Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control

A central problem of representative democracy is how to ensure that policy decisions are responsive to the interests or preferences of citizens. The U.S. Constitution deals with the electoral side of this problem by con-structing institutional safeguards and incentive structures designed to make elected representatives responsive to citizens. But making policy involves more than decisions by elected legislators and the president. Inevitably, elected officials delegate considerable polieymaking authority to unelected bureaucrats. Because elected ollicials have limited resources for monitoring agency performance, the possibility arises that bureaucrats will not comply with their policy preferences. This gives rise to the question bow—or, in-deed, whether—elected political officials can reasonably effectively assure that their policy intentions will be carried out. This paper explores the principles of the political control of bureaucratic decisions. In so doing, we seek to develop a unifying conceptual framework lor two general types of controls: oversight—monitoring, rewarding, and punishing bureaucratic behavior—and administrative procedures. We begin with the premise that the political control of agencies is a principal-agent problem. In general, principal-agent problems do not have