Bureaucratic Discretion, Agency Structure,and Democratic Responsiveness: The Case of the United States Attorneys

Abstract

Structural choices have fundamental and continuing effects on the democratic responsiveness of public agencies. In contrast to popular accounts of the United States Attorneys‘ splendid isolation,1 provide structural evidence of routes to the national political oversight of the prosecution of federal crimes in the field. I will examine U.S. Attorneys’ data on the prosecution of regulatory crimes and present statistical tests of local justice, lone justice, and overhead democratic control accounts of prosecutorial behavior. The U.S. Attorneys ‘ prosecution reflects local and internal office factors, but I also find a surprising degree of responsivness to national political trends, where this structure-induced responsiveness depends on the stage of the prosecutorial process. These results provide support for a design approach to understanding how public agencies respond to calls for democratic responsiveness.

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