In search of deregulation: Exploring administrative reform in the American states

Administrative reform has been, and continues to be, a recurring theme in the American public administration literature. Whether at the federal, state, or local level, there never seems to be a shortage of ideas about how to improve the performance of government. One reform approach which has gained considerable attention in recent years is administrative deregulation. Theoretically, deregulation holds that by removing excess rules and regulations, the performance of government (i.e., the efficiency and effectiveness of government) will be enhanced. Owing partly to the newness of this reform approach, there has been little in the way of empirical research on administrative deregulation at any level of government. Recognizing the advantages of America's laboratories of democracy, this research project examines administrative deregulation in the American states. The goals of the research are basically twofold: (1) to create empirical estimates of administrative deregulation in the states for the areas of personnel, procurement, and budgeting, and (2) to test empirical models of the influences on administrative deregulation in the states. The analyses use survey data, collected by the author, from top state executives in each of the three administrative areas. The data are used to create three summated rating scales, one for each administrative area. The scales demonstrate that the states differ greatly in their levels of deregulation both within and across the three administrative areas. The personnel scale and the procurement scale are used as the dependent variables in two separate models. The empirical results show that certain political, regional, and institutional variables directly influence levels of administrative deregulation in the states. The findings provide important insights into the factors that influence administrative reform in the states. More generally, the empirical estimates of administrative deregulation offer a tool for future research: the measures can be utilized as independent variables in analyses that test the impacts of administrative deregulation on the performance of state governments. Such work is needed in order to test the strength of deregulation's theoretical underpinnings.