Presidents, Regulators and Policy Disagreement
Abstract: Presidents have been selectively reviewing regulatory proposals from executive branch agencies since the Clinton administration. For scholars of the regulatory process, one result of this program is a pattern of "audit rates," or the proportion of an agency's regulatory agenda that is reviewed by the White House. What inferences can be drawn from these audit rates? To shed light on this question, I start with a behavioral model of strategic auditing between a president and a regulatory agency. The model clarifies conditions under which audit rates may reflect policy disagreement between presidents and regulatory agencies. Intuitively, proposals from "adversaries" are audited more frequently than proposals from "allies." Using insights from the model, I statistically estimate the auditing bias presidents have toward individual agencies using data from all executive branch rule-making agencies (regulators) that were active during the Clinton and Bush II administrations. I estimate a partisan bias that changes with the party of the president, as well as a shared bias exhibited by presidents of both parties. I use the estimates of partisan bias to show that the dimension of partisan conflict in regulatory policy-making is shaped by a Republican bias toward auditing health, safety and environmental agencies and a Democratic bias toward auditing agencies with close ties to industry. I also compare my estimates of partisan bias to existing measures of agency ideology and find positive, albeit modest, correlations.
