Salience, Complexity, and the Legislative Direction of Regulatory Bureaucracies

Abstract

Questions regarding the political control of administrative agencies have played a major role in reinvigorating the study of bureaucracy. Scholars have employed increasingly sophisticated analyses to demonstrate that it is possible, even likely, for elected officials to direct bureaucratic behavior. But while theoretical models derive expectations regarding both the propensity and the effectiveness of efforts at political control, nearly all empirical research has focused on only the latter. In this article we extend empirical analyses to study under what conditions efforts at political control of the bureaucracy are more or less likely. Specifically, we assess the effects that public salience and technical complexity have on the willingness of elected officials to use legislation to direct the behavior of four federal regulatory agencies from 1949 to 1996. The results from these analyses demonstrate the utility of using the core concepts of salience and complexity to predict the likelihood of legislative direction of agency behavior.