Presidential Control over the Bureaucracy through Interagency Coordination

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Administration; Public Policy; & State Politics and Policy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Public Administration

Abstract

How does the U.S. president achieve control on the bureaucracy and implement policies which he prefers? In the literature, the scholars explained several mechanisms with various methods such as executive order and regulatory review. However, the reasons that the bureaucratic officers comply with the president’s directives and implement the policies the president wants are insufficiently explained. This study examined interagency coordination in bureaucratic rulemaking process as a mechanism of the presidential control of the bureaucracy. I prepared unique dataset detecting rulemaking in interagency framework across 16 government agencies through quantitative text analysis and applied directed dyad approach, which is common in democratic peace theory based studies in IR. The results indicate that the president selects agencies which are in ideological agreement with the president for agency as a leader in interagency framework. This project represents among the first quantitative empirical assessments of the utility of interagency coordination in rulemaking process.

Author

• Takaharu Saito, the Faculty of Law and Politics in the Graduate school of the University of Tokyo