It is commonly accepted that members of Congress influence federal agencies informally, and that in turn the federal agencies strategically accommodate members of Congress. However, in recent years allegations of accommodation of congressional interests by federal agencies has been met with some skepticism. In this study I frame a critical test of the informal gains of U.S. House subcommittee members and leaders against that of substantive policy criteria in the awarding of distributive grants, specifically with respect to the Title I public works program of the Economic Development Administration during the period from 1978 to 1982. Utilizing a multinomial probit model of grant distributions to House members' districts, I find no substan tively strong or statistically significant "political benefits" for subcommittee members. However, subcommittee leaders are found to receive political benefits only during the critical test, and only enough to return the flow of grants to that which prevailed before the critical period.
Political scientists often consider the place of standard operating procedures (SOPS) in shaping bureaucratic responsiveness to "top-down" direction, but our writing only infrequently considers the processes and ease by which bureaucratic routines, decision standards, and SOPS adjust to produce n m outputs. This article explores the change of routines, decision standards, and SOPs from a behavioral perspective to portray bureaucratic behavior and policy as something other than a static function of extant SOPs or a fully and fluidly malleable function of internal preferences and external incentives. In particular, the role of two organizationally "bottom-up" factorscareerists' policy approval and their policy-relevant working schema -are explored to suggest how readily "top-down" preferences for policy translate into pragmatic working arrangements. The empirical basis for the article is a structured set of cases in the Urban Mass Transportation Administration through the latter 1970s and early 1980s.Well-defined routines, tasks, and standards help an organization to attend coherently and consistently to the tasks that embody policy even when little or no "top down" direction is at hand to direct and coordinate action. These "bottom up" mechanisms of coordination and continuity give political executives a stake in seeing that the often widely scattered people of a bureau create the tasks, standards, routines, and procedures that support executives' preferences. In contrast, literature on bureaucratic responsiveness, often portrays routines negatively: as phenomena that dampen or prevent responsiveness and so make the job of political authorities more rather than less difficult (Allison 1971). Simultaneously, much writing in political science focuses on the strategic components of top-level policy choice while considering less the behavioral components of bottom-up evolution and coordination (March and Olsen 1989). A rich and increasing literature examines bureaucratic structures, training, and politics, but even here a perspective on the place and evolution of the "routine" as a common behavioral feature remains underdeveloped. Indeed, a theory and empirical exploration of how readily the people in federal bureaus together determine and establish the regular tasks that embody policy would flesh out perspectives on bureaucratic responsive-
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