In most policymaking across the US, from state to federal level, bureaucrats have the freedom to decide on the public policies that affect Americans. But how far can bureaucrats go in their decision-making before elected officials intervene? Natalie Smith and Susan Webb Yackee have designed a new measure of policymaking discretion for US state agencies. They find leaders who are popularly elected or are appointed in a way disconnected from elected officials and cover broader areas of policy have more discretion. They also find differences in levels of discretion between states and between policy areas. 

It’s no secret that when we think about policymaking, we usually think about elected legislatures in the United States. It’s slightly more of a secret that it’s the bureaucrat-led government agencies, far removed from the electoral process, who issue many of the major public policy decisions that affect Americans’ lives.

Policy wonks and scholars of bureaucracy understand that government agency leaders make these impactful decisions based on a subjective understanding of the discretion available to them. Put another way, public agency discretion may be conceived of as the perceived authority in which key external political influences—the elected executives, legislators, and interest groups—lack a say over an agency’s major public policy decisions.

Using this subjective understanding of policy-making discretion, government agencies regularly establish state and national legal requirements for topics as impactful as water quality, unmanned aircraft, derivatives trading, and health pandemics. The effects of such agency rulemaking can be far-reaching and profound.

Measuring leaders’ space to make decisions

Bureaucracy and public administration scholars have studied agency policy discretion for decades, theorizing about a discretionary space in which leaders can make major policy decisions on behalf of their organizations without fear of reprisal. This research has been important and influential, yet it has been done without an effective way to systematically measure the phenomenon.

Looking to address this, we recently designed a new measure to quantify discretion for public agencies across the American states, which we hope will lead to a wave of innovative research in the field. To create the metric, we use data from the American State Administrators Project to calculate discretion scores for nearly 9,000 state agencies between 1978 and 2018. The measure incorporates survey questions asking state agency leaders to identify the degree of influence that the governor, legislators, and interest groups hold over their agency’s major policy changes. With this new measure, we were able to test many of the assumptions made about discretion in our field.

For example, scholarly consensus is that bureaucratic discretion increases when an agency leader is directly elected by citizens. Our measure indicates that this assumption holds true, as we find that agencies with leaders who are popularly elected have much larger discretionary zones compared to agency leaders who are not directly elected by citizens.

Broader agendas and disconnected appointment processes mean more discretion

In addition to showing that popularly elected leaders often perceive that they have the highest levels of discretion, we find evidence that agency policymaking discretion increases as the leader’s appointment process becomes increasingly disconnected from elected officials. We also uncover strong support for the hypothesis that agencies focused on specialized policy areas have less policymaking discretion than agencies with broader agendas.

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

We believe this new measure can have important applications across several academic disciplines and levels of analysis. For instance, public opinion scholars can use these scores to determine whether agency discretion is related to how citizens view the performance of these agencies. Public administration and organizational theory scholars, who frequently create hypotheses focused on the individual characteristics of agency leaders, such as gender, race, and work experience, can now connect these attributes more directly to the discretion they are afforded in their positions.

Differences in discretion between states and between policies

Another promising possibility for this new discretion score measure is its application for state-level analyses. Our initial analysis shows that a handful of states in the South, such as South Carolina and Alabama, tend to have higher levels of agency policy discretion, while states in the West, including Oregon and California, report lower levels. In fact, South Carolina’s discretion score is roughly 51 percent larger than the mean score across all 50 states, and Alabama’s score is approximately 68 percent larger than the national average.

We find that Minnesota has the lowest overall score, which suggests that policy discretion for agency leaders in Alabama across all survey waves is more than two and a half times larger than Minnesota’s. Researchers interested in the statewide effects of political phenomena including interest groups, legislative professionalism, or gubernatorial transitions, will have an important new variable to include in their work.

Lastly, scholars of different policy domains – such as criminal justice or human resources – can use this measure to study important patterns in their fields. For example, scholars of environmental politics can investigate how agency policy discretion may correlate with state-level fluctuations in public opinion on environmental policies.

Because so much public policymaking takes place in bureaucratic agencies, it’s incredibly important that we understand how they make the decisions that come to guide so much of our lives. It is our hope that this discretion score will be an important new tool for measuring and understanding the implications of public agency discretion.

• Scholars may access the discretion scores (and the larger American State Administrators Projects dataset) after signing a data transfer agreement at: asap.wisc.edu.
• This article is based on the paper, ‘A New Measure of U.S. Agency Policy Discretion’ in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. 
• Please read our comments policy before commenting.   
• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics. 
• Shortened URL for this post: https://wp.me/p3I2YF-dRj