Personnel is Policy: Delegation and Political Misalignment in the Rulemaking Process

Luca Bellodi, Massimo Morelli, Jörg Spenkuch, Edoardo Teso, Matia Vannoni and Guo Xu

No 34932, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We combine comprehensive data on the rulemaking activities of the U.S. federal government with individual-level personnel and voter registration records to study delegation and principal-agent frictions in the development of new regulations. We present three main results. First, even important pieces of new regulation are frequently delegated to career bureaucrats who are politically misaligned with the president. Second, rules that are overseen by misaligned regulators take systematically longer to complete, are more verbose, generate more negative feedback from the public, and are more likely to be challenged in court. Third, in assigning regulators to rules, agency leaders often face a sharp trade-off between political alignment and expertise. Agency frictions notwithstanding, they tend to resolve this trade-off in favor of expertise.

JEL-codes: D73 H1 K2 L5 M5 P0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-reg
Note: LE PE POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34932.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Personnel is Policy: Delegation and Political Misalignment in the Rulemaking Process (2026)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34932

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34932
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().