Administrative Responsiveness to Public Opinion

Julia Rabinovich

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/N29T77

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Administrative Responsiveness to Public Opinion

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This dissertation project is one of the first to explicitly study the theoretical and empirical relationship between public opinion and the policies of unelected administrative agencies in the United States. This research addresses two important questions: (1) given the absence of a direct electoral connection between bureaucrats and the public, should we expect administrative policies to be responsive to the public's wishes and (2) if we do expect responsiveness, to what extent does the interaction between bureaucrats and elected officials affect the scope of responsiveness? I develop a formal theoretical model of administrative policymaking and test its empirical implications using time-series data on regulatory policies of the Federal Communications Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the International Trade Commission. The theoretical and empirical results of this study demonstrate that administrative agencies may be responsive to public opinion even in the absence of an electoral connection between citizens and bureaucratic agencies. However, the findings also suggest that the relationship between legislative and administrative responsiveness to public opinion is conditional on the success of legislative oversight of bureaucracy and on the gatekeeping powers of congressional committees. As a result, a strong correspondence between administrative policies and public opinion is not always guaranteed in a democratic system, even when the legislature itself is responsive to the public's wishes. Furthermore, issue salience plays an important role in administrative responsiveness. For issues that are easily accessible to citizens, such as equal employment policy, issue salience increases administrative responsiveness. However, for complex issues, such as foreign trade policy, issue salience instead appears to strengthen the relationship between administrative policies and interest groups' preferences.

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