No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
INTRODUCTION Perhaps no administrative function comes with more discretion, as well as controversy, than rulemaking. Concomitant issues of bureaucratic accountability and responsiveness abound. These features lead to the question: Who is minding the when it comes to oversight of administrative rulemaking? Most state administrative agencies can be compared to a store whose shelves contain a large inventory of actual (or potential) rules each agency is empowered to release through its front door. The agency, of course, can open the door and release those rules and regulations. But the agency door is subject to a wide variety of influences from various actors attempting to control the door mechanism. Whether the rulemaking door remains closed, barely ajar, or swings wide open is the result of multiple actors putting pressure(s) on the respective agencies' doors. This paper assesses and contrasts over time the influence of institutional (governor, state legislators, state courts) and non-institutional (clientele groups, professional associations) actors on state agency decisions involving administrative rules and regulations. Studies of the policy actors active in this administrative function have mostly been at the national level (Furlong, 1998; Furlong and Kerwin, 2002) and most often in the form of case studies (Bryner, 1987; Golden, 1998; West, 2004). Gubernatorial and legislative oversight of administrative rule and decision-making has received far less empirical attention than the influence these actors have over other agency activities and functions (Furlong, 1998). Much of the literature on state level administrative rulemaking has focused on the legislature as a control agent (Baranowski, 2001; Grady and Simon, 2002; Miller, 1987). The role of the governor in this domain has been less systematically explored (Woods, 2004). This leaves many questions unanswered. For example, how important is the governor in administrative rulemaking? How does her or his influence compare with that of state legislators and other actors? Is the governor, the state legislature, neither, or both consistent and/or dominant in agency rulemaking decisions? We compare the influence of these two institutional actors over time. We also explore other actors' access to the store and how closed or open is the door of the store. In that regard we assess the role of clientele groups--often considered the most powerful non-institutional actor in this policy realm. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE What is the structure of bureaucratic decisionmaking in administrative rulemaking? What are the implications of agency rulemaking for democratic theory and accountability? Of the three institutional actors with administrative oversight responsibilities, the governor and state legislators are omnipresent and exercise influence in a more regularized and direct manner than state courts. However, the tension between governors and state legislators in assuring accountability has led to increased reliance on state courts for resolving their skirmishes (Gormley, 1996). The challenges to legislative vetoes of administrative rules landed in state courts in the 1970s and 1980s (Levinson, 1987) and are one example of this struggle. Empirical literature on principal-agent explanations of bureaucratic control (Baranowski, 2001; Cook and Wood, 1989; Wood and Waterman, 1994) gives a central role to hierarchy in overhead control and agency interactions. Nevertheless, influence over and public access to state administrative rulemaking may be as essential to the preservation of our democratic system as agency responsiveness is to institutional controls (Furlong and Kerwin, 2004:354). These and related issues emphasize the importance of assessing patterns of influence on rulemaking in state agencies. Governors and state legislatures have a range of informal means and formal tools to exercise influence on agency rulemaking. …
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.