| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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regulatory agencies operate. These general conclusions are not challenged in this study. For the reasons that follow, however, it is argued here that principal-agent models do not provide a general theory of regulatory agency policymaking that can be used to explain the case of FCC cable television regulation.
First, although principal-agent scholars have constructed elegant theoretical models, they have provided (at best) modest empirical evidence to support the proposition that political control strategies actually influence agency decision making.15 Furthermore, the few empirical studies that have been conducted focus almost exclusively on agency enforcement actions rather than on the making of regulations.16 Enforcement actions tend to be routine activities that may be more easily influenced by political control strategies. By contrast, regulations are generally applicable legal provisions made by agencies that possess extensive technical knowledge within their policy domains. Thus, there is reason to hypothesize that the making of regulations will be less pervious to political control than an agency's enforcement actions. Indeed, the few studies that have closely examined the impact of principal-agent relationships on the making of regulations have found meager evidence that political control strategies are successful.17
Second, principal-agent theorists unrealistically assume that principals will employ control strategies in defense of a fixed and well-defined set of political preferences. This assumption is problematic because it does not allow for situations in which principals either do not have clear preferences or do not have the foresight to predict future preferences. Indeed, the case of cable television provides an illustration of how unpredictable political preferences can be. When the Communications Act of 1934 was passed, Congress had no idea that the cable television industry would someday exist. Furthermore, at that time, television