⇒ The executive branch carries out and enforces laws. It includes the President, Vice President, the Cabinet, executive departments, independent agencies, and other boards, commissions, and committees.
⇒ President has a few benefits in the legislative process
⇒ President has an organisational advantage in being a single person, so he/she has more power to follow a path that he/she wants to take
⇒ The president also gets a lot of attention from the media
⇒ The president also enjoys a lot of information that the other branches of government doesn’t get e.g. information about government spending and how exactly problems are being tackled
⇒ The president’s power isn’t limitless
⇒ Neustadt argues that the president’s main power is one of persuasion
⇒ The Executive branch – which includes various officials and agencies – is massive, meaning the president cannot reasonably supervise everything that is happening
⇒ Kingdon states that the president is more concerned with agenda setting than developing policy alternatives to address the problems he/she raises on the agenda
⇒ A bureaucracy is a large group of people who are involved in running a government but who are not elected
⇒ Max Weber says bureaucracy’s have the following features:
⇒ People often criticise bureaucratic governments for being very big
⇒ A government agency will handle tasks that are not economically beneficial for the private sector to handle or tasks that we simply demand the government to provide (instead of the private sector)
⇒ If a good involves a free rider problem (a situation where people can benefit from something without paying for it) it is a public good
⇒ Many people complain as they do not know what the bureaucracy does
⇒ Other people complain that bureaucracies are unaccountable – individuals are usually unelected and chosen based on skill rather than party affiliation
⇒ Many political thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries didn’t view the bureaucracy as a policy maker – their belief was that the bureaucracy was distinct from politics and simply did what the other (accountable) branches told them to do
⇒ However, this is not the current mode of thinking
⇒ Nevertheless, achieving proper bureaucratic accountability is difficult without a clearly defined public interest to work towards (and this clearly isn’t the case in a country as big as the USA)
⇒ The level of discretion afforded to the various bureaucratic agencies is not always the same
⇒ How do the agencies exercise their discretion?