Bureaucracy and the Policy Process

Catalog description

This course examines the role of bureaucracy in the public policy process. Bureaucracies are critical actors in the conceptualization of policy problems, formulating policy solutions, and implementing public policies, whether directly through government or via the market. Public agencies are also the locus of many public policy careers. We will analyze how public agencies and their employees at all levels of government survive and sometimes prosper within an intensely political environment. The course briefly examines the relationship between politics and policy as first developed in public administration as the politics/administration dichotomy, then via the concept of overhead democracy within political science, and finally in contemporary economics and political science via public choice theory and principal agent models. Second, to better understand this transition in approaches to understanding of bureaucracy, the course develops a working model of bureaucratic politics by examining the motivations of relevant actors and their complex political environment(s). And third, this model is employed to examine the enduring problem of political control of the bureaucracy, with emphasis on evaluating a number of alternative and competing institutional strategies designed to enhance control. This first of these strategies is via hierarchy as expressed via principal-agent analysis. After outlining the logic of agency theory, the course looks closely at the relationship between bureaucracy and political executives, legislators, courts, and non-governmental actors. This strategy of controlling bureaucracy in the policy process is then contrasted with three others: limited government, non-bureaucratic provision of services by quasi-markets, and competitive bureaucracy in which agencies are designed to compete with each other. The goals of the course are to become first broadly familiar with the issue of bureaucratic politics and then how this influences each stage of the policy process. Beyond that, the goals include an appreciation of the nature of the bureaucratic control problem and the various strategies designed to address it.