Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1998

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Political Science

Major Professor

Patricia F. Freeland

Committee Members

Bill Lyons, Mike Fitzgerald, David Ostermeier

Abstract

The debate over legislative delegations of rulemaking power to unelected administrators has for the most part been framed within the assumptions of political, economic, and institutional theories of regulation. Each of this perspectives suggest the importance of the public interest, interest group power, and elected political actors in influencing administrative decisions. And, there has been considerable effort devoted to researching and explaining the effect of structural reforms, the choice of administrative procedures to constrain rulemaking decisions, and why rulemaking occurs. There have, however, been only two attempts to model and empirically examine factors hypothesized to influence decisions by rulemakers. Each of these studies use measure that incorporate economic assumptions of agency "capture" and the importance of interest groups to the exclusion of other possible dimensions of decision choice. This study seeks to extend our understanding of both non-institutional and institutional constraints on state administrative rulemaking. Relevant theories and research are evaluated to identify socioeconomic, political, and system variables hypothesized to constrain rulemaking decisions. A dependent measure of rule output that affords cross-state and cross-profession comparison is developed, and data on key independent variables is collected and analyzed to assess the degree to which hypothesized influences agree with the reality of state rulemaking. Finally, ordinal- and regression-based analysis is used to address such key questions about the state rulemaking process as: What is the nature of state rules to regulate the professions? Are there significant differences across the professions? Does ordinal analysis reveal any statistically significant relationships between rule output and the explanatory variables? Finally, multivariate analysis is used to test hypothesized relationships and to define the empirical model that most efficiently describes the state rulemaking process. The findings reveal that rulemaking output does vary significantly across states, but do not support economic assumptions that powerful interest groups "capture" agency administrators. Calculation of Spearman Correlation Coefficients suggests the explanatory variables that significantly contribute to this variation include: state political culture; aggregate interest group strength; relative group strength; state legislative professionalism; state executive professionalism; the stringency of administrative procedures act requirements; the tendency of political actors to exercise institutional controls; and, bureaucratic professionalism. Results of the comprehensive multivariate model of the occupational rulemaking process are significant but modest. Findings reveal the influences of aggregate group strength, administrative procedure act stringency, and bureaucratic professionalism significantly affect the nature of rulemaking output. This implies that increases in aggregate group strength contribute to increased pro-regulatee rulemaking output, and that more professional bureaucracies will exhibit less pro-regulatee rulemaking. Contrary to theory, the findings suggest that more stringent administrative procedures acts contribute to increased pro-regulatee rulemaking. As such, administrators in states with more formalized and restrictive rulemaking procedures are more likely to respond to the needs of the regulated interests.

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