Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1 The Institutional Foundations of Financial Politics in the United States
- Section 1 A Historical Background
- Section 2 Bureaucratic Politics and Finance
- Section 3 The Operation of the Financial Political Economy
- Section 4 Conclusions
- Glossary
- References
- Index
Section 2 - Bureaucratic Politics and Finance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- 1 The Institutional Foundations of Financial Politics in the United States
- Section 1 A Historical Background
- Section 2 Bureaucratic Politics and Finance
- Section 3 The Operation of the Financial Political Economy
- Section 4 Conclusions
- Glossary
- References
- Index
Summary
Bureaucratic Politics and Finance
Chapters 2 and 3 considered the historical background within which major government agencies and financial markets appeared. Although the basic unit of analysis in the policy process is the action of a government as a whole, the U.S. government is not a monolith. It is a conglomerate of loosely allied organizations, each with a life of its own. Actions in the bureaucratic politics paradigm are constrained or biased by the characteristics of the behavior of other large organizations. To explain governmental action in the monetary, fiscal, and regulatory domains of financial politics, the analyst must identify regularized sets of procedures for producing particular classes of actions, or what Allison and Halperin refer to as “action channels.” Therefore, the three chapters in this section break down the main components of the U.S. government that structure, regulate, and supervise the operations of the financial economy – Congress, the presidency and executive branch agencies, and the Federal Reserve System – to see how bureaucratic politics operate within and among them, chiefly in terms of their governing authority, budgets, and personnel.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Money and Banks in the American Political System , pp. 83 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013