A new measure of US public agency policy discretion

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Smith, Natalie L.; Yackee, Susan Webb
• 署名单位: University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1053-1858
• DOI: 10.1093/jopart/muae007
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 404-417
• 关键词: government ideology; Political control; measuring citizen; executive orders; POWERS; bureaucracy; SEPARATION; DELEGATION; Autonomy; STATES

摘要

The US bureaucracy routinely issues major public policy decisions that affect Americans' lives. Government agency leaders make those decisions based on a subjective understanding of their agency's available policy discretion. Over time, discretion has become a prominent theoretical construct in the bureaucratic politics and public administration literature, but it is rarely measured directly. In this article, we create a new measure of agency policy discretion. We draw on research suggesting that discretion is derived from the bureaucracy's key political principals: the elected executive, legislators, and interest groups. We use data from the American State Administrators Project and trigonometry to calculate the discretion area scores for 8,955 state agencies between 1978 and 2018. We then evaluate the measure through a series of construct validation assessments. The article offers an innovative and generalizable way to operationalize discretion that will advance future scholarship in organizational behavior, public administration, and bureaucratic decision-making.