| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Furthermore, principals may hold conflicting institutional design preferences, necessitating compromise among members of the enacting coalition. Thus, legislators and favored interest groups might prefer an organizational design that partially insulates the agency from the short-term agendas of chief executives (i.e., independent commission structure), but the need to engage in political compromise may force them to accept an organizational design that does not serve their long-term interests in maintaining political control (i.e., traditional executive agency structure).8
Nevertheless, even if legislators and interest groups fail to favorably structure statutory authority and organizational designs, they may still be able to exert ex-ante political control through administrative procedures. In a highly influential article, McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast argued that administrative procedures facilitate political control by mitigating informational disadvantages between principals and agents and by enfranchising important constituencies. General procedural frameworks, like the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) of 1946, reduce information disparities by forcing agencies to undertake decision making in a very public atmosphere. Principals may also stack the deck in favor of powerful groups by including burden-of-proof standards, judicial review limitations, and other types of specialized procedures in an agency's enabling legislation.9
Administrative procedures also carry the benefit of providing principals with the information necessary to successfully employ ex-post control strategies—techniques principals use to monitor and influence agency actions long after design decisions have been made. For instance, legislative oversight is one major type of ex-post control that has been studied extensively by principal-agent scholars. McCubbins and Schwartz contended that legislative oversight exists in two varieties: “police patrols” and “fire alarms.” When legislators engage in police-patrol oversight, they