Through the Looking Glass: Bureaucratic Responsiveness in the States

• In Event: The Politics of Regulatory Rule Making

Abstract

Scholars typically examine state bureaucratic agencies from the perspective of the legislature or governor, without evaluating intergovernmental relations from the standpoint of the agencies themselves. Thus, we have a limited understanding of the institutional features that provide state administrators with an incentive to respond to legislative or gubernatorial preferences. Taking a different approach, we rely on a new survey of state administrators from five comparable agencies in all 50 states to assess how state administrators view their political principals and how institutional variation influences the democratic accountability of unelected bureaucrats. We find that administrators’ perceptions of responsiveness vary with the institutional organization of the legislature and executive branch. Our analysis has important implications for our understanding of political control of the bureaucracy and of the complexity of intergovernmental relations at the state level.

Authors

• Jennifer L. Selin, University of Missouri, Columbia

• Jordan Butcher, University of Missouri