Centralized Management in Democratic Governance—Essays on Organizing a System of Executive Branch Bureaucracies

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to our understanding of how non-elected government actors can manage and lead a system of executive branch government bureaucracies to better advance both administrative capacity and democratic governance. I use complementary theoretical concepts from sociology, organizational theory, and public management to identify and study dynamics in how systems of executive branch agencies in the United States behave—both at the state and federal levels—and how they can be changed. Building on an in-depth inductive study on Missouri state government during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chapter 1 introduces the concept of bureaucratic backstopping—defined as the process of identifying and internally moving around government employees, responsibilities, and resources across bureaucratic boundaries in order to fill in gaps in a state’s own capabilities. Chapter 1 further demonstrates that this process in Missouri state government was an integral aspect of the state’s ability to overcome baseline administrative challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic and improve the quality of its administrative response. Leveraging both qualitative and quantitative research methods, Chapter 2 assesses how transferring divisions from one government department to another influences public servants’ experiences of authority and informal bureaucratic control mechanisms in the respective departments after such a reform. Chapter 3, based on an original dataset with information on nearly all regulatory impact assessments for major regulatory proposals across the federal government during a twenty-year period, identifies previously undocumented patterns in how federal agencies formally assess and monetize the value of regulatory policy impacts. Ultimately, the three chapters provide original insights into patterns across systems of government bureaucracies and how non-elected leaders, managers, and organizations responsible for overseeing an entire executive branch of government can use formal and informal tools at their disposal to help better align an executive branch of government with democratically sanctioned values, goals, and outcomes.