This paper is an attempt to understand the processes by which federal agencies are created. Its major thesis is that a majority of agencies (which also tend to be the largest and most important) were created as a last resort response to large scale socioeconomic-technological discontinuities, labeled “novelties.” The origins of novelties are explored, and a historically based, probabilistic model is developed which permits an observer to make predictions about the politics of agency creation on the basis of novelty characteristics and the interest group activities which ordinarily surround a novelty's occurrence.
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