Bureaucratic discretion, agency structure, and democratic responsiveness: The case of the United States attorneys

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Whitford, AB
• 署名单位: University of Kansas
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1053-1858
• DOI: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.jpart.a003523
• 发表日期: 2002
• 页码: 3-27
• 关键词: Longitudinal Data; POLITICS; POWER; RULE

摘要

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 responsiveness 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.