The forthcoming article “The institutional foundations of the power to persuade” by Carlo Prato and Ian R. Turner is summarized by the author(s) below.
How do the design of bureaucratic agencies and congressional oversight shape the ability of the President to influence policy? In this paper, Carlo Prato and Ian Turner address this question using a game-theoretical model.
The premise of the theory is that in many agencies, career bureaucrats enjoy civil service protections that limit the ability of the President to directly compel bureaucrats to take certain actions. The president and his/her administration, however, can shape the production of information that career bureaucrats use for policy implementation (e.g., via guidelines, political appointments, and expert panels). As a result, the ability of the President to align bureaucrats’ actions to her goals depends on the credibility of this information.
A key obstacle to credibility is the temptation of the Executive to interfere ex-post with information provision—for instance, by trying to censor or amend the content of internal reports. Whether these attempts are going to be successful depends on the agency’s structural independence (a function of agency design), but also on Congressional oversight.
The uncovering of interference will damage the President, and different Congressional actors might then vary in how aggressively they exercise their oversight powers. We show that the president’s ability to systematically influence bureaucrats’ actions requires (i) some degree of structural independence and (ii) sufficiently aggressive legislative oversight.
Without independence or aggressive oversight (e.g., when the same party controls Congress and the Presidency), the president might actually lack the necessary credibility to influence bureaucrats’ actions. Why? The reason is that the high likelihood of undetected interference makes the Bureaucracy skeptical of internally produced information. As a result, the best course of action for the Executive might be to provide unbiased information.
Crucially, we show that Congress’ incentive to engage in aggressive oversight requires sufficiently low bureaucratic independence, and will systematically vary with its alignment with the president: under unified government, Congress will devote comparatively more resources to investigating low-independence agencies (e.g., a Cabinet-level agency) in order to increase the President’s credibility. Under divided government, instead, Congress will shift these resources to investigating high-independence agencies (e.g., independent commissions).
More generally, the paper clarifies how the strength of the president’s formal powers does not necessarily translate into policy influence: less formally constrained presidents might actually be less able to influence policy implementation.
About the Author(s): Carlo Prato is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and Ian R. Turner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Their research “The institutional foundations of the power to persuade” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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