The Dynamics of Bureaucracy in the US Government

Samuel Workman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma. He has held the position of J. J. 'Jake' Pickle Research Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, and the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, Austin. He is one of the principals within the Center for Applied Social Research and the Center for Risk and Crisis Management, both at the University of Oklahoma. His work has appeared in the Policy Studies Journal and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.

'Workman proposes an important and completely novel perspective on the relations between Congress and the bureaucracy. Based on a newly collected database of every federal regulation since the 1980s, he shows that Congressional committees and federal agencies are engaged in a mutual dance in which new information coming from agencies signals to Congress that developments require more attention or activity, and that the diversity or range in sources of the regulatory activity signal which parts of the issue require congressional intervention. The book is a model of methodology, theory building, and addressing an important issue of great substantive value: how does government set its agenda, and what is the role of the regulatory apparatus of the state in doing so? It will be seen as a major contribution to the literatures on agenda setting, bureaucratic politics, and congressional policy making for years to come.' Frank R. Baumgartner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• 1. Bureaucracy and problem-solving; 2. The dual dynamics of the administrative state; 3. The regulatory process as an attention mechanism; 4. Problem monitoring in the administrative state; 5. Problem prioritization and demand for information; 6. Problem-solving and the supply of information; 7. Information, bureaucracy, and government problem solving; Appendix A. Conceptualization and measurement; Appendix B. Statistical models.