Doctoral Dissertation Research in Law and Social Science

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Federal bureaucracies operate in an environment of competing forces - political, economic and organizational - at every level from federal to local. This research addresses the question of how and to what extent the enforcement actions of federal bureaucracies respond to the local environment in which enforcement actions take place. Through her doctoral dissertation, under the direction of Dr. Scholz, Ms. Headrick will examine safety enforcement by the Occupational Safety and Health Administrtaion (OSHA). The study extends existing work on enforcement bureaucracies by analyzing the interaction of city politics and federal agency behavior, using detailed local level measures not available at other levels of analysis to map more explicitly the mechanisms linking variables already studied. It analyzes hypotheses from three literatures - implementation, regulation and urban politics - at the city level. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, hypotheses tested reveal how these forces affect the incentives of "street-level" enforcers - OSHA inspectors - that increase or reduce the enforcement level. The project holds substantial promise of advancing our understanding of how bureaucratic actions respond to internal and external pressures. The resulting effects on bureaucratric accountability, and in this case, the process of legal enforcement, also will be elucidated.