Working Smart and Hard? Agency Effort, Judicial Review, and Policy Precision

Turner, Ian R.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2295665

Cited by 9 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…In that sense, the bureaucracy would be (potentially) constrained by the threat of a fire alarm alerting the president or Congress—or both—of agency subversion regardless of policy instrument (McCubbins and Schwartz ). Similarly, explicit incorporation of judicial review is a promising extension, as previous work has shown the presence of effective judicial review can have profound impacts on bureaucratic policy‐making incentives, both positive and negative (Bueno de Mesquita and Stephenson ; Gailmard and Patty ; Patty and Turner, forthcoming; Shipan ; ; Turner ; ). This may be particularly interesting because judicial oversight is separate from consideration of the ability of Congress or the president to monitor while also bargaining over policy.…”

Section: Discussion: Extending the Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is also why bureaucratic investments in policy quality are attractive. Indeed, policy quality represents a commonly valued valence dimension (Hirsch and Shotts ; Turner ). If instead executive unilateralism were treated as a signaling device as well, perhaps to the president's base, then that trade‐off is weakened because the president would care less about policy outcomes per se and more about the value of simply pursuing ideologically congruent policies regardless of their quality.…”

Section: Comments On Modeling Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Policy Durability, Agency Capacity, and Executive Unilateralism

Turner¹

2020

Pres Stud Q

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In this article, I argue that the need to motivate bureaucrats to invest in high‐quality policy implementation alters the appeal of executive unilateralism. If executive orders are less durable than legislation, then the bureaucracy will have weaker incentives to invest in policy making. This affects presidents’ willingness to compromise and work with Congress to pass legislation, rather than pursue unilateral action. Unilateralism becomes less attractive as bureaucratic capacity increases and as the relative durability of executive orders decreases. I formalize this logic in a simple formal model and discuss fruitful extensions for future work.

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Section: Discussion: Extending the Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Comments On Modeling Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy Durability, Agency Capacity, and Executive Unilateralism

Turner¹

2020

Pres Stud Q

Self Cite

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“…More broadly, recent work on political principal–agent settings has explored various limits to oversight, particularly exploring mechanisms by which principals' oversight activities may distort agents' incentives in ways that are undesirable to the principal. See, for example, Canes‐Wrone, Herron, and Shotts (), Fox (), and Fox and Stephenson () in the electoral context; Turner (, n.d.) in a bureaucratic setting, Hübert () in the trial/appellate court setting; and Patty and Turner (n.d.) in a generic oversight context. In parallel, some work has focused on settings of competitive valence , where multiple agents compete to design rules or policies that will be chosen by a principal (Hirsch and Shotts ; Hitt, Volden, and Wiseman ; Lax and Cameron ); in this work, the focus is more on rule design per se than oversight.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Ideological Competition and Conflict in the Judicial Hierarchy

Strayhorn

2019

American J Political Sci

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Circuit splits, or conflicting rules across multiple U.S. Courts of Appeals, have important policy implications and dramatic effects on Supreme Court case selection, yet we know little about the incentives ideological lower courts face when deciding whether to initiate conflict. This article develops a formal model of a judicial hierarchy where lower court judges are subject to review by a high court with distaste for unresolved conflict, termed “split‐intolerance,” and with uncertain preferences over policy. Lower courts may compete by investing costly effort in legal quality to make their rules more attractive. In equilibrium, lower courts may initiate conflict even when the odds of success before the high court are remote. Surprisingly, lower courts grow more likely to create conflict as the high court's split‐intolerance increases; however, split‐intolerance can also incentivize greater lower court effort. I present qualitative evidence illustrating the model's explanatory power.

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“…They also develop programmatic capacity that helps guide the agency's on-the-ground workforce to implement policy effectively. 2 This introduces another wrinkle to agency oversight: The overseer must worry not only about divergent substantive policy choices based on an agency's ability to exploit its informational advantage, they must also consider providing proper incentives for the agency to invest in high quality policy implementation (Turner 2017).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reviewing Procedure vs. Judging Substance: How Increasing Bureaucratic Oversight Can Reduce Bureaucratic Accountability

Turner¹

2021

Preprint

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How does the scope of review affect bureaucratic policymaking? To explore this question, I consider a policymaking environment in which an expert agency develops policy that is upheld or overturned by an overseer who may have different policy goals. The agency can affect the quality of implementation through effort investments in addition to choosing the substantive content of policy. Under procedural review the overseer only reviews the agency’s effort, which allows the agency to fully utilize its expertise. Substantive review also tasks the overseer with judging agencies’ substantive policy choices, which can lead the agency to disregard its superior information and obfuscate to avoid reversal. Depending on the policy environment, this dynamic can either benefit or harm the overseer. In some cases the overseer can be made better off by having less transparent review institutions; that is, institutions that direct the overseer to only review procedure and preclude judging substance.

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Working Smart and Hard? Agency Effort, Judicial Review, and Policy Precision

Cited by 9 publications

References 64 publications

Policy Durability, Agency Capacity, and Executive Unilateralism

Policy Durability, Agency Capacity, and Executive Unilateralism

Ideological Competition and Conflict in the Judicial Hierarchy

Reviewing Procedure vs. Judging Substance: How Increasing Bureaucratic Oversight Can Reduce Bureaucratic Accountability

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