Organizational Reputation and the Securities and Exchange Commission's Failed Regulatory Revolution

When do regulatory innovations fail? I provide a novel organizations‐based answer to this question by developing an institutional‐reputational approach to regulatory politics. Regulators cannot hope to monitor the vast majority of market activities, so they must rely on the regulated to condition their behavior on the regulator's reputation: beliefs and expectations concerning the regulator's goals and capabilities. Regulators thus pursue daily activities while being mindful of how these activities will shape their reputation and thus their ability to achieve future goals. However, even long‐standing reputations are rendered fragile when rival actors use the organization's reputation to cross‐purposes. Thus, while reputation represents a major source of power, reputation also proves fragile when organizations face conflicting reputational demands. The fragility of reputations provides a novel explanation of an understudied phenomenon: failed regulatory revolutions. I develop this theory through the analysis of innovative Securities and Exchange Commission activity in disclosure law following the Watergate investigation.     

Procedural Control of the Bureaucracy, Peer Review, and Epistemic Drift

Regulatory peer review—in which independent scientistscomment on the technical underpinnings of proposed regulations—isa recently pursued form of political control of the bureaucracy.This article situates regulatory peer review in the contextof both the history of technical advice to government and theprincipal-agent perspective often used to explain the presenceof administrative procedures. Much of the academic discussionof attempts to influence bureaucratic decision making has utilizedprincipal-agent theory. We introduce two novel concepts to accommodateregulatory peer review into the principal-agent framework. Thefirst is "technocracy" where the preferences of technical expertsdisplace public preferences. The second is "epistemic drift,"a change in embodied knowledge that contributes to departuresfrom the policy intentions of an enacting coalition of policymakers. In addition to introducing these concepts, we arguethat regulatory peer review is more complex than other administrativeprocedures and that its efficacy critically depends on the detailsof its implementation. We hypothesize that regulatory peer reviewwill cause nongovernmental participants in regulatory conflictsto devote more effort to creating research and other epistemicresources. But we also hypothesize that, just as courts havebecome more politicized with their role in regulatory policy,peer review and regulatory science will become increasinglypoliticized as well.     

Rationality and Bureaucracy: Maoist Contributions to a Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy*

The assessments of the role of bureaucracy in socialism offered by Weber and Lenin are seriously weakened by their reliance on an inadequately developed category of rationality. A genuinely Marxist theory of bureaucracy presupposes a clarification of the category of rationality, and such is presented in accordance with the communicative model recently formulated by Habermas and Gouldner. Premised on several important features of this model, the Maoist ideal type of bureaucracy provides Marxist social theory with a solid basis for advancing a theory of bureaucracy and, at the same time, seriously challenges the Weberian claim that socialism can be either a modern society or revolutionary society, but not both.     

Bureaucracy Redux: Management Reformism and the Welfare State

Bureaucratic discretion is a fundamental feature of social provision,one that presents enduring difficulties for management. In general,management reform has taken two, divergent paths. One, utilizingthe familiar public bureaucratic model, seeks to control discretionthrough hierarchical command structures and standardization.The other, utilizing decentralization and privatization, regulatesand relocates discretion, using incentive structures associatedwith market or quasi-market institutions. However, it may bethat discretion will prove to be as problematic for the newpublic management (NPM) as it was for the old. This articleoffers a critical political history of management reformism,reviewing efforts to reorganize the public welfare provisionby applying new public management models to old public bureaucracyproblems. It considers the dynamics of bureaucratic discretionand reform not only as a problem of public management but aspart of the contested politics of social policymaking.     

Bureaucracy and place: expertise in the European Quarter

Bureaucratic structures and procedures are an integral part of the production of political space today. Analyses of geopolitical practices must therefore unpack the bureaucratic context in which these practices unfold on a daily basis. This is particularly important if we wish to understand transnational processes that operate at scales and in contexts other than the familiar contours of the nation‐state. In this article, I focus on one bureaucratic centre of geopolitics – the European Quarter in Brussels, Belgium, the institutional centre of the European Union. Drawing from scholarship on geopolitics and policy‐making, as well as primary interview material from field research in Brussels, I make two related points – (1) that we need detailed close‐up studies of the bureaucratic settings of contemporary geopolitics, and (2) that we must carefully situate such settings in their place‐specific contexts to reveal dynamics that remain unnoticed from afar. Empirically, the article contributes to the interdisciplinary scholarship on the EU as a transnational power centre of global importance. Theoretically, it seeks to improve our understanding of geopolitics as a bureaucratic and material practice.     

The Use of Polling in Congressional Campaigns

This study examines successful 1974 congressional campaignsthat used public opinion polling. The primary focus of the researchwas on where and how polling was used in the campaign and thefactors that influenced its use. Polling was most common inhighly competitive, well-financed races involving younger, lesspolitically experienced candidates. Surveys were typically begunquite early in the campaign and emphasized candidate standingand determined which issues were most salient to the electorate.The way polling was used was influenced primarily by party affiliation,the hiring of a professional polster and campaign expenditures     

Watergate and the 1974 Congressional Elections

Strong, if delayed, public reactions to the Watergate scandalsare documented through examination of Gallup and Harris pollresults. Analysis of panel data (N = 181) collected before,during and after the major Watergate revelations, however, suggestthat beliefs about Nixon's involvement in the scandal had littlerelationship to 1974 political behaviors. Some evidence is providedthat whom or what the voters blamed for the scandal beyond Nixondid influence the 1974 elections to some extent     

Measurement and theory in legislative networks: The evolving topology of Congressional collaboration

The examination of legislatures as social networks represents a growing area of legislative scholarship. We examine existing treatments of cosponsorship data as constituting legislative networks, with measures aggregated over entire legislative sessions. We point out ways in which the direct application of models from the social networks literature legislative networks aggregated over entire sessions could potentially obscure interesting variation at different levels of measurement. We then present an illustration of an alternative approach, in which we analyze disaggregated, dynamic networks and utilize multiple measures to guard against overly measure-dependent inferences. Our results indicate that the cosponsorship network is a highly responsive network subject to external institutional pressures that more aggregated analyses would overlook.     

The Basic Plot of Family Life

No abstract available for this article.