This study defines and compares three broad theories that seek to explain bureaucratic preferences. I first argue that each of these explanations is complex — that no single measurable attribute encapsulates the entire theory. Second, I argue that these explanations are non-nested...

One important effect of price shocks in the United States has been increased political attention paid to the structure and performance of oil and natural gas markets, along with some governmental support for energy conservation. This paper describes how price changes helped lead the emergence of...

National statistical systems are the enterprises tasked with collecting, validating and reporting societal attributes. These data serve many purposes - they allow governments to improve services, economic actors to traverse markets, and academics to assess social theories. National statistical...

Does aggregate ideological extremism reduce public participation? Does participation in governance processes fall when the social environment shifts to the extreme left or the extreme right of the political spectrum? Our main hypothesis is that the aggregate ideological orientation of the social...

The canonical principal-agent problem involves a risk-neutral principal who must use incentives to motivate a risk-averse agent to take a costly, unobservable action that improves the principal’s payoff. The standard solution requires an inefficient shifting of risk to the agent. This...

In contrast to principal-agency theory, the possibility of the political control of the bureaucracy depends on bureaucratic structure. In this article, I argue that the functional decentralization of responsibility and authority for policy formulation and implementation involves a net loss of...

Purpose – Political reorganizations like that of the national performance review in the USA fundamentally alter hierarchical relations within public agencies. This paper includes a set of formal exercises to examine two logical consequences of reinvention: the increased likelihood of...