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.