American Politics Seminar

Much of what the federal government does today is carried out by people the public rarely sees. While debates focus on bureaucrats and political appointees, agencies increasingly rely on a vast contractor workforce to perform functions ranging from tech support to policy analysis to regulatory drafting services. This quiet transformation has altered how the government functions while simultaneously preserving the public-facing image of a bureaucracy run by civil servants.. The federal government does not keep reliable data on how many contractors it employs, but many estimates suggest that contractors outnumber career bureaucrats.

In Going Private, Rachel Augustine Potter explains how this shift reshapes the everyday operation of the administrative state and coalesces power within the presidency. Easily hired and easily fired, contractors have strong incentives to please their clients, making them malleable to the president’s will. Presidents from both parties have leveraged these features and learned to rely on contractors to advance political priorities, bypass uncooperative bureaucrats, and gain increased control over agency work. 

Drawing on new data and interviews, Going Private argues that outsourcing is not merely an administrative convenience. Rather, it is a defining feature of contemporary governance—one that complicates accountability, blurs the boundaries of the administrative state, and alters the exercise of presidential power.

When the Supreme Court strikes down an act of Congress, normative questions arise about the proper role of life-tenured, unelected judges in a democracy. Similar questions arise when lower courts strike down congressional statutes, but political science research has given considerably less attention to these decisions. Using a novel dataset of Courts of Appeals invalidations of federal legislation from 1979 to 2019, I find that any given law is more likely to be struck down at the circuit court level than at the Supreme Court level. Furthermore, most Supreme Court invalidations were preceded by an invalidation at the circuit level, and circuit court behavior strongly shapes the Supreme Court’s certiorari decisions. Thus, when theorizing about the Supreme Court’s treatment of congressional legislation, we must take into account the prior behavior of the Courts of Appeals. So doing, we gain a broader understanding of the relationship between the courts and Congress. 

Interest groups today have deviated far from the Framers' expectations of them as factional brokers of fluid societal coalitions. More surprisingly, they have also become something other than the parochial, corrupting special interests that observers of American politics have long critiqued. We argue that many interest groups have evolved into something less parochial and more programmatic and, distinctively, more partisan. To examine this evolution's timing, extent, and consequences, we analyze the largest dataset ever compiled of interest groups' publicly observable positions on congressional legislation, covering virtually every issue area from the mid-1970s to the present. These data illuminate how the onset of modern party competition has encouraged groups to align with parties, taking more extreme positions on bills outside their core issue interests but that serve party goals. When groups take sides, they sclerose once-fluid lobbying coalitions into hardened recurring sides, distort the parties' understanding of the electorate, and paradoxically weaken their own influence over policy outcomes even when their preferred party is in power. American democracy suffers---as do the groups themselves---when interests are no longer special.