Personnel is Policy: Ideology and Political Misalignment in the Rulemaking Process
Combining data on the U.S. federal rulemaking process with personnel and voter registration records, we study the consequences of political alignment between regulators and the President. We show four main results. First, there are only small partisan cycles in the assignment of rules to regulators, and subject-matter expertise matters much more than partisan alignment in the assignment process. Second, rules overseen by misaligned regulators take systematically longer to complete. Third, misaligned regulators produce rules that have lower readability, are more likely to attract public opposition and to be challenged in court. Fourth, political leaders face a trade-off between alignment and expertise: we estimate that assigning rules only to aligned regulators would have lost 36% of the stock of expertise in the U.S. rulemaking process between 1997 and 2023.
Luca Bellodi is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His current research focuses on American political institutions, specifically the interaction between politics, bureaucracy, and populism, and its consequences for the quality of government.In Bellodi’s primary line of research, he studies politicians’ incentives to control the behavior of bureaucratic agencies, lawmakers’ reliance on bureaucratic expertise, and the role of bureaucracy in shaping the political agenda. He introduces innovative measurement strategies that combine natural language processing techniques and machine learning to address novel questions in the study of oversight, rulemaking, and the use of information in the policymaking process.In a related line of research, Bellodi investigates why politicians adopt populist behaviors and examines the consequences of populism for government performance and the quality of bureaucracy.Luca Bellodi holds a PhD in political science from University College London. Before joining Stanford, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Bocconi University in Milan.