ABSTRACT
Bureaucracies have been frequently criticized for the seeds of their inherent incompetence and numerous cases of dysfunctions. Bureaucracies have also been criticized in terms of behavioral consequences of bureaucratic structures. In some sense, bureaucracies were suggested as a remedy to political nepotism or spoils system that prevailed throughout the nineteenth century in the United States. Bureaucracy itself was the result of creative efforts by human decision makers to augment their otherwise limited information-processing capacity. Herbert Simon elaborates what Chester Barnard assumed about human beings' decision making in an organizational environment. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has been deemed as a creation of a new "bureaucratic" central agency that would enhance information-processing capacity of primarily budget committees and secondarily other legislative committees. Alt and Lowry conducted empirical tests that are useful for investigating whether and how the impact of bureaucratic centralization on information processing and institutional frictions is moderated by partisan configurations.
