Doctoral Dissertation Research in Law and Social Science

联邦官僚机构在政治、经济和组织各方面相互竞争的环境中运作，从联邦到地方各级都是如此。本研究解决了联邦官僚机构的执法行动如何以及在多大程度上对执法行动发生的地方环境作出反应的问题。在Scholz博士的指导下，通过她的博士论文，Headrick女士将研究职业安全与健康管理局（OSHA）的安全执法。该研究通过分析城市政治和联邦机构行为的相互作用，扩展了现有的执法官僚机构工作，使用了其他分析层面无法获得的详细的地方层面措施，以更明确地描绘出已研究的变量之间的联系机制。本文从城市层面分析了三种文献——实施、规制和城市政治的假设。通过定量和定性分析，假设测试揭示了这些力量如何影响“街头”执行者——职业安全与健康管理局检查员——的激励，从而提高或降低执法水平。该项目有望推动我们对官僚行为如何应对内部和外部压力的理解。还将阐明由此产生的对官僚责任的影响，在这种情况下，对执法过程的影响。

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.