Federal bureaucrats are important sources of information about policy problems. However, federal officials compete for this influence with organized interests plying their own problems and solutions. We attribute the differential agenda influence of the federal bureaucracy to efforts in Congress to construct workable problem definitions in a context of uncertainty about issues. From both behavioral and rational models of congressional decision making, we develop a theory of congressional search for information during problem definition under conditions of uncertainty. The theory presages the prominence of federal bureaucrats in this search, and especially under uncertainty. Using new data sets capturing the appearance of federal bureaucrats at congressional hearings, we find that the mobilization, prominence, and types of federal bureaucrats providing information is explainable in terms of congressional uncertainty about problem definitions.

Attention is an important factor in the study of institutional agenda setting. It has been shown to influence the selection of issues to consider and the prioritization of these issues. This article brings theories of issue attention and prioritization to bureaucracy, focusing on how institutional factors affect bureaucracies’ prioritization of issues. Using quantitative survey data and statistical techniques, we assess the impact of institutional factors on the prioritization of competing issues in higher education. We find that these institutional factors significantly affect the prioritization choices of universities, beyond the influence of individual leadership traits.

Many drivers of agenda setting have been considered in political science, yet the bureaucracy has been largely absent from these discussions. This article challenges that tendency by arguing that bureaucracies provide information and analysis to legislatures early in the policy process, which then affects the bills that are introduced and eventually adopted. I further posit that institutional forms condition the information a bureaucracy can provide, leading to the central hypothesis that highly centralized agencies have more concentrated agendas than decentralized institutions and therefore less congruence with and influence on legislative agendas. Based on a large original dataset of bureaucratic information and proposed legislation concerning higher education policy from two states with archetypal institutional forms, I analyze what kinds of information shift the attention of lawmakers to higher education topics of interest within different institutional arrangements. The findings further our understanding of the impact of institutional factors on information processing by legislatures and the role of the bureaucracy in agenda setting.

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Bureaucratic rulemaking is a crucial aspect of American policymaking. We argue bureaucratic policymaking is particularly significant when legislatures are unable or unwilling to pass legislation. To test this hypothesis, we leverage an original dataset containing all rules proposed by bureaucratic agencies in three states over a ten-year period. We combine this with information about divided government and legislative session calendars in each state to identify periods of gridlock or recess when legislatures are less likely to produce legislation. With this data, we investigate whether rulemaking activity increases during periods of legislative inaction. Our results are supportive—during periods of divided government or a split legislature, state bureaucracies issue significantly more proposed rules. Moreover, state bureaucracies are most productive during periods of legislative recess. These results underscore the importance of bureaucratic policymaking as a key feature of governance and improve our understanding of the balance of power between branches of state governments.