Chain of command vs. Who’s in command: Structure, politics, and regulatory enforcement

Abstract

Agencies vary over which individuals have final authority to make decisions. But this authority differs in two important ways. While officials with final authority can be either political appointees or civil servants they can also be located anywhere within the agency's hierarchy. This begs the question of whether it is the nature of political appointees or the workflow of actions through an agency that are more responsible for inserting politics into agency decisions. This study addresses this question by employing new institutional data on all state and local air agencies to examine how decision-making authority competes or reinforces political appointee's efforts to shape agency actions. Our empirical exercise centers on the regulation of 16,000 major air pollution sources under the U.S. Clean Air Act. Our results suggest that while political appointees may influence regulatory output, centralized workflow, regardless of party, impedes output.

Reversals of Capacity: Norms, Culture, and Institutional Disruption

“…Furthermore, hierarchy has also been measured by the number of political appointees within an agency, which makes the organization more exposed to political influence (Lewis 2010). Using this measure, Reenock, Konisky, and Uttermark (2021) find that greater institutional hierarchy harmed state-level enforcement activity related to the U.S.…”

The Politicization Conversation: A Call to Better Define and Measure the Concept

“…Scholars operationalize this variable many ways, with measures such as an indicator of whether agency leadership is appointed or a count of the number of appointees in an agency (e.g., Fernandez, Cho, and Perry 2010;Krause, Lewis and Douglas 2006;Moore 2018;Reenock, Konisky, and Uttermark 2021;Villalobos and Vaughn 2009), a ratio of the number of managers in the agency that are appointed (e.g., Berry and Gersen 2017;Bruns Ali 2020;Lewis 2008;Lowande 2019;Napolio 2021;Resh 2015), or by using survey data that captures perceptions of the amount of influence various politicians have on appointments (e.g., Bach, Hammerschmid, and Löffler 2020;Meyer-Sahling and Mikkelsen 2016). Aside from data availability, one of the benefits of focusing on the presence of political appointees is that it is concrete.…”

Editorial introduction: An eclectic collection

“…“Chain of Command vs. Who's in Command: Structure, Politics, and Regulatory Enforcement” by Reenock et al (2021) examines whether political appointees or civil servants garner more or less responsibility for inserting politics into agency decisions. Leveraging data on the regulation of 16,000 pollution sources under the U.S. Clean Air Act, their findings suggest that political appointees do influence regulatory output, but that centralized workflows of civil servant institutions impede output which holds true regardless of a political party.…”