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This article argues that regulatory trust is established and maintained through a relationship between stakeholders and the government, with the former group of organizations and individuals relying on their understanding of this relationship. Federal administrative law in the United States makes the expectations about the regulatory environment on which stakeholders rely more meaningful by granting stakeholders the right to bring actions in court when their expectations are being (or seem likely to be) dashed. To make this argument, I begin with the threshold question of how courts serve as a forum for voicing claims of distrust in regulatory regimes. I then consider the importance of political accountability over regulatory decision making, illustrating the concerns about the structure of agencies that regulate consumer and housing finance. Next, I will discuss a second major challenge to trust that arises from the extent to which the authority of regulatory agencies is circumscribed by legislation. Along the way, I draw on the case law presented to argue that problems of trust in financial regulation center on the reliance interests of stakeholders. Finally, the argument suggests a research agenda into trust as a reliance interest that I sketch in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laws such as 0.08 blood alcohol content, open container, and license revocation provide a policy framework for reducing drinking and driving. Drinking and driving behavior is difficult to assess; unlike property and violent crimes, where incidence statistics can approximate behavior, most drink-driving trips go undetected. The authors develop a novel measure of drink-driving propensity by estimating an item response model using national survey data. The authors illustrate their measures in the aggregate and as they relate to law enforcement efforts in the American states. (Contains 4 tables, 4 figures and 8 notes.)

Congress packages pork‐barrel spending in complicated proposals that belie theories of distributive politics. We theorize that roll‐call voting on such bills depends on grant programs' administrative centralization, party ties with presidents or home‐state governors, and differences in geographic representation between chambers. Analyzing votes between 1973 and 2010 using a within‐legislator strategy reveals that House members are less likely to support decentralized spending when they are copartisans with presidents, while senators support decentralization regardless of such party ties. When House members or senators share affiliation with only governors or with neither chief executive, the likelihood of support rises with decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public management researchers are interested in many characteristics of organizations that cannot be directly captured, making aggregated attitudes from surveys an attractive proxy. Yet difficulties in measuring meaningful attributes over time and across organizations have frequently limited statistical designs to a single organization or time. We offer a method for creating such statistical measures across agencies and time using item response theory. Focusing our attention on US federal administrative agencies, we marshal a variety of questions from surveys commissioned by the Office of Personnel Management and Merit Systems Protection Board and employ statistical models to measure three important attributes--autonomy, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation--for 71 agencies between 1998-2010. Our study provides a wealth of data for quantitative public management research designs as well as an adaptable framework for measuring a wide range of concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federalist Nos. 41-43 provide a unified justification for the powers granted to the national government by posing a series of questions about the four classes of responsibilities, such as declaring war. This essay examines the role of polarization in limiting the coordination of powers needed for effective administration and uses ideology estimates for four states to illustrate the difficulties embedded in shared power between national and state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the president's relationship to Congress has been carefully studied, the broader executive branch has received far less attention in that context. Scholars rely on assumptions about the relationship between the president and cabinet departments that remain untested. We construct the first statistical portrait of executive branch ideology by estimating ideal points for members of Congress, presidents, and the heads of cabinet-level departments between 1991 and 2004 in a Bayesian framework. We empirically assess claims about the composition of the president's administrative team and the influence of institutions on the ideology of principal executive decision makers. We also test an important claim regarding the trade-off between ideological congruence and budgetary authority to demonstrate the utility of our estimates for other scholars. Our analysis reveals a new picture of the executive branch as ideologically diverse, casting into doubt some essential assumptions in a substantial body of work on the separation of powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in district boundaries in small magnitude electoral systems can have substantive consequences for representation. In the U.S., each decennial redistricting cycle infuses House districts with a large number of new voters, changing personal representation for many citizens. What effect does the influx of these new voters exert on member behavior? By assessing the extent of this change in constituencies in conjunction with member voting behavior on roll calls, we can determine if significant changes to a congressional district impact post-redistricting legislative behavior. Using panel data estimators and various measures of legislator behavior, we show evidence that supports this claim. Our findings have notable implications for debates over representation and electoral accountability in legislative assemblies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Scholars have focused attention toward congressional influence over distributive grant allocations, but they have less frequently examined the extent to which administrative agencies play a role in that process. We present a new theory of ideology-contingent executive decision making within a multiple-principals framework to explain the geographic distribution of policy benefits. Our theory is novel in that it locates interbranch ideological conflict and confluence at the center of bureaus' allocational strategies. Discretionary Department of Labor (DOL) grants and Department of Defense (DOD) contracts from 1991 to 2002 are examined to provide evidence that agencies deliver more grants to senators with proximate ideologies. To measure bureaucratic ideology, we generate comparable ideology estimates for cabinet secretaries, presidents, and members of the U.S. Senate via an item-response model. Our findings suggest that ideological congruence between senators and DOL or DOD is associated with significantly larger amounts of grants or contracts, respectively. These findings are important as they recast our understanding of distributive politics into ideological terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All U.S. states have laws designed to discourage people from drinking and driving, but enforcement varies across the states. Existing studies offer conflicting evidence on the effectiveness of these strategies in deterring drinking-and-driving behavior. Deterrence theories imply that the mere existence of such laws has little impact on criminal behavior, but the perception of enforcement and the probability of being detected have a deterrent effect. To test these hypotheses, we develop a measure of the propensity to drink and drive using item response theory and national survey data. Inferential models test the impact of perceptions of enforcement, actual enforcement levels, and deterrence laws on criminal propensity. Results indicate that the existence of statutes impacts only those least likely to drink and drive, while perceptions of the likelihood of arrest and individual agreement with the goals of drinking and driving laws significantly reduce the propensity for almost everyone. Actual enforcement rates display no behavioral effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cabinet secretaries represent their departments when testifying before Congress on a broad range of legislation. Do they also represent the president's views on such legislation? Consistent with institutional theories of the presidency, we posit that, in some instances, cabinet secretaries take public positions contrary to those of the president, suggesting ideological distinctions between presidents and their appointed secretaries. We examine all congressional testimonies of secretaries of labor, commerce, and agriculture from 1991 to 2002, coding their positions taken on legislation considered on the floor of the Senate. Though these public disagreements are infrequent, our evidence suggests that agreement is more likely as support for the president's position among oversight committee members increases, yet less likely as secretaries’ tenure in office increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs a novel statistical strategy to examine the determinants of turnover intention in government service. To appropriately measure a main determinant of turnover intention--functional preferences--I estimate an ordinal item response model using data from the Federal Human Capital Survey. The sample is selected to facilitate an important comparison: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has undergone significant performance-based pay reforms for supervisors, but not for nonsupervisors, whereas the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), also a subunit of the U.S. Treasury, has not. Inferential models of turnover intention reveal among other things that functional and friendship solidary preferences are important determinants of turnover intention, but increased accountability is associated with greater turnover among subordinates. IRS supervisors, who face paybanding, are significantly less likely to consider leaving than their counterparts in the OCC, who do not face such incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pay-for-performance reforms create "high-powered" incentives for civil servants to meet or exceed specified performance objectives as measured by such things as customer satisfaction. Economists and social psychologists have advanced the claim that high-powered incentives for performance may empirically lessen the effect of civil servants' intrinsic motivation toward achieving agency goals (motivation can be "crowded out"). Nonetheless, well-designed pay-for-performance incentives may "crowd in" intrinsic motivation. A number of federal agencies and subagencies have undergone personnel management reforms that raise the specter of this pattern of "motivation crowding." Does it happen? Is intrinsic motivation crowded in or crowded out? This paper employs item response theory to create measurement models for the estimation a latent trait of intrinsic motivation for employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) using data from the 2002 Federal Human Capital Survey. The IRS, but not the OCC, implemented a paybanding system that imposed high-powered performance incentives on supervisors, but not an non-supervisory personnel. Results suggest that the IRS reward structure crowded in intrinsic motivation at the lowest levels, but that at the highest levels of motivation intrinsic motivation is crowded out, a pattern not seen in the OCC data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of managerial responsibility is a shining thread in the literature of public administration, but its definition within our constitutional scheme remains elusive. How will we know responsible public management when we see it? We propose one answer: Public administration should be conducted according to what we term a ‘precept of managerial responsibility,’ which involves four interrelated elements derived from the classical literature of public administration: judgment, accountability, balance, and rationality. We apply this precept to one of the most vexing problems of public administration theory and practice, institutional reform litigation. This application illustrates how the precept solves a major theoretical problem of American public administration by defining a role for administrative officers that fully comports with the Madisonian scheme of separated institutions‘legislative, executive, and judicial’sharing power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on the determinants of immigrant policy in the 50 U.S. states between 2005 and 2011, another on the activities of lobbyists and a report on the impact of the opposition over crime policy in Denmark.

Laws such as .08 blood alcohol content, open container, and license revocation provide a policy framework for reducing drinking and driving. Drinking and driving behavior is difficult to assess; unlike property and violent crimes, where incidence statistics can approximate behavior, most drink-driving trips go undetected. The authors develop a novel measure of drink-driving propensity by estimating an item response model using national survey data. The authors illustrate their measures in the aggregate and as they relate to law enforcement efforts in the American states.