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Recent studies have documented how presidents issue signing statements. A president might try to bend policy closer to his own position through shaping how bureaucrats use their discretion to implement a law. Later in time, it may serve as a defense if it shapes how judges decide whether a particular interpretation is consistent with the Constitution. A president may construct more detailed and complex statements when his ideal point is distant from Congress. I test this hypothesis and others using data from the George W. Bush administration between 2001 and 2006. Both the number of objections applied to a given bill and their complexity increase when the president is distant from Congress., A number of recent studies have explored how and when presidents use signing statements to shape the interpretation and implementation of statutes (e.g., Bradley and Posner 2006; Cooper 2005; Kelley [...]

Numerous studies argue that law affects behavior 'expressively'--such as when states create focal points that overcome the coordination difficulties firms face. We argue that governments help firms overcome coordination dilemmas by explicating a preferred strategy for firms weighing investment in voluntary regulation. Firms would prefer to coordinate on a common strategy as a way of reducing the costs of voluntary regulation and increasing its benefits. We test our hypothesis about the efficacy of focal point selection with the European Union's (EU) advocacy of the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) over a rival environmental management system, International Standards Organization (ISO) 14001. EU nations have statistically significantly lower rates of ISO 14001 certification than comparable countries at least in part due to their advocacy of EMAS. These results emphasize the role the state plays in coordinating business behavior even when such policy is simply expressive. KEY WORDS: voluntary regulation, environmental management, expressive law, seemingly unrelated regression (SUR), Introduction Substantial recent attention has been paid to numerous ways that law affects behavior indirectly--'expressively'--that is, independent of direct deterrence (Cooter, 1997, 1998, 2000; McAdams, 2000a, 2000b; Posner, 1998, 2000a, [...]

A broad variety of scholars, including Weber (1946, 233-4), have considered the effects of rules that require agencies to disclose information to the public (Rourke 1961). One active area of [...]

INTRODUCTION Albert O. Hirschman argued in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States that individuals respond to a decline in the quality of an organization [...]

Byline: Andrew B. Whitford (1), Benjamin Y. Clark (2) Keywords: Water rights; Institutional design; Second best solutions; Market failure; Government failure; Corporation failure; Double moral hazard Abstract: Recent decades have seen an acceleration in public concern about the allocation of increasingly scarce water supplies. There are many reasons for this concern, such as growth in urban populations. In this article, we focus on how surface water's special qualities (the combination of spillovers, rent-seeking behavior, and common pool resources) complicate the assignment of property rights in any legal framework. These characteristics make specific market structures necessary in order to efficiently allocate rights. The state usually designs those structures. Yet, just like markets can fail, so can governments fail to effectively allocate those rights. So designers often turn to quasi-judicial conservancy boards as a second-best solution. We argue that those boards may themselves fail through a form of 'corporation failure.' We address these three types of failures, and offer an analysis of two cases that suggests that the likelihood conservancy boards will suffer from corporate failure depends on the actions of the boards and outside stakeholders (like governments). Author Affiliation: (1) Department of Public Administration and Policy, The University of Georgia, 204 Baldwin Hall, Athens, GA, 30602-1615, USA (2) Department of Public Administration and Policy, School of Public & International Affairs, The University of Georgia, 204 Baldwin Hall, Athens, GA, 30602-1615, USA Article History: Registration Date: 22/10/2007 Received Date: 02/06/2005 Accepted Date: 22/10/2007 Online Date: 15/11/2007

This article examines the relationship between political veto points, credible commitments, and regulatory compliance costs. Its central purpose is to assess whether different types of political veto points credibly constrain regulatory change and thus lower compliance costs. The authors conceptualize veto points broadly, including legislative oversight, gubernatorial powers, and direct democracy. We analyze state-level environmental compliance costs from 1988 to 1994 as a function of the structure of state political institutions and state political and economic characteristics. The results suggest that a key veto point, the authority for legislators to review bureaucratic behavior, consistently reduces compliance costs. Keywords: veto points; credible commitment; environmental regulation; compliance costs; bureaucracy

INTRODUCTION Since Adam Smith, the attraction of the market has been the Invisible Hand: the promise that social well-being may be advanced simply by allowing individuals to follow their self-interest. [...]

This article develops a regime-splitting process model of decentralized policy implementation to integrate two theoretical approaches rooted in the tension between local flexibility and national control. The author estimates a model that simultaneously assesses the ability of each approach to explain the outcome it is meant to map onto (case-level discretion for local flexibility and aggregate responsiveness for national control) as well as each approach's extensibility to the other approach's domain. The data for the study come from the implementation of eight primary statutes by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's regional offices. The results are counterintuitive: the national control approach largely explains case-level discretion, the domain of local flexibility, but retains some power for explaining aggregate responsiveness. The local flexibility perspective contributes to both case-level discretion and aggregate responsiveness. Both models work outside their traditional domains, but neither is a sufficient explanation for decentralized policy implementation. Keywords: policy implementation; decentralization; regulation

Governments continue to embrace the market-like mechanisms of auctions and bidding. This essay considers how governments (as bid-takers) and firms and nonprofits (as bidders) strategically interact in the design and implementation of these systems. I assess with regard to the uniqueness of bidding in government four principles on the role of: credible commitments, rational collusion, the setting of reserve prices, and heterogeneity among bidders. I also address recent calls for expanding the use of dynamic pricing in government., Introduction Recent studies have highlighted key dimensions in the decision to contract out government services and its implementation (e.g., Besselman, Arora, & Larkey, 2000; Boyne, 1998; Brown & Potoski, 2003; [...]

It is widespread conventional wisdom that presidential pardons--the only way for offenders to remove or eliminate all disabilities that arise from a federal or military offense--are political. We move beyond this belief and assess five broad ways that federal pardons may be systematically influenced by the policy agendas present in a separated powers system. We model the aggregate dispensation of clemency appeals (requests for pardons) using Prais-Winsten regression and find that the probability of denials for executive clemency reflects the president's own agenda and ideological position, congressional attention to criminal justice issues, and the homicide rate. In sum, both policy signals and the political processes they signify permeate the presidential pardons process. Keywords: presidency; executive branch; pardons; clemency; executive privilege; criminal justice; separated powers; policy signals; policy agendas

Simple changes are discussed to help the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) overcome those aspects of its organizational structure that obstruct its attempts to build comprehensive environmental protection policies. The EPA fails to meet its obligations as its structural DNA is not designed to achieve those goals, and the structure is not likely to change in the future.

I examine how the legislature and the president sequentially enable and constrain agencies in a tug-of-war over the exercise of bureaucratic discretion, partly in response to past political interventions. I provide evidence from a duration analysis of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's enforcement of hazard waste law for the acceleration and deceleration of policy implementation in response to sequential interventions by multiple, competing principals. I document the use of agenda-setting and solution-forcing statutes by Congress and case clearance mechanisms by the president. Sequenced political control means that agencies face shifting political expectations, caused in part by how the agency responds to past control attempts. While previous empirical research has portrayed a largely static world in which Congress and the president have influence, this study reveals a dynamic portrayal in which there is move and countermove from these principals.

One consequence of the president's use of rhetoric to shape the public agenda, the media, and congressional attention is less recognized: Presidential rhetoric shapes the priorities of the administrative agents over whom he seeks managerial control. We present statistical tests of the managerial power of presidential policy signals in the case of the United States Attorneys' implementation of the federal 'War on Drugs.' We find that presidential policy signals shifted the composition of the Attorneys' caseload, although not to the exclusion of other pertinent local, national, and internal factors. Yet, the consequences of presidential rhetoric for executive governance remain real and substantial.

Can bureaucracies respond to threats marked by both potentially high costs and fundamental uncertainty? Standard guidelines such as maximizing expected value to the society over a period of time may be ineffective; yet, state action is often most demanded for such situations. I argue that the precautionary principle of reserved rationality helps explain the ability of bureaucracies to choose appropriate actions under uncertainty. Such bureaucracies are empowered when there is sufficient informal institutional support for their expertise and the bureaucracy has the discretion to take necessary precautions. I draw historical information from the case of Singapore's regulation of the formerly common pool resource of water catchment areas. This case reveals decision making when it is not clear that the expected-value criterion would support action, as well as the importance of political and institutional support for such action.

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, I 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., Bureaucratic discretion is a central and continuing concern in American politics and administration. Over the past century, social scientists have consistently voiced concerns about the transition to greater administrative discretion [...]

We contrast social-structural theories of voting behavior with spatial theories of voting behavior to explain voter choice in the Netherlands and Great Britain. We hypothesize that voting behavior is best explained by the spatial theory of voting. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation is used to estimate multinomial probit (MNP) and multinomial logit (MNL) models of voter choice, for which we calculate Bayes factors for the purpose of model comparison. We find that the joint social-structural/spatial model is the best explanatory model in the Netherlands. Our results indicate that the MNP model outperforms the MNL model in our Dutch sample. In Great Britain, on the other hand, a purely spatial model is the best explanatory model, and our MNL model outperforms our MNP model. These results suggest the question of whether to employ MNL or MNP depends crucially on the data at hand.

The authors respond to Richard York's main concerns about their approach to assessing the impact of federalism and democratization on environmental sustainability, as measured by the Environmental Sustainability Index. Keywords: environmental sustainability; sustainability

We examine the forces for the descriptive representation of women in ministerial and subministerial positions. We offer a unified model in which portfolio allocation makes political forces for descriptive representation more important in the case of ministerial lines; in contrast, labor market forces determine the extent of descriptive representation in subministerial lines. We provide evidence for this claim from data for 72 countries and show that the advancement of women into ministerial posts depends on the form of electoral system and presence of women in the legislature (conditional on being in a parliamentary system). In contrast, the subministerial representation for women depends on the supply of women in the workforce. Additionally, the increased incidence of women in ministerial lines is associated with an increase in representation in subministerial lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study defines and compares three broad theories that seek to explain bureaucratic preferences. I first argue that each of these explanations is complex -- that no single measurable attribute encapsulates the entire theory. Second, I argue that these explanations are non-nested -- that al least one attribute representing a given theory cannot be expressed as resulting from attributes that representing one of the other theories. Based on the theory of comparisons of non-nested models, I assess these three competing explanations with the Likelihood Dominance Criterion, an approach for assessing the total explanatory power of a given theory relative to that offered by other theories. The comparisons take place in the context of the bureaucratic implementation of policies governing the remediation of hazardous waste at the state level in the United States. The comparisons show that bureaucratic preferences are best explained by the organizational capacity and constraints explanation rather than more proximate political and task environment theories. In total, the agency's rules, capacity, and characteristics form a better total explanation of the observed variance in bureaucratic preferences than either proximate state politics or the agency's task environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the intersection of coalition formation, judicial strategies, and regulatory politics. Coalitions are a low-cost means for assembling minority interests into more powerful blocs. However, in most cases in regulatory politics, judicial strategies are high cost efforts. I argue that coalitions among interests form one basis for judicial participation, but that participation manifests in an array of coalition "microstructures." For any one event, the microstructure of the interest group coalition varies, but across events the coalitions take on general forms. The paper offers evidence for a variety of coalition microstructures in interest group participation as amici curiae ("friends of the court") in cases before the United States Supreme Court. The evidence is drawn from the case of the Group of Ten, a stable, long-term coalition of environmental interest groups that operated from 1981 to 1991. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to principal--agency theory, the possibility of the political control of the bureaucracy depends on bureaucratic structure. In this article, I argue that the functional decentralization of responsibility and authority for policy formulation and implementation involves a net loss of political control. I show that the choice by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to transfer responsibility to its Regional Offices changed the ability of national political superiors to intervene in policy implementation in the field. Examining Regional Office data on the enforcement of reactor regulations from 1975 to 1996, I present statistical tests of the changing influence of national political institutions, local policy preferences, and the Regions' task environment. I find that decentralization insulated the NRC from national political oversight, and that the Regions were more responsive to local oversight post-devolution and deviated from a 'natural rate' of enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]