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Bureaucratic drift


Bureaucratic drift in American political science is a theory that seeks to explain the tendency for bureaucratic agencies to create policy that deviates from the original mandate. The difference between a bureaucracy's enactment of a law and the legislature's intent is called bureaucratic drift. Legislation is produced by elected officials, but is implemented by unelected bureaucrats, who sometimes act under their own preferences or interests. Bureaucratic drift is often treated as a principal–agent problem, with the House, Senate and Presidency acting as principals and bureaucracy acting as the agent. The government seeks to control bureaucratic drift in a number of ways, most notably congressional oversight and procedural controls.

Mathew McCubbins, Roger Noll, and Barry Weingast first defined the theory of bureaucratic drift in 1987. They argued that drift is essentially a principal-agent problem that explores "how—or indeed, whether—elected political officials can reasonably effectively assure that their policy intentions will be carried out." The major tenets of the theory include how bureaucrats can manipulate policy when creating bureaucratic agencies and the argument that delay built into the bureaucracy is a good thing, because delay gives government a chance to perfect a policy over time.

In 1989, Murray Horn and Kenneth Shepsle proposed that coalitional drift, the phenomenon of present legislation being overwritten by the changing views of political coalitions, is a trade-off to bureaucratic drift. The relationship between bureaucratic and coalitional drift is a disputed part of the bureaucratic drift theory.

In 1992, Jonathan Macey hypothesized that the creation of an agency's structure and design is instrumental in preventing bureaucratic drift. Macey speculates that both current interest groups and Congress benefit from the careful structure and design of a bureaucratic agency. The former is pleased by policies that continue to reflect their preferences while the latter is pleased that both bureaucratic and coalitional drift are protected against. Contrary to Horn and Shepsle, Macey argues that coalitional drift and bureaucratic drift aren't necessarily opposing forces, but that the careful construction of an agency's structure and design can mitigate the costs of both types of drift. He also disagrees with McCubbins, Noll and Weingast on the power of delay to reduce bureaucratic drift, because extra time gives future interest groups and a future Congress the opportunity to insert their own preferences into the proposed policy. This is an example of coalitional and bureaucratic drift working counter to each other.


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