POLS- the Bureaucracy
Bureaucratic Components
-Independent regulatory commissions -Independent government corporations
the proportion of poll respondents labeling themselves Republicans or Democrats
Aggregate partisanship
The most prominent spokesperson for the democratic spirit and challenged the use of federal offices as private property.
Andrew Jackson
While how the bureaucracy operated changed dramatically, what it did changed little:
Collecting duties and taxes • Delivering the mail • Disposing of public lands in the West • Granting patents • Managing relations with foreign nations and Native Americans • Maintaining a small navy and army
regulates by delegating broad grants of authority to regulatory agencies and letting them fill in the details by making rules. (that have the force of law)
Congress
the parts of the iron triangle are:
Congress Bureaucracies interest groups
For both efficiency and fairness, decisions and choices made by bureaucrats need to be impersonal and consistent.
Consistent Rules
structure and authority of the DHS:
Could write its own personnel rules • This demonstrates how a president's national security rationale for reducing transaction costs can trump Congress's reluctance to risk higher conformity costs and agency loss. • Result, when finished, was the most far-reaching government reorganization since the formation of the Department of Defense.
three departments that consolidated expansions of the federal domain while making pointed political statements:
Department of Housing and Urban Development. Embodied the commitments of Kennedy and Johnson to revitalizing the inner cities. • Department of Transportation. Became home to all the agencies established piecemeal over the years to promote the different forms of transportation. • Department of Energy. Embodied another effort to coordinate policy, this time for sources of energy.
Weber argued that there were a few critical elements for achieving this ideal
Division of Labor Consistent Rules Hierarchy Professionals Impersonality Specified Goals
Roles should be clearly defined. In order to fit together and function in unison, each of the parts in the bureaucratic machine must know both what it is supposed to do and how it fits within the larger organization
Division of labor
When an agency wants to make a rule, it must give public notice in the
Federal Register
argued that there should be a sharp distinction between the political branches making the laws and the bureaucracy implementing them
Frank Goodnow
recognized that modern nation-states needed professional bureaucracies. He argued that the ideal bureaucracy should be efficient and rational. It should function like a machine, with each of its parts playing a well-defined role.
German sociologist Max Weber
most common reasons to expand govt.
Handle large-scale administrative tasks • Exploit expertise • Avoid blame for unpopular decisions • Make credible commitments to stable policy • Deal with crises demanding swift, coordinated action
bureaucracies are strictly hierarchical, each person should have only one immediate supervisor, and each supervisor should have only a limited number of subordinates
Hierarchy
Everyone should be treated the same equally regardless of who there are as individuals
Impersonality
__________ insulates the president and Congress from the fallout of unpopular decisions
Independence
U.S. Postal Service; the most important government corporations are the Tennessee Valley Authority and Amtrak
Independent government corporations
Designed to maintain their independence from the president and the executive departments.
Independent regulatory commissions
Role of Congress in Bureaucracy:
It creates and empowers the bureaucracy with ordinary legislation. • It provides the funding that allows bureaucrats to carry out their work through yearly budgeting. • Thus it maintains significant indirect control. • The agencies, as agents, know that their existence depends on Congress, the principal, and generally respond accordingly.
HHS, like its predecessor the Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare, is an umbrella department containing many social welfare agencies and programs that have roots in the
New Deal
Revulsion against the spoils system led to the passage of the
Pendleton Act
is the basis of the modern civil service. Put 10 percent of federal jobs under the merit system; presidents have extended through executive order. By the time FDR became president in 1933, 80 percent of federal workers were included in the merit system.
Pendleton Act
was assassinated in 1881 by a demented job seeker incensed at having lost a chance for a patronage appointment.
President James Garfield
There should be a career system and the selection of persons to fill roles within the bureaucracy, must be done on the basis of merit.
Professionals
civil servants:
Rarely were they dismissed. • Even passed positions on to progeny. • However, these practices (notion of government by respectable gentlemen) were in conflict with the democratic spirit that would eclipse the Federalists.
overturned state laws making abortions illegal
Roe v Wade
There should be a cleargoaltowardwhichthecollective action is aimed.
Specified goals
These agencies are very information oriented and serve their clientele by gathering and disseminating information, particularly technical information such as statistics, information on new products, the results of experiments and studies, and so on.
The Departments of Agriculture, Labor, and Commerce
Who Controls the Bureaucracy?
The president is at the top of hierarchy. • But difficult to control. • Use of appointments. Congress can intercede. • Senatorial approval. • Role of clientele groups. • Appointments "marry the natives." Mechanisms for presidential supervision. • OMB. • Special authority over agencies involved in diplomacy and national defense. The judiciary also shares authority over the bureaucracy. • United States inherited the common law principle that the government, no less than its citizens, is bound by law.
The first Congress began the foundations of the executive branch by reestablishing the departments that had existed under the Articles:
Treasury • Foreign Affairs (renamed State) • War • And in 1798: Navy • 1849: Interior (to placate Western states)
The most dramatic incident of the period of Industrial Revolution
Whiskey Ring
a massive conspiracy of revenue collectors and whiskey distillers to evade taxes. It led to 230 indictments and the resignation of one member of President Grant's cabinet.
Whiskey Ring
wrote an essay declaring that there should be a strict dichotomy between politics and administration
Woodrow Wilson
Congress could decide to give agency managers more authority to hire, promote, reward and re-deploy, or fire staff on the basis of their performance: • But this would mean reducing the civil service protections put in place for good political reasons: to avoid a partisan spoils system and to preserve congressional influence over _______.
administration
also regulate; The FBI regulates personal behavior, the Food and Drug Administration regulates medicine, the Securities and Exchange Commission tries to regulate Wall Street, etc. primarily responsible for implementation; they make sure that the laws that legislatures pass get put into place.
administrative agencies
Government could only grow if Congress and the president were willing to delegate authority to new
agencies
we avoid incurring information costs by delegating opinion information to reliable
agents chosen for that purpose
given its coherence and focus by opinion leaders, typically based in institutions, whose knowledge, ideas, proposals, and debates define the positions and options from ordinary citizens, acting logically as cognitive misers, adopt their expressed views
aggregate public opinion
the sum of all individual opinions
aggregate public opinion
individual opinions become public opinion only when
aggregated
the most important source of instability in a person's expressed opinions is
ambivalence
an organized and consistent manner of thinking, feeling, and reacting with regard to people, groups, social issues, or more generally, any event in one's environment
attitude
introduce bias into perceptions and interpretations of political info because people tend to pay more attention and give more credence to sources and info that confirm rather than challenge their beliefs
attitudes
problems of a democratic bureaucracy
authority leakage the iron triangle
The same electoral dynamics expected to encourage responsiveness to the public create an imbalance of interests in the activities of the ________
bureaucracies
nearly everything the federal govt. does is done by
bureaucracies
responsible for making public policy; legislatures often pass laws that are general, and they will leave the specifics to the expertise of bureaucracies.
bureaucracy
Changing government to reflect the creative, entrepreneurial model may be difficult. Entrepreneurs take risks, but civil servants seldom profit from risk taking. If something goes wrong, it is due to the routine and not the _______.
bureaucrat
Under Jackson, the federal administration did NOT become fully
bureaucratized
The larger departments were soon subdivided into a few more specialized offices called
bureaus
Agencies that rise to the department level and gain a seat in the president's _____ receive no special power or privileges.
cabinet
The Departments of Agriculture (1889), Labor (1903), and Commerce (1903) represented a new type of government agency altogether. • Unlike the existing departments, which served general social purposes, each of the new departments was established to serve the particular ______ indicated by its title.
clientele
relying on chosen agents because interested people and groups have a stake in gathering and disseminating political information
cognitive shortcuts
because politics is primarily about the provision of collective goods, and ordinary citizens can achieve political ends only through collective action, it is logical that political opinions would reflect attitudes arising from more _____ than from personal experiences
collective
Bureaucratic organization arises when leaders try to solve the huge problems of coordination and delegation raised by many forms of large-scale
collective action
the work to measure and shape public opinion has helped individual citizens to act
collectively
The model bureaucracy Imposes heavy ______ costs
conformity
distrust govt. and have greater faith in private enterprise and free markets, but they are more willing to use govt. to enforce traditional moral standards
conservatives
favor a large military and more assertive pursuit of national self-interest, advocate lower taxes, particularly on investment income, to stimulate growth and to restrict the govts capacity to finance social welfare programs
conservatives
In granting interest group wishes and supporting department budgets, a member of Congress could claim credit for the continuing flow of benefits provided to
constituents
some studies suggest that a person's political attitudes reflect a small number of ___ ____ such as individualism, support for equal opportunity, moral traditionalism, or opposition to big govt.
core values
Red tape does not flourish by accident. • Proliferates because it helps principals control and monitor their agents and because it helps agents demonstrate that they are doing their jobs _____
correctly
better information holds no promise of a better outcome because the views of any single individual are so unlikely to be
decisive
unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise, Americans interpret political phenomena in ways that favor the preferred party
default cue
Presidents can and do invite whomever they choose to serve in their cabinets regardless of whether they head a ________.
department
Those who seek greater efficiency may have difficulty with measurement. • How do you measure the productivity of the State Department in its efforts to pursue long-term security? • Success in terms of vaguely defined ends is
difficult
Per capita federal employment has _____ over the last half a century. Some of this is picked up by ____ and _____ government. has hit ____ voters disproportionately
dipped state; local younger
the fear that democracy would bring economic ruin by allowing popular majorities to despoil the wealthy minority was a central motive behind the Constitution's elaborate avoidance of
direct popular rule
CIA, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Selective Service System all report ______ to the president.
directly
The executive and legislature typically have little interest in bureaucratic oversight. In contrast, the interest groups ______ affected by the bureaucracy have a great deal of interest in it
directly
completely severing politics from administration would be a _____ for democracy.
disaster
Aggregate partisanship shifts with changes in...
economic conditions political events presidential approval
Empowering bureaucrats on the front lines of service delivery may increase _______ and customer ______, but it also makes it easier for them to go astray
efficiency; satisfaction
HEW was a Republican attempt to deal with the politics of the New Deal Could not repeal it, but only manage it more _____. • Also a ploy to reduce the autonomy of officials appointed by the______ during the New Deal.
efficiently Democrats
bureaucracies take on functions that would waste the time and effort of
elected and unelected leaders
Civil service reform needed ______ not ______
experts; amateurs
The expansion of the _______ government has not been confined to cabinet-level executive departments
federal
explains how both the mass media and political campaigns can affect people's expressed political opinions
framing
uninformed and inattentive majority routinely ____ ____ when forming opinions by takin cues from members of attentive segment
free rides
During early Federalist period, the informal custom was that civil servants served their tenure during
good behavior
provide many services; they run hospitals, carry out welfare programs, run public schools, operate parks, etc.
govts.
expertise in procedures and policy domains could shield their actions from outside oversight by their principals
hidden action
Civil servants (agents) might also have access to information that is not available to the public or other branches of government (principals) and not be willing to share it if it goes against their goals
hidden information
The country wanted _____ and ______ from government. The emerging industrial revolution was raising new problems of administration.
honesty; efficiency
promote consistency among political attitudes by connecting them to something greater, a more general principle or set of principles; often combine attitudes linked more by coalition politics than by principle
ideologies
surveys find abundant evidence that opinions differ among____ but the differences are modest compared with those found in most other modern industrial nations
income classes
mass media report and interpret the collective political experiences that become the material basis for
individual opinions
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is ____ which is particularly disturbing because they were NOT designed to be _____ to the people.
inefficiency responsive
if we are like most people, we rationally free ride on the efforts of others, following the cues given by people we consider
informed and whose biases we know
Career bureaucrats developed their own personal and institutional... Non-responsive to citizens and elected officials. • Yet it was difficult to "_____" such behavior.
interests punish
leads to agencies being "captured" by small interests group that are often those the bureaucracy is directed to regulate
iron triangle
most policy domains are of concern only to ____ ____ so it is usually their opinions, not mass opinion, that matter to politicians
issue publics
subsets of the population who are better informed than everyone else about an issue because it touches them more directly and personally
issue publics
The model bureaucracy centralized control over ____ numbers of people
large
individual opinions although rooted in personal values and experiences, are both shaped by and expressed through
leaders and institutions
Congress also authorized the hiring of an attorney general to give the president and department heads
legal advice
ideological labels commonly used in American politics are
liberal and conservative
believe rich should be taxed at higher rates to finance social welfare programs
liberals
favor using the govt. to reduce economic inequalities, champion the rights of disadvantaged groups such as racial minorities and women, and tolerate more diverse range of social behaviors
liberals
prefer smaller defense and usually less willing to use military force in international politics
liberals
The Constitution said _____ about how the executive would be organized. From the beginning, Congress was wary of delegating too much power to the executive but realized the impracticality of delegating too little.
little
when survey responses are added together, random individual changes tend to cancel one another out; therefore, the average remains the same if circumstances remain the same
measurement errors
The principle of rotation (the spoils system) did not allow for the development of government service as a career with job security and advancement based on...
merit
The Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force agencies make up the
military establishment.
Congress rails against red tape, but without the red tape it could not _____ and ______ administration
monitor; influence
Congress set up single officials to be responsible for the departments'
operations
arises naturally as people respond to different incentives
opinion leaders
together these two are the main conduits of public opinion in a pluralist political system
opinion leaders and issue publics
The structure and authority of the DHS reflects its political _____. Threat forced Congress to concede unprecedented, sweeping authority over the organization of a cabinet-level agency.
origins
Independent executive agencies are placed _____ departments for political reasons.
outside
The most obvious way to integrate bureaucracies into a democratic system is to create a system of
overhead democracy
elected officials are put at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy in
overhead democracy
Congress's primary means of regulating the bureaucracy is through
oversight hearing
How can stable and coherent public opinion arise from unstable and incoherent individual opinions?
part of it lies within the aggregation process itself- public opinion given rationality and coherence by 1) opinion leaders and 2) measurement errors
Officials would serve in positions for a short, fixed period, then move on to something else. • This notion meshed with the practical need of _____ _____ to inspire and reward activists who had helped them gain office.
party organizations
economic self interest means that people getting more of the benefits tend to see the greater merit in social programs than do those
paying more of the costs
generally, people tend to develop more complex, rich informed attitudes only when the ____ is greater than the cost of doing so
payoff
the process of acquiring political attitudes that takes place during childhood and young adulthood, but new experiences can alter attitudes at an stage in life
political socialization
consensus on the basics makes_____ - reaching agreement on a course of common, or collective action despite disagreement on the purposes of the action- possible; disagreement within this general consensus makes politics _____
politics; necessary
those at the apex have more ____
power
news media helps to define political agenda influencing which considerations are in the foreground when citizens make political judgements and they ____ their audience to use particular frames in responding to political phenomena
prime
plays a crucial role and effective part in American politics because a variety of formal and informal political institutions give it shape and force
public opinion
those opinions held by private persons which govts find it prudent to heed
public opinion
The history of the cabinet provides a concise picture of the succession of social and economic interests that have become powerful enough to command this level of political ________.
recognition
protects bureaucrats from criticism: "I just followed the rule".
red tape (rules)
The Constitution was unclear on the issue as well: whether or not the president, who could appoint officials, could also remove them. • This issue was later resolved to give the president sole...
removal power
red tape is a merit system that rewards conscientious, long-term service - not ____ -_____.
risk-taking
Jackson advocated
rotation in office
developed as a tool for systematically investigating the opinions of ordinary people
scientific polling
Presidents have frequently promised to reduce waste and improve policy coordination by eliminating "_______" duplication. • But this duplication would all seem senseless only if government pursued a coherent set of interrelated goals. Government pursues overlapping, conflicting, or disconnected goals in response to the diverse demands Americans place on it.
senseless
Bureaucracies are involved in
service, regulation, implementation, and policymaking.
opinion leaders provide the cues that the rationally ignorant majority uses as
shortcuts
the public opinion's influence is rarely
simple or unmediated
In 1947 the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force were formed into a ______ cabinet-level Department of Defense headquartered at the Pentagon.
single
As bureaucracies grew in ___ and ____, there has been constant concern that they might assume the roles meant for elected officials
size and number
Practice of the winning party dispensing government jobs
spoils system/ patronage system
democratization of the civil service was also motivated by pragmatic politics, and thus the
spoils system/ patronage system
aggregate public opinion is both ____ and _____
stable and coherent
The 9/11 terrorist attacks inspired latest addition to the cabinet -
the Department of Homeland Security
the government, no less than its citizens, is bound by law
the common law
individual expressions of opinion to influence public policy are subject to ____ because it is exceedingly unlikely that any single person's message will make a difference
the free rider problem
narrowly focused subgovernments controlling policy in their domains—out of sight or oversight of the full Congress, the president, and the public at large. examples-
the iron triangle areas of agriculture, water, and public works
9/11 cut ______ costs, age the president more power, and raised ______ costs
transaction; conformity
The lessons of WWII also had an impact on the government. They learned that only with a _____ command of all military forces could they coordinate land, sea, and air operations
unified
because people are "cognitive misers", reluctant to pay the cost of acquiring information that has no practical payoff, the opinions they express on issues often appear to be both ____ and _____
uninformed and unstable
Since the Civil War, Congress and the president have created an additional set of administrative bodies to make and carry out national policy. These are generally categorized as:
• Independent executive agencies. • Regulatory agencies. • Government corporations.
