Bureaucratic effectiveness and influence in the legislature

An extensive literature explores the correlates of bureaucratic influence in the implementation of public policy. Considerably less work, however, has investigated the conditions under which bureaucratic actors influence legislative outcomes. In this article, we develop the argument that effectiveness should be a key determinant of bureaucratic influence in the legislative process and identify a set of institutional characteristics that may facilitate or constrain this relationship. We test these expectations in an analysis of legislator perceptions of bureaucratic influence over legislative outcomes in the 50 US states. The results suggest that the impact of bureaucratic effectiveness on the influence of the bureaucracy over legislative outcomes is greater in states with legislative term limits, united governments, and fragmented executive branches.