Public Management, Governance, and American Politics

The institutional causes and substantive consequences of interest group influence is Assistant Professor Sven Feldmann’s topic of study. In a set of recently published journal articles, Feldmann examines the interaction of interest groups with legislative decision makers. In the first article, with Morten Bennedsen, “Lobbying Legislatures,” in the Journal of Political Economy (volume 110, 2002), he examines informational lobbying in the context of a multimember legislature that decides on the allocation of a public good. Feldmann finds that the U.S. Congress’s decentralized nature allows the strategic formation of policy coalitions among high-demand districts at the exclusion of low-demand districts. Informational lobbying is effective given that it helps congressional leaders craft winning policy coalitions. By contrast, in a legislature with higher party or coalitional cohesion, informational lobbying remains ineffective and the incentive for interest groups to lobby is attenuated, relative to the U.S. Congress.

A second article, also with Bennedsen, entitled “Lobbying and Legislative Organization: The Effect of the Vote of Confidence Procedure” and published in Business and Politics (volume 4, 2002), examines how the structure of the legislature affects interest groups’ incentives to lobby in an intertemporal setting. Feldmann shows that the vote of confidence procedure, a distinguishing feature between the U.S. Congress and European parliamentary systems, reduces an agenda setter’s willingness to change policy partnerships, and thus significantly lowers the incentives for interest group lobbying in parliamentary systems relative to the U.S.

Feldmann’s most current work focuses on the role of interest groups during policy implementation by a bureaucracy. In a Harris School working paper entitled, “Imperfect Judicial Enforcement: Legislative Mandates and Public Law Litigation,” with Anthony Bertelli, Feldmann shows that the legislature can only partially control bureaucratic agencies by means of statutory design. Interest groups can use the courts, through public law litigation, in ways that systematically undermine the legislative intent. Based on a series of court cases encompassing education policy, law enforcement, and child and family services, Feldmann finds that the interest group-plaintiff can “collude” with the implementing agency to appropriate additional resources and deviate from intended policy. Feldmann is also working on the effect of lobbying and legislative delegation, which includes developing a theory of lobbying of administrative agencies and integrating it with a more general argument about interest groups’ “venue choice”—the decision of interest groups of where in the policy process to focus their lobbying efforts.

Additional work by Feldmann includes deriving a measure of partisanship in Congress and, with Harris School Assistant Professor Thomas DeLeire, studying the determinants of individuals’ campaign contributions. Finally, Feldmann is working on an explanation for the use of violence in civil wars. While farther afield, this work is methodologically related to the above research in its use of information economics as the mode of analysis.

Assistant Professor Jeffrey Milyo continues his work on campaign finance reform, looking at the efficacy of state campaign finance reforms. Very little research examines efficacy explicitly, and in his work, he examines whether there is a causal relationship between campaign finance reform and electoral competition, voter turnout, trust in government, and the election of women and minorities.

The bureaucratic process is the topic of a recent journal article published by Assistant Professor Sean Gailmard. In “Expertise, Subversion, and Bureaucratic Discretion,” published in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization (volume 18, October 2002), he examines a legislature’s delegation of policy-making authority to an imperfectly controlled, expert bureaucrat. The legislature can reduce the bureaucrat’s expertise advantage through costly investigations of its own before delegating. Further, the bureaucrat is granted discretionary bounds by the legislature, but can subvert legislative dictates by stepping beyond them at some cost. Gailmard analyzes the interaction of preference divergence, investigation cost to the legislature, and subversion cost to the bureaucrat on the decision to delegate. He finds that because of the equilibrium effect of subversion on discretion, bureaucrats will want subversion of legislative dictates to be difficult, while legislators want it to be relatively easy. He highlights an indirect effect between preference divergence and discretion: preference divergence leads the legislature to become more expert on policy matters, which leads it to delegate less.

Another study of bureaucracy by Gailmard is his recently completed Harris School working paper, “Multiple Principals and Outside Information on Bureaucratic Policymaking.” In this paper, he examines the forces of accountability and oversight between bureaucrats and the legislature, using budgetary negotiations as the backdrop. As he argues, bureaucrats are privy to information that can be used as a lever in the negotiations (e.g., the scope for cost reduction on a large project), and yet legislatures face costs of extracting that and other useful information from agencies. Gailmard examines how diffusion of oversight authority in the legislature affects the accountability of bureaucrats, and how it interacts with oversight incentives of legislators. The paper shows that holding bureaucrats accountable may have as much to do with the structure of overseeing institutions as with the bureaucracy itself.

Gailmard is also studying the overlap and redundancy in public organizations by examining Chicago’s programs for the arts and culture programs, via the Department of Cultural Affairs, in “Governance and the Arts: A Study of Overlapping Jurisdictions in Project Selection and Implementation.” In this initiative, he is assessing which governance structures tend to facilitate sound decision-making in the uncertain environment of project evaluation, and is analyzing the effect of a particular governance structure—independent decisions versus coordination of agencies with overlapping jurisdiction—on project selection and implementation. He suggests that some redundancy might in fact be useful as viable projects are less likely to be overlooked when the process is duplicated. He is working with the Cultural Policy Center (see “Research Centers and Programs” in this report for a description of the center) on this project.

Other research by Gailmard includes a theoretical and empirical study of congressional oversight (with Assistant Professor Jeffrey Milyo), venue choice by lobbyists and bureaucratic structure (with Fred Boehmke, University of Iowa, and John Patty, Carnegie University), as well as political control of education administration.