A Conceptual Model of the Politics of Place
Diane E. Schmidt, California State University, Chico
Theories about how government organizations work should be able to explain differences between similar organizations as well as why some parts of a single organization work differently. While examining strategies of politicization within similar administrative designs is at the core of much political research on government organizations, most political theories do little to explain why decisions made in single units of an agency, commission, or board vary. In this paper, I argue that the nature and degree of field office responsiveness to clientele depends on its place within the communities’ political structure, congruence between organizational norms and societal expectations, place effects arising from the political context, and level of pluralism within the community.
Introduction
In the 1993 movie, Falling Down, a disenfranchised American, already angry at the system, walks into a fast-food restaurant and orders a hamburger. He is promptly informed that he will not be allowed to order a hamburger because it is not quite time for the lunch shift. At gunpoint, this fellow orders the clerk to serve his hamburger, and he then insists that the hamburger match the one advertised in the promotional picture. He complains bitterly about how the prepared hamburger never looks like the one promised in the advertising.
We have all been there—and it does not seem to matter whether we have ordered a burger or donuts—the product never consistently looks like the advertised picture. What is more, while the ingredients are standard, the product quality varies across place within cities, between states, and across the United States. Yet, corporate advertising sets the standards. When products fail to live up to those standards, consumers are at best disappointed and at worst, stimulated to complain. Consumers prefer variation in the product only when they have initiated the variation (hold the pickles) to meet their individual needs. In other words, they prefer national standards with local exceptions.
Such are the cultural expectations of modern Americans. They expect universalism in the application of global standards when they are the preferred outcome and structured individualism when peculiarized solutions can be skewed to address local preferences. This creates a paradox; while American political culture promotes individualism, the state itself is an expression of political universalism. Such universalism necessarily subordinates the individual to the universal (Brown 1993). While these cultural expectations are at best troublesome for producers of products, they create democratic challenges in the administration of public policy in the American federalist system. The paradoxical tension between universalism and individualism in policy implementation has manifested itself in variation in policy outcomes across space. While the goal of national policy, particularly in regulatory policy, is to set universal standards for conduct and behavior that is immune to place differences, in fact this goal can not be achieved. In this paper, I examine the politics of place as limits on political control that exist as products of continuing features of regional office administration. I argue that the nature and degree of field office responsiveness to clientele depends on its place within the political structure, congruence between organizational norms and societal expectations, place effects arising from the political context, and level of pluralism within the community.
Determinants of Limits to Political Control
The antithesis to political control and accountability is the very element that humanizes policy implementation; that element is institutional discretion. American institutional designs avoid the 'one size fits all' mentality yet reflect a constitutional mandate that benefits exhibit universalism or equality before the law. Through the use of discretion, American governmental design has ultimately created institutions that strengthen the spatial differentiation of political interests (Salisbury 1993).
In public policy implementation, such discretion exemplifies the notion of choice constrained by external factors. Choices often reflect not only decisions concerning process (how to do something) but also policy outcomes (what to do) (Vinzant and Crothers 1998). Like the situation in Falling Down where a customer just wanted a hamburger that looked like the picture, the successful exercise of discretion is constrained by the external community or place factors. Failure to exercise discretion in a way that is commiserate with a field office's place within the political structure, community expectations (norms), the political context, and preferences of important identifiable interests can stimulate or invite political scrutiny.
Politics of Place and Political Structure: While neither localism nor national standards are intended to serve individual needs, through fiscal federalism and regulation, authority has increasingly become centralized, layered, complex, and impersonal. The last vestige of individualism is preserved with the decentralizing effect of field administration (Elazar 1970; 1984; Moe 1987). As an institutional design, field administration is an attempt to strip away the dehumanizing 'one size fits all' approach to public administration while maintaining centralized control over the general application or implementation of policy. Yet, the more diffusion of authority, the more difficult it is to control all units within the institution (White 1989). For example, in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), each state office has the authority to not only react to complaints but to take proactive steps to intervene in what individual staff perceive as problems within the state without reference to what other state offices are doing or how the national office may view such problems (Schmidt and McKinney 1993).
Tension Between Place Norms and Organizational Norms: The internalized values or norms of field employees are personalized through the typical societal socialization processes of their communities. Yet, field employees also have professional values associated with the substantive components of their duties. They also bring a highly personalized understanding of and commitment to organizational values that are imposed as part of the expectations of government service (Fesler 1965, 1983; Kaufman 1956, 1960; Simon 1985; March and Olson 1983; O'Connell 1991). For example, prior to employment, some field examiners in the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) regional offices have labor and industrial relations training; some are trained broadly in other areas. Further, some field attorneys in the regional offices conduct essentially the same case processing investigations that the field examiners do. Thus, in the same office, doing the same type of work, regional offices will have staff that have legal training, industrial relations training, and no prior background in labor relations. The professional values, perspectives, and approach of field attorneys to case resolution can be quite different than those trained in industrial relations or labor relations (Staff 1999).
Such values and perspectives, especially if embedded in organizational traditions, create additional limits to political control even when staffs are faced with competing information. This is because before entering public service, people are pre-conditioned (Hamill and Lodge 1986; Lodge et al. 1985). Within the sphere of authority granted to public servants, these habits filter and shape the way problems are perceived and that, when possible, the problems may be resolved quite parochially and individually (Fesler 1965, 1983). To state it simply, the more decentralized the decision process, the more likely the traditions or norms of decision-making will reflect an affirmation of an administrator's beliefs and values. The routines and rituals of decisions facilitate the use of values and norms in the interpretation of problems (March and Olson 1983). For example, in the delivery of social services, notions about worthiness are often based on a bureaucrat's personal opinion/perception of client needs (Scott 1997).
Further, according to Cruz and Henninsen (2000), those individual decision-makers who belong to the majority are more influenced by normative considerations than information. Conversely, those in the minority tend to rely on more informational influence than on norms. When decision makers' opinions are consistent with the majority within the decision context, such decisions tend to weigh normative considerations over conflicting information. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) handling of the Elian Gonzalez issue late 1999 to early 2000 is an excellent example of the challenges regional offices face when normative considerations compete with compelling facts of a case. On November 25, 1999, a six-year old shipwreck survivor and Cuban national Elian was pulled from the water off the coast of Florida. His mother had perished in the shipwreck. In the following weeks and months the Florida INS office was faced with a making a decision between sending the boy back to Cuba to live with his father or to give the child political asylum. The INS's challenge was to balance the normative considerations between reinforcing family values by sending him back to Cuba or rewarding the child's struggle for survival and granting him asylum. Challenged by a sizable Florida Cuban exile community to grant asylum as well as enduring the glare of congressional, judicial, and public scrutiny, on January 2, 2000 INS Commissioner ordered the boy returned to Cuba (MSNBC 2000). As this case shows, majority and minority values and perspectives have a significant influence on how normative considerations determine the decision process and outcomes.
Finally, policy inheritance (implementing commitments made by predecessors), according to a study by Rose and Davies (1994), is a more important force than choice in implementation. When faced with conflicting information, external pressure from clientele and superiors, field office staffs find it easier to continue processing cases the way they have been processed in the past. Beyond following standard operating procedures, these inherited, unwritten office norms provide a comfortable way to process the routine aspects of policy implementation. For example, when caseloads are high, field administrators are more likely to ignore or dismiss less serious complaints. This has been true for the EPA in states where there are many large repeat offenders; in those states, EPA officials tend to concentrate on the most visible and serious offenders. Likewise, in the NLRB, where caseloads are high, and labor relations are volatile, field administrators dismiss a higher proportion of cases than offices that have small caseloads and weak labor interests (Schmidt and McKinney 1993). While each case is supposed to be handled on its merits, these examples suggest that regional variation in implementation may have more to do with the inherited traditions in implementing policy than with the nature of the problems being resolved.
Political Culture and Traditions: According to Wells and Hamilton (1996), one policy myth in America is that locals always know what is best and work harder for the common folk. The source of this myth may be that bureaucratic decision-makers share in a common political culture associated with being members of their community (Rasinski 1987; Kelly 1994). Exposure to the community's collective memory, diversity, and community norms influences the way in which decision-makers identify, filter, and process information. While studies show that rotation of regional administrators decreased efficiency and effectiveness of service provision, increasing tenure resulted in increasing loyalty. Under these conditions, long-tenured regional directors actually act as ambassadors of their agency within the community (Kaufman 1969).
Moreover, local communities have a collective memory and have identifiable patterns of interests and politics that maintain the collective memory (Salisbury 1993). According to Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993) the state of residence is an important source for measuring attitudinal differences in the general population. Importantly, variations across states include a tendency toward liberal, conservative, populist, or libertarian policy preferences that are particular to regions and/or states (Maddox and Lilie 1984). Further, Elazar (1994) identified regional subcultures in America where the South has a tendency toward traditionalistic attitudes, the Southwest has a tendency toward individualistic attitudes, and the North, the Northwest, and Pacific coast have a tendency toward moralistic attitudes. Finally, Wells and Hamilton (1996), based on findings in cultural geography, identified seven distinct cultures in the United States. These distinct cultures crosscut state lines and are identified by policy preferences and traditions. Included in these cultures are: the industrial Northeast with its historically favorable treatment toward labor unions; the Heartland culture with its historically favorable treatment toward the disadvantaged; the Western culture with its distinctive anti-east, anti-development, and anti-regulation policy preferences; and the Old South with its traditional resistance against intrusions by national government and its persistently hostile race relations.
Field administrators then, exist within identifiable cultures that are differentially supportive (or not) of the policies they administer within their communities. Such value systems and preferences are both sharable and livable; political conflict is rooted in rival political cultures (Ellis 1993). Regardless of national policy goals, field administrators face a clientele with expectations that the policy outcomes, like the fast food hamburger in Falling Down, resemble national standards but also take into consideration local preferences and exceptionalism.
Structure of Clientele and Responsiveness to the Politics of Place: In general, people are more likely to sympathize with groups they identify with or belong to (Conover 1986; Conover and Feldman 1984). Put more simply, people who live among groups tend to identify with those groups and accept those groups' norms. As such, traditional interest group patterns of influence and characteristics of a field office location are important components in determining variation in the decision environment (Lane 1993; Sabatier 1975; Mazanian and Sabatier 1980).
Clientele groups, like the field office staff they pluralize, are a reflection of the political culture that nurtures them. The more institutionalized the clientele is into the political framework, the more likely they are to find sympathy within the political culture, to be a significant influence in the political environment, and to be a critical component of the political context in which field office personnel make their decisions. Where both government and clientele each have their own competencies and interests, policy implementation can be characterized as the result of interactions between them. Importantly, the routinized and frequent interaction between the field administrators and highly organized clientele makes it easier for each set of interests to know the other side's views and expectations (Hart and Kleiboer 1995). Various studies confirm that organized interests have a significant advantage in securing favorable policy outcomes (Lowi 1979; Heclo, 1978; Heinz et al. 1993; Salisbury 1993; Moe 1980).
The institutional structure of the organized interests also provides them resources and opportunities for influence. Some groups are local and independent of national influences and some are federations and have powerful national organizations. While those that are independent can serve as local reference groups, such groups are at a disadvantage when vying for benefits in competition with a large group with national or federated organizations. Large, highly organized federated groups have dual opportunities to influence policy implementation. The local clientele offices may pressure at the field office while the national component of their organization can influence the national administration. For example, the NLRB regional offices are pressured by both large manufacturing companies with plants scattered across the United States as well as by labor unions that have national and local affiliates (Schmidt, 1999). Likewise, in the EPA state offices, the regional staff must interact with the same kind of manufacturing interests as the regional NLRB offices as well as large national conservation groups with local affiliates. So, while the clientele's local group pressures for local results, the national components of these groups can pressure the national office for global results.
What Are the Costs of Variation in Policy?
Variation in policy implementation is not a problem if by policy design, variation is intended. The problem occurs when the policy design was meant to create a standardized response across space and time. In addition, no matter how decentralized the institutional design, field administration is held to the minimum standards of universalism expressed in the First and Fourteenth Amendments. By bringing local disputes to the national level for resolution, the national government strips particularized problems of their local roots and imposes a normalized solution regardless of local application. While all politics is local, all critical solutions to local political problems are national.
Yet, based on piecemeal decisions made at the field level, the sum of decisions made across place can result in a policy outcome that is significantly different from the intent of Congress or the preferences of the president or presidential appointees (Schmidt 1991, 1994b, 1994c). It is a matter of discretion when a decision-maker rules someone deliberately violated the law or just broke the rules because of ignorance or confusion (Scholz 1984). Either way, the result can be justified by standard operating procedures through weighting and filtering of evidence (Kroeger 1975).
Because such piecemeal approaches to policy implementation is so dependent on the political culture, nationally organized groups may set out to deliberately alter policy effects by targeting field offices in sympathetic political cultures for benefits. In this way, organized, federated clientele can control or manipulate policy decisions through controlling when and where decisions affecting them will be decided (Schmidt 1999). For example, highly organized, federated clientele who pressure in the field offices of the NLRB and EPA may shop for the best forum to make a complaint by choosing a regional office that is historically sympathetic or in an area that is historically sympathetic to their positions. By choosing the historically union sympathetic St. Louis, Missouri regional office to file an unfair labor practice complaint, a union like the United AutoWorkers can increase its opportunity for success. As long as its complaint is shared similarly by other unions in other states by manufacturers identical to or in the same industry as the one they are charging against in St. Louis, they can effectively increase the probability that they will not only be taken seriously, but will win their case. Likewise, a group like the Sierra Club can choose an environmentalism friendly state such as Oregon to make its case and establish precedent.
Further, such clientele may actually use the field office as a bargaining chip for resolving highly organized and routinized conflict. Such groups may engage in a type of political brinkmanship where they push field office personnel to the limits of their authority for providing benefits stopping just short of triggering oversight activity from political institutions. Such manipulation of policy objectives creates a challenge to democratic controls on power imbedded in universalistic policies. For example, the clientele may file nuisance complaints in the EPA or NLRB just to create greater visibility for the issues and to coerce compromise from their opposing interests.
What Is To Be Done?
The Civil Service Act of 1883, the 1970 Intergovernmental Relations Act, and the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act became normalizing influences on the implementation of policy (Hoogenboom 1961; Freedman 1988). Over time, legislative and judicial decisions further imposed a set of national norms and expectations on public administration. They also delineated responsibilities in federal service to exhibit merit values of efficiency, effectiveness, and equity beyond those imbedded in those acts.
But, is legislation enough to combat the influence of place? To meet these expectations, administrative systems were increasingly pressured to professionalize the workforce (Ingraham and Rosenbloom 1990; Durant 1995). As such, the necessity of hiring technical and professional staff infuses public service with a set of norms and values that originate outside of the organization but very likely will continue to reflect community values, norms, and group sympathies.
Importantly, regardless of the level of decentralization, and especially when the training of bureaucrats is uniform, decisions tend to be predictable, uniform and conform to standard operating procedures (Kaufman 1960). Whatever the intentions of the legislature in structuring an agency's accountability relationships, the key to understanding the political penetrability of field office decision-making is the level at which staff engage in case filtering (Schmidt 1994a, 1994b, 1994c). Ideally, the more routine the decision, the more responsive the decision-maker is to national standards; the less routine, the more responsive the decision-maker is to other influences (Romzek 1997).
Beyond training, another standardizing influence may occur as a function of Internet and regional office networking. Until the implementation of information sharing technology through web pages and database access through networking, field office administrators often made decisions independently of each other. The more independent, the looser the monitoring controls. But as field office data and decisions become more public and more accessible to other field offices, field staff can access the decision data of other offices for information about how a similar case was processed for a national, federated clientele. Through networking and providing more access to information, it is possible to reduce the opportunities of federated, nationally organized clientele to venue shop. As such, this access may create pressure on the field staff to reduce their reliance on local preferences and culture and to justify their decisions as consistent with those of other regional offices.
For example, the NLRB is installing a new case tracking system (CATS) that connects the regional offices electronically for the first time (Staff 1999). Until CATS, a regional office had little or no information about how cases dealing with similar problems with similar or identical clientele were being handled. Case precedent set by the national board, was supposed to determine how the case should be processed. Yet, variation in case processing was so striking that it triggered congressional investigations (Schmidt 1999). In particular, members of Congress were concerned about recidivism in unfair labor practices. While a company or union may have been punished in one state, they were continuing the same offending practice in other states. CATS will provide information to regional offices about how similar cases have been or are being handled in other regional offices. If used to identify a client's "priors", CATS has the potential to reduce variation in case processing. With CATS, it may be possible to make the policy outcome "look like the picture" more consistently across regional offices.
Conclusion
Despite popular perceptions that policy administration is impersonal, varying implementation of national policy exists at the local and regional level. The policy outcomes of the implementation rarely consistently "look like the picture." Some of the variation, of course, is due to the diversity of problems that occur across regions. Not all locally determined problems fit easily into a standard operating procedures framework. In those cases, field staff must use whatever discretionary authority they have to resolve the problem at the local or regional level.
Yet, forces within the local political culture converge to strip such national policies of their 'one-size-fits all' result. Political culture creates a context in which field staffs engage in balancing interests as well as expectations arising from both culture and environment. The political context, and not the nature of the problem, more likely determines policy variation in implementation because of the level of discretion involved in applying nationalized solutions to localized problems.
But it is how such discretion can be used and manipulated by organized interests that creates the greatest challenge to democratic implementation of policies. The historical patterns and strategies of interest aggregation and promotion influence field decisions. Such influence occurs from staff group identity related to place as well as the ability of federated, organized national groups to venue shop for benefits. Importantly, without access to adequate information about how other regional offices resolved cases related to such groups, field administrators are at a disadvantage to federated clientele. By shopping for forums, organized interests can shape policy implementation to the extent that the aggregate results across time and place do not achieve the national goals originally set by Congress.
The politics of place, then, creates a tension between univeralism and particularism in national policy implementation. While the public expect policy outcomes to "look like the picture," it is clear that variation in policy implementation at the field office level is related to more than diversity or complexity of problem solving. This paper identifies patterns of behavior that determine such variation that are generalizable across place and time and agencies. These patterns of behavior are related to the field office's place in the community, influence of societal norms on decisions, the influence of political context within the jurisdiction of the office, and structure of organized interests within the community.
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