No abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Brookings Institution This article presents an empirical analysis of the National Labor Relations Board, focusing on the balance the agency strikes between the interests of business and labor. It is oriented by a theoretical framework that, relative to popular models, takes a broader view of the causal structure of regulatory performance-one that simultaneously allows for presidents, congressional committees, the courts, agency staff, constituents, and economic conditions. The empirical results are instructive. All of these factors prove to have significant impacts on NLRB decisions. In addition, the core regulatory actors -Board members, staff, and constituents-are shown to engage in mutually adaptive adjustment: each is responsive to the decisions of each of the others, and their reciprocal relationships impart equilibrating properties to the system as a whole. Thus, the evidence points to a varied set of important determinants and to the dynamic nature of their interconnection. To the extent that thesefindings are at all characteristic of other regulatory agencies, simple popular models of regulation are likely to give anemic explanations, if not highly distorted accounts, of why agencies behave as they do. Government regulation has long been viewed as a controversial and important matter, yet it has not been well studied, at least not in a balanced way. The social science of regulation has done an enthusiastic job of investigating the kinds of technical issues in which economists are most interested: rate setting, cost determination, efficiency, optimality. Far less effort, particularly in the form of quantitative analysis, has been devoted to even the most basic issues of politics and organization. What can we expect of the relationship between regulatory agencies and the groups they are supposed to be regulating? To what extent and toward what ends are these agencies controlled by elected politicians? What are the determinants of agency autonomy, and how is it exercised in the making of economic policy? Central as these questions are to our understanding of regulation, we are in no position to offer satisfactory answers. At this point, the necessary empirical foundation simply is not there.Despite the lack of evidence, or perhaps because of it, theories of regulatory politics abound. The most prominent is the capture

In this article we highlight a formal basis for presidential power that has gone largely unappreciated to this point, but has become so pivotal to presidential leadership and so central to an understanding of presidential power that it virtually defines what is distinctively modern about the modern presidency. This is the president's formal capacity to act unilaterally and thus to make law on his own. Our central purpose is to set out a theory of this aspect of presidential power. We argue that the president's powers of unilateral action are a force in American politics precisely because they are not specified in the Constitution. They derive their strength and resilience from the ambiguity of the contract. We also argue that presidents have incentives to push this ambiguity relentlessly to expand their own powers-and that, for reasons rooted in the nature of their institutions, neither Congress nor the courts are likely to stop them. We are currently in the midst of a research project to collect comprehensive data for testing this theory-data on what presidents have done, as well as on how Congress and the courts have responded. Here we provide a brief history of unilateral action, with special attention to the themes of our theoretical argument. We also make use of some early data to emerge from our project. For now it appears that the theory is well supported by the available evidence. This is a work in progress, however, and more is clearly needed before definitive conclusions can be justified.