Which Statute to Implement? Strategic Timing by Regulatory Agencies

A critical though underexplored decision that regulatory agencies make is their choice of which statutes to implement as they set their regulatory agenda. In a standard positivist framework, strategic agencies should be expected to implement statutes of varying partisan origins in order to satisfy the ideological preferences of their political principals—conservative principals, for example, may prefer regulation that implements statutes passed by conservative coalitions. In this article, I demonstrate that regulatory agencies can choose different statutes to prioritize and I present empirical evidence that this choice changes with party control of political institutions. The use of statutory deadlines by enacting coalitions to insulate agencies from such politically motivated implementation schedules does not alter the empirical patterns.