Information provision as agenda setting: A study of bureaucracy's role in higher education policy

Abstract

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.

Show Me the Numbers: Bureaucratic Use of Data in the Policy Making Process

“…Though the number of reports is small, each was broken down and coded at the paragraph level, resulting in 1,424 units of observation comprising the bureaucratic agenda in the two states over roughly the same period. 5 These paragraphs were coded into 30 substantive topics using previously developed methods (Bark, 2021). The topic coding scheme was based on the topics appearing repeatedly in the tables of contents of a sample of SHEEO reports from several states and substantive expertise in higher education policy.…”

“…Instead, bureaucrats use information to affect the policy process at a much earlier stage in order to help define policy problems within their domain (Shafran, 2015; Workman et al, 2017). To do so, bureaucracies are eager to provide as much information as possible to legislators in order to shape their perspective on policy questions to more closely match the bureaucracy’s goals (Bark, 2021; Workman, 2015). Bureaucracies are not the only organizations providing this information, but they are among the most significant (Sabatier & Whiteman, 1985).…”

“…Structural factors have long been known to influence an agency’s agenda (Hammond, 1986; Moe, 1995). Centralization in particular has been shown to have substantial impacts on an agency’s response to incoming information (May et al, 2008), as well as the information it is able to produce for external audiences (Bark, 2021). In higher education, bureaucratic centralization has been shown to influence minority student enrollment, both independently and through an interaction effect with legislative representation (Hicklin & Meier, 2008).…”

“…Previous research has shown that structural factors of bureaucracies influence the ability of an agency to shape legislative discussions. One such example is centralization, which affects the concentration of an agency’s agenda and its alignment with legislative concerns (Bark, 2021). The amount of data included in bureaucratic communications may also be one of these factors in that it can provide factual information on which legislators may base their arguments in favor of a specific position.…”

When Bad News Becomes Routine: Slowly-Developing Problems Moderate Government Responsiveness

“…Of course, policy problems develop continuously whether or not policymakers are paying attention to them, so an implication of the theory is that there is a disconnect between input flows (i.e., the progression of policy problems) and policy outputs (Jones et al, 2003). This divergence is more likely to occur as institutional friction in the policy process increases (Jones and Baumgartner, 2005, Jones et al, 2009) and is subject to variation in institutional forms, such as centralized bureaucratic agencies (Bark and Bell, 2019, Bark, 2021).…”