Politics, Capacity, and Performance in U.S. Federal Agencies, 2000-2022

• In Event: Executive Power and Bureaucratic Politics

Abstract

An enduring question at the nexus of political science and public administration is the relationship between politics and administration. Scholars have wrestled with the nature of this relationship since Wilson(1887) argued that politics and administration could and should be separate. Modern political science research has focused more on the politics side of the politics-administration dichotomy, exploring how political choices influence the policy direction of agencies, rather than agency performance per se. Public administration research, by contrast, more often examines how organizational characteristics (individual-level behavior and/or organizational entity) and managerial choices shape agency performance, sidestepping how political choices might shape performance.

In this paper, we revisit the relationship between politics and administration, emphasizing how politics can influence agency performance even in the most professional and high performing agencies.

We describe the mechanisms by which political alignment or misalignment influence performance. We detail how presidents work to 1) change outputs by directly influencing agency capacity (e.g., budget and personnel levels) and 2) change outputs without directly targeting capacity by using the tools of the administrative presidency to let capacity idle, reorient capacity, or diminish capacity indirectly.

We test these relationships using newly created measures of agency performance for 139 U.S. federal agencies during the 2000-2022 period. The new measures combine dozens of subjective and objective measures of performance that vary across agencies and time. We conclude with the implications of our findings for future research focusing on the intersection of both politics and management.

Authors

• George A. Krause, University of Georgia

• David E. Lewis, Vanderbilt University