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Government agencies service interest groups, advocate policies, provide advice to elected officials, and create and implement public policy. Scholars have advanced theories to explain the role of agencies in American politics, but efforts to test these theories are hampered by the inability to systematically measure agency preferences. We present a method for measuring agency ideology that yields ideal point estimates of individual bureaucrats and agencies that are directly comparable with those of other political actors. These estimates produce insights into the nature of the bureaucratic state and provide traction on a host of questions about American politics. We discuss what these estimates reveal about the political environment of bureaucracy and their potential for testing theories of political institutions. We demonstrate their utility by testing key propositions from Gailmard and Patty's (2007) influential model of political control and endogenous expertise development. F or democratic government to be effective, it must rely on administrative officials to make and implement policy. While the Constitution barely describes an administrative apparatus, the departments and agencies created by Congress and the president play a key role in the politics and policy of the United States. The growth in the size, role, and complexity of government activity has forced elected legislators and presidents to increasingly rely on administrative officials to set policy agendas and make and implement policy decisions. With the increased political role of administrative actors, scholars have raised many important questions about federal executives and their agencies. Do they follow their own views about what policy should be or do they pursue the policy goals of the president, the courts, Congress,

Objective. Does the race of a legislator or does the black population of a district best predict legislative roll-call voting in the interests of African Americans? Due to methodological limitations, no prior study has found that both the race of the legislator and the black district population are significant predictors of congressional roll-call voting. Drawing on post Shaw v. Reno/Miller v. Johnson congressional districts (with greater data variance), I examine the effect of these two racial representation variables on roll-call voting in the 104th-106th Congresses. Methods. Linear regression with random effects is employed in two statistical models. Results. Even when the black district population and party are considered, the presence of an African-American legislator leads to greater substantive representation of black constituents. Conclusion. Districting plans that maximize the election of black legislators and Democrats are the most important for the aggregate enhancement of liberal voting in Congress, while districting plans that maximize black district populations and Democrats are the most important for the aggregate enhancement of civil rights voting records in Congress.

Legislators claim that how they explain their votes matters as much as or more than the roll calls themselves. However, few studies have systematically examined legislators' explanations and citizen attitudes in response to these explanations. We theorize that legislators strategically tailor explanations to constituents in order to compensate for policy choices that are incongruent with constituent preferences, and to reinforce policy choices that are congruent. We conduct a within-subjects field experiment using U.S. senators as subjects to test this hypothesis. We then conduct a between-subjects survey experiment of ordinary people to see how they react to the explanatory strategies used by senators in the field experiment. We find that most senators tailor their explanations to their audiences, and that these tailored explanations are effective at currying support-especially among people who disagree with the legislators' roll-call positions.