This dissertation addresses three questions about administrative rulemaking: • Do comments submitted on proposed rules vary in identifiable ways? • Do these differences directly relate to the likelihood that recommendations will be associated with changes to regulations? • Can these characteristics be incorporated into a model that accurately predicts whether or not suggestions will coincide with changes to administrative rules? Using data collected from the Commonwealth of Virginia's Regulatory Town Hall, I analyze 2,534 comments that address 67 regulations proposed by state agencies during an 11-year period. I find that submissions do differ in meaningful ways. I also find statistically significant evidence that those differences are related to the probability that a requested change coincides with a subsequent modification to a rule. The principal result of this research is a model that predicts with a high degree of accuracy the outcome of participants' recommendations to alter proposed regulations. I also demonstrate the implications of these results and how failure to account for these differences undermines the legitimacy of conclusions that can be drawn from studies of notice-and-comment rulemaking. The primary contribution of this dissertation is methodological, but the empirical evidence presented here also raises questions about the value of citizen participation in notice-and-comment rulemaking in its current form. As a result, it challenges contentions that participation contributes to the democratic legitimacy of bureaucracy, serves as a safeguard against the influences of organized interests, or improves the substantive quality of administrative decisions. / Ph. D.

Thesis advisor: Robert C. Bartlett / Government, today, encapsulates both politics and bureaucracy. Yet if politics and bureaucracy are understood within this context it is hard to conceptualize the nature of each or their effect on one another. In this paper I attempt to separate bureaucracy from politics in order to understand each before considering their effect upon one another. I begin by considering bureaucracy according to its most famous commentator, Max Weber. Since bureaucracy must be understood in relation to the modern state, I include a treatment of the modern state that presumes a beneficial civil service, G.F.W. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. If Hegel shows us a politics dependent upon the bureaucracy and seamlessly reflected in that bureaucracy, we must examine politics anew in a context in which it is neither entangled with nor compromised by bureaucracy. Aristotle provides a definition of politics unencumbered with bureaucratic administration: a seeming alternative to the modern state. But is such activity possible today? Or in the American republic? I conclude with a discussion of these questions using the work of Hannah Arendt and James Q. Wilson. Arendt discusses the worst effects of bureaucratic administration while Wilson suggests that the American constitutional order can withstand the addition of bureaucratic administration. The question that remains is whether politics as described by Aristotle—speech about justice and injustice on the public stage—can exist alongside the American bureaucracy. My initial response to this question is yes and no: political speech in America is still possible, but its character has been altered. The productive form of political speech has become complaint—complaint against the actions of the government, complaint that makes its way to the floors of the House and Senate, and complaint that is registered in the voting box or the courthouse. Complaint, however, is not the whole of political speech, and therefore bureaucracy cannot be wholly compatible with political activity. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

The organizing theme of this dissertation is media and ownership. The first and second chapters explore how media content is influenced by its ownership, using commercial media outlets in the U.S. and government-owned media in China respectively. The third chapter studies how Research and Development efficiency differs across listed firms of various ownership structures. In the first chapter, I explore what determines the media slant towards foreign nations using the 2018-2019 Sino-U.S. trade negotiation as a testing ground. Using an event study design and coverage by local U.S. newspapers, I analyze how stories about China respond to shifts in U.S. policy towards China, and how this media reaction is determined by owners' partisan affinity, controlling for readers' characteristics. I find that local newspapers with Republican-leaning owners increase the intensity of negative coverage following a shift towards hostile trade policies relative to papers of nonpartisan owners, and they decrease this slant following a conciliatory shift; the opposite is true for Democratic-leaning media owners. To address the potential endogeneity of diplomatic events, I select events that induced significant abnormal price fluctuations of trade-war-related financial securities. I further establish a causal effect of owners' preferences by exploiting mergers and acquisitions among national conglomerates as a source of variation in the political orientation of owners. These findings imply a spillover from the domestic policy in forming citizens' sentiment towards other nations: the media, as their lens to view the world, is colored by domestic political polarization. In the second chapter, I study how political competition among provincial officials affects media criticism in China. I collect news reports of local mouthpiece outlets operated by local provincial governments that at least point out the weakness of local governance from 2004 to 2017. By exploiting the semi-randomness of the pairing of the provincial governor and the party sectary, based on an established fact that bureaucrats are likely to be promoted in their third or fourth year (hereafter referred to as the examination period), I show with a DID setting that competition induces media criticism. Specifically, compared with pairs without an overlapped examination period, pairs assigned with an overlapped period 1) observe higher criticism, especially on economic improvement, during the secretary's examination period; 2) show better joint economic performance; 3) demonstrate a positive correlation between media criticism and secretaries' promotion, especially when the GDP growth rate is mediocre. The intuition can be illustrated by a principal-agent model with adverse selection. When individual signals are not observed, the secretary sends a media signal to take more credit for the joint performance. In the third chapter, we empirically investigate how state-owned firms differ from non-state-owned firms in their R&D efficiency. We estimate the economic value of invention patents granted to Chinese publicly listed firms using the stock market's responses to patent issuances, following the methodology proposed in Kogan, Papanikolaou, Seru, and Stoffman (2017). We measure the return of R&D by dividing the future patent value by current R&D expenditure, and find that the state-owned firms' R&D efficiency is higher with very low R&D intensity, and is lower for medium and high R&D intensity. This finding is robust across different specifications, with both non-parametric and parametric models.

Far from the frontlines, the destiny of armies and generals has been considerably influenced by anonymous public servants working long hours behind a desk. On many occasions, these bureaucrats were the actual organizers of victory or the root cause of defeat. Count Pierre-Antoine Bruno Daru (1767-1829), Intendant Général de la Grande Armée, was one such man. The research concerns the critical nature of logistics and military administration in the performance of modern armies. It challenges the conventional view that the military commissariat was primarily responsible for the defeats of the armies of the First French Republic during the Revolutionary Wars. A professional bureaucracy was the response deployed by the French government to cope with the need to enlist, train, arm, equip, feed, shelter, pay, and control ever larger military forces. The solutions designed and applied by Pierre Daru and his colleagues, tested and improved by trial and error, became the foundation of modern military administration and, eventually, a model that was extended to contemporary, multinational corporations. Most accounts of the exploits of the late eighteenth-century French armies are devoted to describing their élan, maneuverability, and operational innovations. Yet, the fundamental distinction between the Revolutionary forces and their predecessors was scale. The gradual emergence of a professional bureaucracy was instrumental in making such an expansion possible.

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The "decision costs" of unanimity are a well known fact of collective decision making and in many instances provide the reason for rejection of such a rule. These costs, however, would not have proved prohibitive had the unanimity rule been applied to decisions regarding reorganization in government. Consolidation as a means of efficiency has been accepted by both the public administration literature and the public administrator alike; scarcely a word has been raised in objection when this means has been proposed to reduce cost. Recently, however, this unanimity has been challenged, notably or perhaps expectedly, by a number of individuals identified with the theory of public choice. These heretics have suggested the perverse relation, increased government spending as a result of consolidation. Their arguments are fashioned on the basis of some solid microeconomic theory and are well suited to the esoteric environment in which they have been presented. The contribution of this thesis will be clearly institutional rather than theoretical. I make no apology for this fact. What is needed before the inertia of a century of consolidation of government sweeps aside the voices of dissent is a presentation and discussion of the actual results of consolidation in light of its stated intent. Specifically the thesis will trace a history of government reorganization at the federal level while at the same time focusing on the continued emphasis placed upon consolidation. Additionally the discussions, events, and relevant characters involved in actual consolidations of government will be examined. The statistical method will allow a comparison of the actual allocation of resources to the consolidated bureau with that which could have been expected had consolidation not occurred. This comparison will result in an evaluation of whether consolidation does or does not achieve economy in government. / Ph. D.

Yes / Public sector managers take much of the responsibility for selecting, commissioning, implementing and realising benefits from information technology (IT) projects. However, e-Government initiatives often suffer from complexity, vision failure, lack of goal clarity and insufficient commitment. These problems may stem from value traditions that are deeply ingrained in managers’ cultural environments but not always in harmony with each other. A first step towards working with value complexity is to understand it; we synthesise a model of value positions for e-Government derived from major traditions in the public administration literature. Four value positions relevant to e-Government together with their IT assumptions are identified; they reflect the ideals of professionalism, efficiency, service and engagement. A qualitative investigation of Danish local authority managers displays both value congruence and value divergence. The interpretive study results in a theoretical model that combines value positions and relationships, and the model’s implications for researchers and practitioners in focusing successful e-Government initiatives are outlined.

Yes / The literature on the imperativeness of government support for firm survival since the onset of COVID-19 is vast, but scholars have scarcely considered the impact of such assistance on managers' time, nor the extent to which support measures induce resilience and export activity. Accordingly, this study assesses the impact of government support on (1) bureaucracy and (2) resilience using data from 535 Moroccan SMEs. It further evaluates the influence of resilience on direct versus indirect exports, and espouses the institutional voids, resource-based and strategy-creation view to explain the associations through a contingency lens. The results demonstrate that (1) government support increases bureaucracy which, (2) surprisingly triggers and enhances resilience. Furthermore, (3) resilience has a positive impact on direct exports but (4) adversely affects indirect exports. Theoretically, the findings acquiesce extant calls for measurement specificity in export performance. Practically, stakeholders' attention is drawn to the value of managers' time well spent.