Essays on Regulation and Bureaucracy in American Politics

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore various aspects of regulation and bureaucracy in the context of American Politics. In the first chapter, I study the costs of a federated government structure in food safety by running a quasi-natural experiment. I take the extent to which a U.S. metro area straddles state lines as a quasi-randomly assigned variable, and I examine its influence on foodborne illness outbreak length. I find that the control of chemical outbreaks uniquely suffers from the presence of state borders, and I attribute this to their brevity. I also build evidence that the result is not spurious by examining the influence of port activity, partisan policy preferences, partisan strife, and partisan trust in government. In the second chapter, I argue that the regulation of nuclear energy is fundamentally multidimensional; and I develop a model to demonstrate the consequences of that dimensionality. The model construes regulatory policy as being a result of negotiation between a unitary government and a monopolistic industry with policy consisting of a price and risk level for nuclear energy and with the parties generally disagreeing with one another about the relative importance of these dimensions. Most importantly, I find that the primary dimension of policy change shifts as policy moves between the government's and industry's most preferred outcomes. I also find that the primary dimension of policy change indicates policy's relative proximity to these outcomes. In the final chapter, I illustrate the model's dynamics in the context of nuclear energy in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century by leveraging the exogenous price and risk shocks provided by the oil crises of the 1970s and the near-miss disaster at Three Mile Island. Within the model's framework, I interpret these shocks' consequences for Vogtle and Shoreham—two emblematic power plants—as well as nationwide through both a descriptive analysis and a survival analysis of plant construction projects.