Who’s Whispering in Your Ear? The Influence of Third Parties Over State Agency Decisions

Abstract

This article expands our understanding regarding the level of influence and the strategies used by third parties on the decisions and policies of state agencies. In particular, we seek to explain the ability of three actors—governors, legislators, and interest groups—to shape policy outputs in state agencies. We highlight one of the most straightforward and largely overlooked strategies for third party influence—the use of routine, informal interactions such as phone calls and face-to-face meetings. Using data from the American State Administrators Project (ASAP), we create a new, pooled cross-sectional dataset from 1978 to 1998 to examine third party influence on state agency heads. We confirm that as the interactions between state agencies and third parties increase, so too does the influence of these parties over agency policies and decisions.