WHO CONTROLS THE BUREAUCRACY - PRESIDENTIAL POWER, CONGRESSIONAL DOMINANCE, LEGAL CONSTRAINTS, AND BUREAUCRATIC AUTONOMY IN A MODEL OF MULTIINSTITUTIONAL POLICY-MAKING

In the past 15 years a scholarly debate has developed in the United St ates over the question ''Who controls the bureaucracy?'' Some have arg ued that Congress has a dominant influence on the bureaucracy, some th at the president plays the major role in managing the bureaucracy, and others have emphasized the role of legal constraints on the bureaucra cy, as enforced by the courts. Still others have asserted that the bur eaucracy has a substantial amount of autonomy from the president, Cong ress, and courts. This article presents a formal model of multiinstitu tional policy-making that illuminates several key aspects of this deba te. The model shows that there are conditions under which an agency wi ll have considerable autonomy and conditions under which it will have virtually none. The model also shows that when an agency lacks autonom y, control of the agency usually cannot be attributed to just one inst itution. Finally, the model has some important implications for empiri cal tests of hypotheses about who controls the bureaucracy; among them is the fact that the empirical literature on control of the bureaucra cy is based on a logic that gives a seriously incomplete picture of ho w the bureaucracy is controlled and who controls it.