Bureaucratic procedural discretion and institutional policy competition

Traditional accounts of bureaucratic control emphasize the dyadic relationship between regulatory agencies and Congress, ignoring such complicating factors as bureaucratic procedures and administrative law. That is, they ignore the role of the federal courts, and of legal considerations more generally, in constraining bureaucratic behavior. More recent research has attempted to incorporate the Supreme Court into models of bureaucratic behavior, but has provided no empirical evidence that the Court is important. In addition, the recent multi-institutional models continue the literature's inattention to bureaucratic procedures. This study integrates a political understanding of bureaucratic rulemaking and adjudicatory procedures into current models of multi-institutional policy competition, and provides empirical support for the model. Post-WWII procedural history of the Federal Trade Commission is examined as a demonstration that both Congress and the federal courts attempt to shape bureaucratic procedures as one facet of their efforts to further their own policy agendas.