Political Insulation, Information Exchange, and Interest Group Access to the Bureaucracy Christopher M. Reenock Florida State University Brian J. Gerber West Virginia University ABSTRACT Under political uncertainty, legislative coalitions have incentives to insulate policy from future coalitions. While there is evidence of legislators’ use of agency design to insulate the bureaucracy from elected officials, little is known about the ultimate consequences of such design choices on the policy participation of interest groups. How such design choices affect group access is important because of the centrality of groups in providing both bureaucratic accountability and information for policy development. Accordingly, we examine the con- sequences of the so-called ‘‘insulation game’’ on group access to the bureaucracy. We develop an information exchange theory that portrays the impact of agency design choices on group-reported access as a function of the level of design-induced political insulation and the quality of the information offered by a given group. We test our theory with two original datasets that include design parameters of US state environmental agencies and survey data measuring reported agency access by state-level interest groups. Our results suggest that insulating agencies via design does lead to lower reported access to regulators by interest groups, but only among those groups who supply less valuable information. When legislative coalitions face uncertain political futures, they have an incentive to use agency design (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast [McNollgast] 1987, 1989) to protect their policies from future elected officials (De Figueiredo 2002; De Figueiredo and Vanden Bergh 2004; Moe 1989, 1990). Engaging in this particular use of design, or playing the ‘‘insulation game,’’ may however have unforeseen consequences. Although certain design choices may successfully insulate an agency from interference from elected officials, we know from prior research that they may also shape the opportunities that private interests have to interact with administrative agencies (Balla and Wright 2001; Macey 1992; McNollgast 1987, 1989). Yet, despite the prominence of such work, controversy persists over precisely how and whether such design choices affect interest groups’ activities The authors would like to acknowledge several scholars for their helpful comments and suggestions, including: Cherie Maestas, Gretchen Sunderman, Jeffrey Staton, and the anonymous reviewers for this article. Address correspondence to the author at creenock@fsu.edu. doi:10.1093/jopart/mum021 Advance Access publication on September 10, 2007 ª The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org JPART 18:415–440 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jpart/article/18/3/415/916711 by guest on 26 March 2023