Bureaucratic Ambition: Careers, Motives, and the Innovative Administrator

3. A Theory of Bureaucratic Ambition: Why Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship Happens

chapter three A Theory of Bureaucratic Ambition Why Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship Happens (or Doesn’t) How many people can play this role, take the risks that being a leader entails, when they have families to support, children to put through college, mortgages to pay? How many people are willing to play this role when every aspect of your professional and private life can become the stu√ of front-page stories, editorials, and columns such as yours? The best people, the people we want running our agencies (or should want doing this job) have options and they’re exercising them. They have good skills, are eminently employable, they can go elsewhere, and they have. a recently fired agency executive in a letter to the editor of a city newspaper Despite numerous anecdotal accounts and case studies, we know little about why some bureaucrats emerge as policy entrepreneurs while others do not. Greenport’s two police chiefs, Calvin Jensen and his successor Jerry Cook, approached the same job with very di√erent decisions: Jensen was entrepreneurial and Cook deferential, each in the extreme. The concept of a policy entrepreneur is a useful component of a theory of bureaucratic politics since it underscores the role of purposive, individual behavior in explaining policy innovation. But ‘‘bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship’’ is not a very satisfying explanation for innovation if the label is simply applied descriptively in post hoc fashion. It is neither profound nor useful to point out that some bureaucrats are bold, even rash, innovators if we can say nothing about what makes them entrepreneurial when others are not. In this chapter, I lay out a theory of bureaucratic ambition that explains how administrators’ motives and career opportunities combine to drive (or to not drive) policy entrepreneurship. Here bureaucrats are cast as heterogeneously motivated individuals facing varying career opportunities. I argue 60 Bureaucratic Ambition that bureaucrats’ motives and career opportunities lead them to pursue more or less professionally innovative policies more or less vigorously. Bureaucratic Policy Entrepreneurship By definition, bureaucratic policy entrepreneurs are individuals who invest time and energy pursuant to policy innovation by connecting latent demand for public policies with a government supplier, just as commercial entrepreneurs do (Kingdon 1984; Schneider, Teske, and Mintrom 1995; Roberts 2005). ‘‘By implication,’’ writes Paul Manna (2006) in his book on education policy, ‘‘entrepreneurs are not mere bystanders but advocates who fight to push their ideas onto the agenda.’’ (28). Policy entrepreneurship is a useful component of a theory of bureaucratic politics because it underscores the important role of purposive, individual behavior in explaining policy change. But in order for bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship to be a useful theory of policy change and not simply a post hoc description, we must understand why bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship happens. My theory of bureaucratic ambition aims to do just that. When stepping into the political arena, a public administrator must make two related decisions: (1) which innovations (if any) to pursue; and (2) how hard (if at all) she should try to change policy. The theory developed here addresses both of these decisions. Professional Innovation Not all policy change is equal. Which innovations do bureaucrats choose to pursue? The first phenomenon of interest here is the professional innovations initiated by an administrator. In using this somewhat awkward phrase, I seek to link the concepts of innovation and professionalism. Innovation means the introduction of a new policy to an agency.∞ Professional innovation means the import of policy ideas from the broader profession into an organization. It is important to bear in mind that innovation is di√erent from invention: the former is the process of introduction, while the latter is the process of creation. All inventions are innovations, but most innovations are not inventions . The phenomenon of interest in this study really is the di√usion of policies across agencies, rather than policy conception. A government policy or program may be conceived and first deployed anywhere, but when an agency head introduces to his agency a policy that he learned about through A Theory of Bureaucratic Ambition 61 professional training, conferences, or journals, he is introducing a policy that is new to his organization, and therefore innovating. But defined as simply ‘‘newness,’’ innovation is a rather blunt theoretical instrument: if an innovation is simply a new policy, a policy is either innovative or noninnovative. Such a binary definition of innovation implies that any policy change, however paltry or innocuous...