Procedural control of the bureaucracy, peer review, and epistemic drift.

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, October, 2007 by Guston, David; Shapiro, Stuart

INTRODUCTION

Administrative procedures may be used as instruments for the political control of the bureaucracy, preventing policies from drifting from the original intentions of an enacting coalition of legislators and interest groups through the independent action of bureaucrats (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987). Legislative principals also worry about additional actors who may attempt to change the specified administrative, procedural safeguards because they belong to a coalition that has drifted in composition and/or interest since the original legislative action (Horn and Shepsle 1989).

Since these initial descriptions of "bureaucratic" and "coalitional" drift, respectively, regulatory politics has discovered a new instrument of potential...

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