Administrative Procedure Acts as a Mechanism of Political Control: Evidence from the States.

The goal of this paper is to shed light on the political motivations that led to the passage of the landmark 1946 Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and subsequent state APAs. Political scientists have long argued that administrative procedures are legislative tools to constrain executive discretion, enfranchise politically-favored groups, and "lock in" the policies of current majorities. We believe these theories are useful for understanding administrative procedures in a general sense, but are inappropriate for understanding the underlying political forces that brought about APAs- arguably the most important administrative procedures in modern history. Current theories of administrative procedures focus on procedures that are specific to particular agencies and programs. APAs, by contrast, typically apply to most agencies in government. In this paper, we develop a theory of APA passage that focuses on the separation of powers system and the conditions under which the executive and legislature would want to introduce procedural constraints across all agencies. In general, executives gain from the increased oversight APAs provide when they are weak managers of the bureaucracy, despite the loss of discretion entailed in agency procedures. Legislatures want APAs to prevent "drift" when government is divided. Under unified government, they impose APAs in order to assist an allied executive in managing the bureaucracy. We test our theory by taking advantage of the fact that the U.S. states have passed relatively similar APA legislation through adoption of Model State Acts. We conduct an empirical test on state-level passage and find support for our theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]