Hostname: page-component-f554764f5-sl7kg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-18T20:02:30.410Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Expert Opinion, Agency Characteristics, and Agency Preferences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2007

Joshua D. Clinton  and
David E. Lewis
Joshua D. Clinton*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540
David E. Lewis
Affiliation:
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, e-mail: [email protected]
*
e-mail: [email protected] (corresponding author)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The study of bureaucracies and their relationship to political actors is central to understanding the policy process in the United States. Studying this aspect of American politics is difficult because theories of agency behavior, effectiveness, and control often require measures of administrative agencies' policy preferences, and appropriate measures are hard to find for a broad spectrum of agencies. We propose a method for measuring agency preferences based upon an expert survey of agency preferences for 82 executive agencies in existence between 1988 and 2005. We use a multirater item response model to provide a principled structure for combining subjective ratings based on scholarly and journalistic expertise with objective data on agency characteristics. We compare the resulting agency preference estimates and standard errors to existing alternative measures, discussing both the advantages and limitations of the method.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Winter 2008 , pp. 3 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

Authors' note: We thank Tom Hammond, George Krause, and Joshua Tucker for helpful comments. We are grateful to Simon Jackman and Shawn Treier for generously providing their code and our survey respondents for their time and expertise.

References

Aberbach, Joel D., and Rockman, Bert A. 2000. In the web of politics: Three decades of the U.S. Federal Executive. Washington, DC: Brookings.Google Scholar
Bafumi, Joseph, Gelman, Andrew, Park, David, and Kaplan, Noah. 2005. Practical issues in implementing and understanding Bayesian ideal point estimation. Political Analysis 13(2): 171–87.Google Scholar
Bertelli, Anthony M., and Grose, Christian R. 2006. Secretaries of Pork? Executive ideology, multiple bureaucratic principals, and distributive public policy. Unpublished manuscript, University of Georgia.Google Scholar
Canes-Wrone, Brandice. 2003. Bureaucratic decisions and the composition of the lower courts. American Journal of Political Science 47(2): 205–14.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey E. 1986. The dynamics of the “Revolving Door” on the FCC. American Journal of Political Science 30(4): 689–708.Google Scholar
Clinton, Joshua D., and Lapinski, John S. 2006. Measuring legislative accomplishment, 1877-1994. American Journal of Political Science 50(1): 232–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clinton, Joshua D., Jackman, Simon, and Rivers, Douglas. 2004. The statistical analysis of legislative behavior: A unified approach. American Political Science Review 98(2): 355–70.Google Scholar
Epstein, David, and O'Halloran, Sharyn. 1999. Delegating powers. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gilmour, John B., and Lewis, David E. 2006a. Political appointees and the competence of Federal Program Management. American Politics Research 34(1): 22–50.Google Scholar
Gilmour, John B., and Lewis, David E. 2006b. Assessing performance assessment for budgeting: The influence of politics, performance, and program size in FY2005. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 16 (2): 169–86.Google Scholar
Hillygus, D. Sunshine, and Treier, Shawn. 2006. The contours of policy attitudes in the mass public. Unpublished manuscript, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Huber, John D., and Shipan, Charles R. 2002. Deliberate discretion? New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jackman, Simon. 2004. “What do we learn from Graduate Admissions Committees? A multiple-rater, latent variable model with incomplete discrete and continuous indicators. Political Analysis 12(4): 400–24.Google Scholar
Jackman, Simon, and Treier, Shawn. 2006. Democracy as a latent variable. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Johnson, Valen E., and Albert, James H. 1999. Ordinal data modeling. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Lewis, David E. Forthcoming. Politicizing administration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Martin, Andrew D., and Quinn, Kevin M. 2002. Dynamic ideal point estimation via Markov chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999. Political Analysis 10(2): 134–53.Google Scholar
McCarty, Nolan M. 2004. The appointments dilemma. American Journal of Political Science 48(3): 413–28.Google Scholar
McCubbins, Mathew D., Noll, Roger, and Weingast, Barry. 1987. Administrative procedures as instruments of political control. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 3: 243–77.Google Scholar
McCubbins, Mathew D., Noll, Roger, and Weingast, Barry. 1989. Structure and process, politics and policy: Administrative arrangements and the political control of agencies. Virginia Law Review 75(2): 431–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moe, Terry M. 1985a. Control and feedback in economic regulation: The case of the NLRB. American Political Science Review 79(4): 1094–116.Google Scholar
Moe, Terry M. 1985b. The politicized presidency. In The new direction in American politics, eds. Chubb, J. E. and Peterson, P. E., 235–71. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Moe, Terry M. 1989. The politics of bureaucratic structure. In Can the government govern? eds. Chubb, J. E. and Peterson, P. E., 267–329. Washington, DC: Brookings.Google Scholar
Nixon, David C. 2004. Separation of powers and appointee ideology. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 20(2): 438–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 1997. Congress: A political-economic history of roll call voting. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Poole, Keith T. 2005. Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rudalevige, Andrew. 2002. Managing the president's program: Centralization and Legislative Policy Formulation, 1949-1996. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Quinn, Kevin M. 2004. Bayesian factor analysis for mixed ordinal and continuous responses. Political Analysis 12(4): 338–53.Google Scholar
Snyder, Susan K., and Weingast, Barry R. 2000. The American system of shared powers: the President, Congress, and the NLRB. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 16(2): 269–305.Google Scholar
Voeten, Erik. 2000. Clashes in the assembly. International Organization 54(2): 185–217.Google Scholar
Weingast, Barry W., and Moran, Mark J. 1983. Bureaucratic discretion or congressional control? Regulatory policymaking by the Federal Trade Commission. Journal of Political Economy 91(5): 765–800.CrossRefGoogle Scholar