Clarity or collaboration: Balancing competing aims in bureaucratic design
| Date | 01 January 2018 |
| Published date | 01 January 2018 |
| Author | Christopher Carrigan |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629817737859 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2018, Vol.30(1) 6–44
ÓThe Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629817737859
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Clarity or collaboration:
Balancing competing aims in
bureaucratic design
Christopher Carrigan
George WashingtonUniversity, USA
Abstract
Following the Gulf oil spill and US housing meltdown, policy-makers revamped the associated
administrative infrastructure in an effort to sharpen each agency’s focus, based on the perspective
that asking an organization to fulfill competing missions undermines performance. Using a formal
model, I demonstrate that priority goal ambiguity introduced when an agency balances multiple
roles does have detrimental effects. Yet, assigning competing missions to one organization can be
better than separating them, as the underlying tasks supporting the goals may require coordina-
tion. In fact, it is precisely when ambiguity becomes more debilitating that the importance of
coordination intensifies. Moreover, if the bureau is misinformed about which goals are more val-
ued politically,fostering uncertainty in agencies charged with multiple goals can even be beneficial.
The article thus describes how such organizations function and why these arrangements persist,
demonstrating that structural choices impact behavior even when agencies and overseers agree
on policy objectives.
Keywords
Agency coordination; bureaucratic structure; delegation; goal ambiguity;multiple missions
1. Introduction
Searching for explanations following the April 2010 explosion on a BP-leased drill-
ing rig which caused an oil spill that would deposit almost five million barrels into
the Gulf of Mexico, investigators focused critical attention on the Department of
Corresponding author:
Christopher Carrigan, Trachtenberg School of PublicPolicy and Public Administration, George Washington
University,Media and Public Affairs Building, 805 21st Street NW, WashingtonDC 20052, USA.
Email: ccarrigan@gwu.edu
the Interior’s (Interior) regulator of offshore drilling, the Minerals Management
Service (MMS). One prominent theory connected MMS’s regulatory approach to
its organizational design which combined oversight with offshore leasing and tax
collection duties, prompting Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to declare that
MMS ‘has three distinct and conflicting missions that.must be divided’ (Interior,
2010b). The Obama administration announced MMS’s disbanding roughly a
month after the spill began. Yet, underlying the focus on its competing goals,
MMS’s dissolution also revealed the importance of coordinating the activities sup-
porting those goals. In fact, MMS’s creation in 1982 was an effort to encourage
collaboration among Interior’s oil and gas missions (Carrigan, 2014). It is not sur-
prising then that Secretary Salazar asserted MMS’s successors needed to maintain
‘close program coordination’ to ensure a ‘functioning and effective process’
(Interior, 2010a: 11).
MMS was hardly the only agency under scrutiny at that time. In the aftermath
of the US housing meltdown, critics alleged the agencies charged with oversight
managed other missions which limited their abilities to effectively oversee the asso-
ciated industries. In a hearing of the House Committee on Financial Services one
month before the Gulf explosion, Representative Spencer Bachus (R-Alabama)
asserted, ‘It is worth examining whether the Federal Reserve should conduct mone-
tary policy at the same time it regulates and supervises banks..It is no exaggera-
tion to say the health of our financial system depends on getting this answer right’
(Committee on Financial Services, US House of Representatives, 2010: 2). Still,
like MMS, the Federal Reserve’s design demonstrated a tension between managing
multiple goals and encouraging task coordination. Testifying in support of the
existing structure, then chairman Ben Bernanke explained, ‘Even as the Federal
Reserve’s central banking functions enhance supervisory expertise, its involvement
in supervising banks.significantly improves the Federal Reserve’s ability to effec-
tively carry out its central bank responsibilities’ (Committee on Financial Services,
US House of Representatives, 2010: 8).
Using a formal model studying a politician’s decision to assign two missions to
one or two agencies, I analyze the organizational tradeoff illustrated by these crises
between managing competing goals and encouraging collaboration. Agencies
tasked with multiple goals, which I refer to as multiple-mission agencies, face
uncertainty regarding how to prioritize their activities. This well-documented issue,
termed priority goal ambiguity, can be especially debilitating when the goals con-
flict (Chun and Rainey, 2005). In response, public administration scholars and
practitioners often recommend that such organizations emphasize one goal over
the others to alleviate the confusion that personnel face in navigating competing
objectives (Shalala, 1998; Wilson, 1989). Still, if the agency emphasizes one goal, it
neglects the other, which reduces social welfare and may be the goal political over-
seers more highly value.
Priority goal ambiguity manifests itself in the model through the agency’s uncer-
tainty about the politician’s preferences. Although the politician values achieve-
ment of both goals, any partiality for one over the other is not fully communicated
to the agency, either because she cannot or does not want to do so. This feature
Carrigan 7
introduces goal ambiguity as envisioned by public administration scholars and
makes the analysis the first to incorporate it into a formal model studying bureau-
cratic politics. The agency establishes a belief about which goal the politician values
more and a level of confidence in that belief. In assigning both goals to one agency,
the politician considers not only the possibility that the agency will misread her pre-
ference but also that the agency’s uncertainty over that preference may negatively
affect its operations. No similar problem exists if the politician divides the goals
because each agency faces a single mandate. Ambiguity is therefore an impetus to
separate missions.
Yet, separating missions also has costs. The policy discussions after the crises
show that tasks performed to achieve competing goals might still need to be coordi-
nated. This insight has not been considered in studies of goal ambiguity, perhaps
because tasks are not often distinguished from goals. Still, considering this distinc-
tion places a spotlight on the tension that exists between mitigating ambiguity and
encouraging collaboration. By assigning both missions to one agency, the politician
affords that agency the opportunity to coordinate execution of the tasks supporting
the goals by sharing information and outputs. Coordination is modeled through
the agency’s ability to move resources between missions, a possibility not available
if the goals are separated.
The multiple-mission agency allocates the budget it receives using its belief
about the politician’s preferences and its observation of the surrounding ecologi-
cal, industrial, and social environment. The probability that a goal is attained is
determined by how conducive the environment is to achieving it and the portion
of the budget allocated to it. Although the politician has more information
about her preferences, each agency also holds an informational advantage based
on its unique ability to interpret how the environment will impact its capacity to
achieve its assigned goal or goals. The asymmetry originates in the agency’s
more extensive knowledge about its policy space, consistent with what is typi-
cally assumed in studies of bureaucracy.
I also allow for realizations of environmental conditions to affect the probability
of attaining the goals in similar or dissimilar ways. In so doing, the model captures
variation in the degree of discord between the goals, ranging from congruent,
reflective of a positive correlation in how conditions affect whether each goal is
attained, to conflicted, where the correlation is negative. The framework considers
the possibility that the decision to combine goals may be contingent on how con-
flicted they are, an issue that has been overlooked in formal analyses of administra-
tive design. One of the article’s advances is that it directly models this linkage.
Combining these elements, the research makes four primary contributions. The
first two are general observations about the role organizational design plays in
explaining bureaucratic behavior and performance. The second two are more spe-
cific observations about how the competing effects of goal ambiguity and coordi-
nation impact agencies depending on whether they manage multiple missions or
not.
First, contrasting existing formal studies of related topics, the analysis points to
a large area where combining missions is the best option. A politician’s desire to
8Journal of Theoretical Politics 30(1)
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