The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928(Princeton Studies in American Politics)

Until now political scientists have devoted little attention to the origins of American bureaucracy and the relationship between bureaucratic and interest group politics. In this pioneering book, Daniel Carpenter contributes to our understanding of institutions by presenting a unified study of bureaucratic autonomy in democratic regimes. He focuses on the emergence of bureaucratic policy innovation in the United States during the Progressive Era, asking why the Post Office Department and the Department of Agriculture became politically independent authors of new policy and why the Interior Department did not. To explain these developments, Carpenter offers a new theory of bureaucratic autonomy grounded in organization theory, rational choice models, and network concepts. According to the author, bureaucracies with unique goals achieve autonomy when their middle-level officials establish reputations among diverse coalitions for effectively providing unique services. These coalitions enable agencies to resist political control and make it costly for politicians to ignore the agencies' ideas.Carpenter assesses his argument through a highly innovative combination of historical narratives, statistical analyses, counterfactuals, and carefully structured policy comparisons. Along the way, he reinterprets the rise of national food and drug regulation, Comstockery and the Progressive anti-vice movement, the emergence of American conservation policy, the ascent of the farm lobby, the creation of postal savings banks and free rural mail delivery, and even the congressional Cannon Revolt of 1910.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xv Introduction 1 One: Entrepreneurship, Networked Legitimacy, and Autonomy 14 Two: The Clerical State: Obstacles to Bureaucratic Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century America 37 Three: The Railway Mail, Comstockery, and the Waning of the Old Postal Regime, 1862-94 65 Four: Organizational Renewal and Policy Innovation in the National Postal System, 1890-1910 94 Five: The Triumph of the Moral Economy: Finance, Parcels, and the Labor Dilemma in the Post Office, 1908-24 144 Six: Science in the Service of Seeds: The USDA, 1862-1900 179 Seven: From Seeds to Science: The USDA as University, 1897-1917 212 Eight: Multiple Networks and the Autonomy of Bureaus: Departures in Food, Pharmaceutical, and Forestry Policy, 1897-1913 255 Nine: Brokerage and Bureaucratic Policymaking: The Cementing of Autonomy at the USDA, 1914-28 290 Ten: Structure, Reputation, and the Bureaucratic Failure of Reclamation Policy, 1902-14 326 Conclusion: The Politics of Bureaucratic Autonomy 353 Notes 369 Archival Sources 459 Index 465

About the Author :
Daniel P. Carpenter is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He has also taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. This book is based upon his dissertation, which won the 1998 Harold Lasswell Award of the American Political Science Association, and includes a chapter that won the 1995 Herbert Kaufman Award of the APSA.

Review :
Winner of the Levine Memorial Book Prize Winner of the Gladys M. Kammerer Award "Carpenter's book is intellectually arresting--weaving quantitative and qualitative empiricism through an impressive array of theoretical propositions toward an attractive theory of bureaucratic autonomy in the administrative state ... [A]dmirably successful in adding to our narrative of the development of the American administrative state."--Anthony Bertelli, Public Administration Review