Who’s Whispering in Your Ear? The Influence of Third Parties Over State Agency Decisions

Abstract

S tate administrative agencies play a critical role in the policymaking process in the United States. However, within both policy formation and implementation, state agencies do not act alone. Rather, agencies are challenged to balance the preferences of a number of powerful constituencies-in particular, governors, legislators, and interest groups. Despite the importance of both agencies and third parties to the policy process in the American states, there have been few theoretical and empirical studies dedicated to the interactions of these policy stakeholders. In this article, we seek to fill that void and focus on two primary questions.First, do third parties influence the major policy decisions of state agencies? Over the past several decades, while scholars have given some attention to state agencies, the primary focus of most work has been the national bureaucracy. Additionally, scholars often analyze the separate and distinct influences of executives, the legislative branch, or interest groups. Few previous studies provide an over time, empirical assessment of the joint influences of these three third party actorsinterest groups, governors, and legislators-on state agency outputs. As a result, we do not fully appreciate or understand the degree of influence that they hold over major budgetary and policy decisions made by state agencies.Second, what effect do the informal interactions of third parties have on their levels of influence over the policies and decisions of state administrators? While the interactions between third parties and bureaucrats take two formsformal and informal-the vast majority of existing literature focuses, perhaps incorrectly, on the former at the expense of the latter. 1 We define formal interactions as those relations that occur between bureaucrats and third parties and are structured by political institutions, constitutional powers, and current laws. These interactions include, for example, the legislature' s ability to set agency budgets, the governor' s powers of appointment and removal, or an interest group' s right to submit public comments to pending bureaucratic rules and regulations. These forms of interaction are visible and easier to track by observers of American politics, and therefore, have garnered the majority of scholarly attention.In contrast, informal interactions are the methods of influence that generally take place outside of established political or legal frameworks. These communications are often characterized by difficult to observe, ex parte contacts and tend to occur below the radar screen of most political observers. Perhaps due to the difficulties in measuring these "whispers" within political dialogues, most previous research does not fully identify or account for the role of informal, third party influence over the bureaucracy. Given we know that third parties frequently use both formal and informal tactics in an attempt to affect bureaucrats' decisions on policy formation and implementation (This article expands our understanding regarding the lev...

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