Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics 253
principals in this relationship—they seek to persuade bureaucracy (the agents) to
follow through on their policy preferences. Key to agency theory is the assump-
tion that principals are interested in compliance and that bureaucracy feels some
obligation to respond to the interests of elected actors. Empirical support for this
argument is fairly extensive. Dan Wood and Richard Waterman (1994) convinc-
ingly demonstrate that bureaucracy is highly responsive to changes in political
environment and direction. Bureaucratic agents do occasionally resist the control
of their political principals, but when this happens, it is as likely to be resistance
in the name of the public interest as it is an attempt to undermine the superior
policy role of principals.
One method that had been gaining traction was the use of formal performance
assessments required by principals of the agents. Th e George W. Bush adminis-
tration developed the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) as a way to force
the bureaucracy to be cognizant of and respond to the requests of elected offi cials.
Other attempts, such as organizational, and even state-level, report cards, have
been or are being used. Such mechanisms clearly inject a high degree of politics
into the issue of democratic accountability. Although PART was discontinued
by the Obama administration, pressure from the public to hold all institutions
accountable (both elected and unelected) will force elected offi cials to continue to
consider such options. What remains in question is whether PART, or any other
assessment tool, improves or impedes the quality of public service provision.
Although these subsequent frameworks have avoided the primary fl aw of the
original politics-administration dichotomy, tradeoff s are involved. It is probably
fair to say that theories of political control of the bureaucracy have not completely
reestablished a clear division between politics and administration, but it is also
accurate to say they have contributed to a much deeper and more realistic un-
derstanding of the symbiotic relationship between these two. By continuing to
unpack administration and politics into distinguishable operations, theories of
political control of the bureaucracy have helped us understand how the two mix
and combine to produce public policy. Th e later evolution of theories of political
control is somewhat less parsimonious and elegant, but they have improved dra-
matically the replicability, descriptive qualities, and predictive capacities of theo-
ries of political control of bureaucracies. As much of this work is highly empirical
(and oft en largely inductive), the empirical warrant of the theories of political
control has to be rated as fairly high.
Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics
Th eories of bureaucratic politics stake their claim to utility on a convincing
demonstration of the intellectual poverty of the politics-administration dichot-
omy. Th is demonstration was something of a demolition project. In rejecting the
politics-administration dichotomy, advocates of theories of bureaucratic politics
were deliberately removing the keystone supporting the intellectual edifi ce of