ABSTRACT
Control-of-bureaucracy theory is an approach to public administration theory particularly associated with matters of compliance or responsiveness. The significance of control-of-bureaucracy theory is that it provides for the analysis of public administration by making distinctions between political and administrative acts or actions and/or between political and administrative actors. One group of theories concerning the control of bureaucracy could be described as theories of bureaucratic capture. This theory traces primarily to studies of the federal government, particularly to studies of the regulatory process and the independent regulatory commissions. The direction of the political control of bureaucracy was tested in a National Science Foundation-funded study done by Steven Maynard-Moody, Michael Musheno, and Marisa Kelly. This chapter reviews the most popular contemporary theory of political control of bureaucracy: principal-agent theory or, more simply, agency theory. Agency theory is an especially useful way to understand the relationship among time, politics, and bureaucracy.
