Understanding and Managing
Public Organizations
Chapter 5
The Impact of Political Power and
Public Policy
Two Views
• Discussion falls into two camps:
• Bureaus and bureaucrats are seen as independent and influential.
• Bureaus and bureaucrats are impotent.
• Both views have some merit. Bureaucratic power is a dynamic
mixture of both conditions.
• Numerous cases showing agencies’ responsiveness to president,
courts, Congress
• Also evidence of “bottom-up” processes with agencies independently
initiating policy
• Proactive behavior of public mangers is a common theme in
leadership literature.
Sources of Political Authority and Influence
• Chief executives
• Legislative bodies
• Courts
• Government agencies
• Other levels of government
• Interest groups
• Policy subsystems ands policy communities
• News media
• Public opinion
• Individual citizens
Sources of Political Authority and Influence of Institutions, Entities, and Actors in the Political System
Chief Executives
•Appointment of agency heads and other officials
•Executive staff and staff offices (for example, budget office)
•Initiating legislation and policy directions
•Vetoing legislation
•Executive orders and directives
Legislative Bodies
•Power of the purse: final approval of the budget
•Authorizing legislation for agency formation and operations
•Approval of executive appointments of officials
•Oversight activities: hearings, investigations
•Authority of legislative committees
•Initiating legislation
Courts
•Review of agency decisions
•Authority to render decisions that strongly influence agency operations
•Direct orders to agencies
Government Agencies
•Oversight and management authority (GAO, OMB, OPM, GSA)
•Competitors
•Allies
•Agencies or government units with joint programs
Sources of Political Authority and Influence of Institutions, Entities, and Actors in the Political System
Other Levels of Government
• “Higher” and “lower” levels
• Intergovernmental agreements and districts
Interest Groups
• Client groups
• Constituency groups
• Professional associations
Policy Subsystems and Policy Communities
• Issue networks
• Inter-organizational policy networks
News Media
• Constitutional protections of freedom of the press
• Open meetings laws, Sunshine laws
General Public Opinion
• Providing (or refusing to provide) popular support
Individual Citizens
• Requests for services, complaints, other contacts
Public Organizations and the Public
• Public managers are influenced by public
opinion, including the public’s.
• General attitude about government
• Attitudes toward specific policies
Public Opinion and Mass Publics
• Public organizations need support from
– Mass publics: broad diffuse populations
– Attentive publics: more organized groups that are interested
in specific agencies
• The public manager’s concern is to maintain enough
authority and discretion to meet organizational goals.
• Bureaucratic power is essential to the fundamental
organizational process of gaining financial resources,
grants, and other resources from the environment.
Ambivalences and Paradoxes in
Public Opinion
• The public expresses negative attitudes and
ambivalence toward government but at the
same time can have high praise for specific
agencies and programs.
Public Opinion, Agencies, Policies
and Officials
• The general level of public support for a
particular agency’s programs affects the
agency’s ability to maintain a base of political
support.
• Certain agencies hold a more central place
than others in the country’s values.
Public Opinion
• General level of support affects agency’s ability to
maintain base of political support.
– Praise for NY fire fighters after 9/11
– Periods of antigovernment sentiment often prompt
reforms. New institutions and structures can upset the
organization and present numerous challenges.
– Changes might include
• New lines of authority
• New reporting requirements
Public Opinion
• It’s often difficult to gauge what the public really wants.
• Public regards some agencies as more important than others
(e.g. police, defense).
• Public sentiment can help or hinder public management.
• Hargrove and Glidewell (1990) propose an agency
classification in relation to public opinion.
• How does the public perceive the agency’s clientele?
• Is agency respected?
• How important is the agency?
Media Power: Obvious and
Mysterious
• Social media platforms such as Facebook and
Twitter have changed the political landscape.
• Politicians, agencies, and citizens now rely on
social media for messaging.
• Social media also has a downside
– Information distortion
– Biases
Media Power: Obvious and
Mysterious
• Close media scrutiny of government plays an
indispensable role in governance, but news
coverage can tend to focus more on the
negative than the positive, distorting citizens’
views of government
• Recent surveys show that opinions about
news coverage are based in part on
partisanship.
News Media
• Media attention varies by administration and agency.
• Media attention can shift unpredictably.
• Media tends to take an adversarial stance.
• Bad press can damage budgets, programs, and careers.
• Agencies value good coverage and spend a least five hours
per week on matters pertaining to media (Graber, 2003).
• Media serves as a watchdog, reporting government waste
and abuses.
Guidelines for Managing Relations with the News
Media
Experts on managing relations between government agencies
and the news media propose the following:
• Understand the perspective of the media: their skepticism,
their need for information and interesting stories, their time
pressures.
•Organize media relations carefully: spend time and resources on
them and link them with agency operations.
•Get out readable press releases providing good news about the
agency; be patient if the media respond slowly.
Source: Adapted from Cohen and Eimicke (1995), Chase and Reveal (1983), and Garnett
(1992).
Guidelines for Managing Relations with the
News Media
The Community Relations Office of the City of Claremont, California,
published the following guidelines for managing relations with reporters:
•
Prepare an agenda on each subject the media may be interested in.
Include a list of three to five points you want to sell to the reporter.
•
Write or verbally deliver quotable quotes of ten words or less.
•
Listen carefully to the question. The reporter may have made
incorrect assumptions, and you will need to give clearer
background information before answering the question.
•
Avoid an argument with the reporter.
Source: Adapted from Larkin (1992).
Guidelines for Managing Relations with the
News Media
•Respond to bad news and embarrassing incidents rapidly,
with clear statements of the agency’s side of the story.
•Seek corrections of inaccurate reporting.
•Use the media to help boost the agency’s image,
implement programs, and communicate with employees.
•To carry all this off effectively, make sure that the agency
performs well and be honest.
Source: Adapted from Cohen and Eimicke (1995), Chase and Reveal (1983), and Garnett
(1992).
Guidelines for Managing Relations with the
News Media
•
If interrupted in mid-thought, proceed with your original answer before
answering the next question.
•
Challenge any effort to put words into your mouth.
•
Don’t just answer the question; use the question as a springboard to sell
your agenda.
•
If you do not know the answer, say so. Do not speculate.
•
If you cannot divulge information, state why in a matter-of-fact way.
•
Be positive, not defensive.
•
Always tell the truth.
Interest Groups, Clients, and
Constituencies
• Support of organized groups is essential to the well-being
of agency.
• Role of interest groups is controversial.
• Some criticisms:
– There is a danger that special interest politics will further
fragment the system, complicating communication and
coordination.
– System favors some powerful private interests over public
interest.
– Agency can become “captive.”
– Revolving door
Interest Groups, Clients, and
Constituencies
• Support from constituent groups can
• Bolster and legitimize agency work
• Defend agency against budget cuts
• Provide agency with important information, expert reports
• Provide competition between interests to give rise to
various viewpoints
•
Legislative Bodies: Formal
Authority
Formal legal authority over agency comes in many forms. A few examples:
–
–
–
–
•
Power of the purse
Legislation
Oversight
Committees
Legislative bodies have substantial authority over agencies.
–
–
–
–
Enabling statutes detail agency authority but can be amended.
Statutory authority can be vague or specific.
Budgets
Oversight, including hearings, reports, investigations
•
Formal authority always operates in a political context.
•
Formal authority can weaken or bolster agency.
Legislative Bodies: Informal
Influence
• Legislative influences can be relatively informal
as well, rather than codified into law.
• Legislators call administrators to press for
information or actions.
• Exerting influence to hire political friends
• Exerting influence to fire political foes
Limits on Legislative Power
• Agencies are typically the experts.
• Implementation is a source of power.
• Close scrutiny over agency often has minimal
political payoff.
– Could jeopardize relationships
– Eliminate potential sources of favors for constituents
Chief Executives
• Rivals legislative branch for strongest influence
• Chief executives presumably have the greatest formal
power over bureaucracies in their jurisdictions.
• Influence powers are complex and dynamic.
• Methods of influence:
– Appointments of agency heads
– Budgeting authority
– Executive branch proposes initial budget, although legislature
approval is necessary.
– Policy initiatives and executive orders
Courts
• Some experts claim courts exert powerful controls
over bureaucracy, and others see them as
ineffectual.
• Courts confine agency to statutory authority but
under the right circumstances can wield immense
authority.
• Courts require agency to follow due process in
rulemaking.
Other Government Agencies as Overseers,
Allies and Competitors
• Relationship of bureaucracy to other bureaucracies and
different levels of government can be complex.
• Interdependencies require cooperation.
• Grants sometimes require coordination between agencies.
• Federal system fragments authority.
• Agencies sometimes compete for resources and control over
programs.
Public Managers’ Perceptions of
the Political Environment
• Some studies indicate that state agency
managers see their legislatures as the most
influential, with the governor coming second.
• Local managers see the chief executive—the
mayor—as the most influential actor.
• State and local agency managers rate interest
groups as much less influential than
legislatures and chief executives but often see
them as valuable contributors to decisionmaking.
Public Managers’ Perceptions of
the Political Environment
• Three conceptions of politics that emerge in
state agency executives’ descriptions of their
political activities (Olshfski,1990):
–Political astuteness
–Political activities
–Electoral politics
The Public Policy Process
• Many arenas, actors, levels. and instruments
• Policy subsystems
Some Labels for Policy Actors
• Iron Triangle
– Old name to describe relationship among bureaucracy, congressional
committees, and interest groups.
– Relatively stable
– Entry into the triangle is rare.
• Issue Network
– Businesses, organizations, bureaucracies, individuals, legislative
committees, and subcommittees all have interests in policy. All
attempt to influence the development and execution of public policy.
• Barriers to entering the network are rather low.
• Those actively involved in the network at any one time will fluctuate, and
levels of activity will fluctuate.
Iron Triangle
Congress
Low regulation
Can lobby for agency support
The Agenda-Setting Process and
Garbage Can
• The garbage can model depicts decisionmaking in organizations as being much less
systematic and rational than is commonly
supposed.
– People are not sure about their preferences or about how
their organization works
– Solutions can chase problems.
– Choice opportunities are like garbage cans in which
problems, solutions, and participants come together in a
jumbled fashion.
Kingdon’s Streams Metaphor
Problem Stream
Window of
Opportunity
Policy Stream
Political Stream
Time
Kingdon’s Streams Metaphor
• An adaptation of the garbage can model
• The streams:
– The state of politics and public opinion (politics stream)
– The potential solutions to a problem (policy stream)
– Attributes of problems and the attention to them (problem
stream)
Kingdon’s Streams Metaphor
• Streams are parallel and somewhat independent of
each other.
• Policy entrepreneurs try to join the streams in a
window of opportunity.
• Window of opportunity: the possibility of policy
change
Kingdon’s Agendas, Alternatives, and
Public Policies: Basic Theory
• Three separate and independent streams come
together in evolutionary manner.
• Windows of opportunity
• Highly fluid interactions of streams:
– Coupling of problems and policies
– The role of entrepreneurs
Networks and Collaboration in Public
Management and the Policy Process
• Networks are “structures of interdependence
involving multiple organizations or parts thereof,
where one unit is not merely the formal subordinate
of the others in some larger hierarchical
arrangement” (O’Toole).
– Atypical chains of command and hierarchical authority
– The lines of accountability and authority are loosened.
– Management requires more reliance on trust and
collaboration.
The Nature of Networks
• A real measure of effectiveness should not be
focused on any individual organization.
• A network will most likely be effective when a
core agency integrates the network, when the
government’s mechanisms for fiscal control
are direct and not fragmented, when
resources are plentiful, and when the network
is stable (from Milward and Provan study).
The Nature of Networks
• Network effectiveness is defined as the attainment
of positive network-level outcomes that individual
organizational participants cannot achieve by acting
independently (Provan and Kenis, 2008) .
• Leadership Networking and Organizational
Effectiveness
– Research shows positive relations between networking
behaviors and proactive management, organizational
performance, management tenure, time in a given
network, and gains for a given organization.
Negative Networks
• Networks formed to tackle “wicked problems.”
• Some factors lead the networked actors to
become dependent on each other to solve
policy problems through joint action.
– Cognitive uncertainty
– Strategic uncertainty
– Institutional uncertainty
Collaboration in Public
Management
• Multiple Definitions
• Page’s (2003) five principles:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Agreeing to work together
Planning
Assessing progress
Improving performance
Allocating and mobilizing resources
Collaboration in Public
Management
• Multiple Definitions
– Thomson, Perry, and Miller (2009): a process in which
autonomous or semi-autonomous actors interact
through formal and informal negotiation, jointly
creating rules and structures governing their
relationships and ways to act or decide on issues that
brought them together; it is a process involving
shared norms and mutually beneficial interactions