50 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics
of an issue and divergent preferences on what should be done based on their ob-
jectives, values, and sense of mission. (3) How are players’ stands aggregated to
yield governmental decisions and actions? Once it has been determined who are
involved in a given issue and what their interests and objectives are, the challenge
is to assess how these actors bargain to protect and advance their preferences.
Th is means determining the relative infl uence of the players. Model III assumes
that bargaining is highly structured and that “action channels” or “rules of the
game” shape the process of decisionmaking and distribute power among players
(Allison and Halperin 1972).
Allison’s model of bureaucratic politics has had a signifi cant impact on how
bureaucracies are studied. It was not just a series of propositions formulated to
explain one study, but rather a workable theory for understanding the policymak-
ing role of bureaucracy. As such, the contribution of Model III to the theoretical
development of public administration scholarship is hard to underestimate. Yet,
although Allison undoubtedly reduced the paucity of theoretical substance in the
fi eld, Model III has had mixed success as a general framework for the study of
bureaucratic politics. Model III is predicated on a series of intuitively appealing
assumptions: Government actions are the product of bargaining among the or-
ganizational components of the executive branch, these actors have their own
parochial interests, and their ability to translate those interests into policy is de-
termined by their role in decisionmaking. Th ese assumptions logically lead to
testable propositions: Policy outcomes will refl ect the parochial interests involved
in the bargaining game, they also will refl ect the relative power of the players
involved in the game, and the power of the players will be determined by the
“action channels,” or regularized processes, used to structure decisionmaking.
Unfortunately, subsequent scholarship has raised doubts about the empirical va-
lidity of these hypotheses and the conceptual structure that supports them (Rosati
1981; Rhodes 1994; Bendor and Hammond 1992).
Politics, Power, and Organization
Ironically, one of the implications of other work on bureaucratic politics is that
Allison’s Model III was, if anything, too limited in scope rather than too am-
bitious. In particular, Allison’s framework left important organizational issues
underdeveloped, and, like the majority of the studies the framework sought to
synthesize, it was almost exclusively focused on the executive branch. As some
scholars were to make clear, bureaucratic politics is not confi ned to bargaining
games within the executive branch; it is a fundamental component of a broad
power structure that includes Congress, the courts, organized interest groups, in-
tergovernmental relationships, and the public at large. Th e nature and context of
this power structure, and the role and relative infl uence of bureaucracies within
it, are heavily dependent upon organizational issues. How bureaucracies are or-
ganized has been persuasively argued to play an important role in determining