24 2: Th eories of Political Control of Bureaucracy
describes functions that are exclusive to the council or the manager, functions
that are shared, and a gap in leadership. When cities fi ll that gap by adapting,
they tend to retain the council-manager form. When they leave a leadership vac-
uum or the manager attempts to fi ll it, more likely abandonment of the council-
manager form will be considered.
It is evident from the study of the council-manager form of city government
that the use of policy and administration as units of analysis does illuminate the
theory of public administration. Further, theories addressing the political control
of bureaucracy can easily be tested by using political and administrative variables.
Th is suggests that, although the simple policy-administration dichotomy is with-
out empirical support, a nuanced conception of policy and politics, on the one
hand, and administration, on the other, does account for or explain variations
among organizations or cities as to the degree of political control of bureaucracy,
as well as some of the character or quality of that control or its absence.
Are Bureaucracies Out of Control?
We turn now to the more complex forms of democratic government and to the
theories that purport to explain or account for the roles and behavior of bureau-
cracy, particularly as those roles and behavior are or are not controlled by elected
offi cials.
One group of theories concerning the control of bureaucracy could be de-
scribed as theories of bureaucratic capture. Th is theory traces primarily to stud-
ies of the federal government, particularly to studies of the regulatory process
and the independent regulatory commissions. In one form of this theory, the in-
dustries regulated or licensed (airlines, railroads, telephones, etc., at the national
level; electric, gas, and other utilities at the state level; and general retail busi-
ness at the local level) come, through time, to heavily infl uence or even to control
their regulators (Huntington 1952). Under these circumstances, the regulators
are sometimes referred to as “having gone native.” Another version of capture
theory is that the bureaucratic process is dominated by a triumvirate of policy ac-
tors: an interest group, a congressional committee charged with the oversight of a
particular agency, and a government agency (Wood and Waterman 1994). Origi-
nally, this was a variant of theories of pluralism, commonly known as “iron trian-
gles” and later as “issue networks” (Heclo 1978). A third version of capture theory
suggests that policy elites control bureaucracies (Selznick 1949). It is assumed,
correctly, that legislatures have passed enabling legislation that created the regu-
latory agencies and through the delegation of rulemaking, and even adjudicatory
powers, have given those bureaucracies wide discretion in regulating entire fi elds
of business, such as transportation or stock markets. Capture theorists argue that
the actual functioning of these agencies was outside of the control of the president
(governor, mayor), and Congress (state legislature, city council). Th erefore, cap-
ture theorists sometimes refer to the connections among the regulated industry,