Political affiliation and deference decisions in cases involving federal administrative agency rulemaking

The federal bureaucracy and courts are handling increasingly large amounts of the nation's business. With the President and Congress being forced to delegate more tasks to the bureaucracy due to time and resource constraints, the courts are increasingly called upon to oversee the bureaucracy, which leads to a uniquely undemocratic situation where unelected judges are deciding cases involving the policymaking decisions of unelected bureaucrats. The current state of administrative law requires judges to give agencies deference in such matters. This dissertation will examine judicial behavior in the context of judicial review of bureaucratic action by trying to understand whether political affiliation influences judicial decisions to grant deference in cases where executive departments exercise their quasi-legislative rulemaking power. It will also consider a number of competing influences such as partisan, legal, institutional and historical factors. The quantitative portion of the work consists of three independent empirical studies that share a common methodology. The first study focuses on a single administrative agency, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and examines how different courts and judges have reacted to it over time. The second study focuses on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and it looks at how the judges on this court have treated different agencies over time. The third study focuses on the Reagan Administration, and it considers how Reagan's various agencies fared before a variety of courts and judges. These three studies are then placed side-by-side to identify possible trends and commonalities among them.