Institutionalizing Rationality in Regulatory Administration
探讨了通过规则制定、裁决程序和成本收益分析等制度手段来约束行政裁量权、促进理性决策的做法，指出其虽能提升严谨性，但可能忽视政治因素并导致政策偏差。
The administrative process is the medium through which we attempt to legitimate, or at least live with, delegations of policy-making authority to non-elected officials. The institutional forms and procedures agencies use in implementing statutes are intended to promote desired qualities in the exercise of bureaucratic discretion. As such, they serve as a substitute for detailed, substantive policy guidance, which often proves impractical given Congress' lack of time and expertise, the need to maintain administrative flexibility, and the difficulty of building legislative majorities in support of specific proposals. The use of institutional means to structure and confine agency discretion has become especially popular in the area of regulation, where delegated authority has expanded tremendously. Three of the most significant developments in the process of regulatory administration in the past decade and a half have been the emphasis on rule making as a means of implementation, coupled with the use of adjudicatory procedures and cost-benefit analysis to control rule-making decisions. Different as these devices are, their general thrust has been to promote a synoptic, rational approach to the administration of statutory mandates. The pursuit of rationality through such mechanisms is appealing on its face, and indeed may promote rigor and objectivity in agency decision making. As discussed here, however, it may also ignore the political aspects of regulatory administration, and may thus hinder and bias agency policy making in ways which have received relatively little attention.