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Democrats wanted to “lock in” the policies of the New Deal against an expected Republican,
anti-New Deal political tide in the late 1940s. Republicans were expected to capture both houses
of Congress in the upcoming midterm election, and Truman was not expected to win re-election
in 1948. McNollgast view procedures as a way of slowing down and preventing policy change.
So, as long as the Democrats controlled both branches of government, stringent administrative
procedures did not serve their interests. However, they did value imposing administrative
constraints on a potential future Republican president with a working Republican majority in
Congress. If McNollgast’s story is generally true, we should observe outgoing presidents in
other countries supporting the passage of APAs in order to lock-in their preferred policies. Yet,
at least in Taiwan, this was not the case. I argue that the Taiwan case exemplifies a more
general explanation for why chief executives support administrative procedural reform.
Theoretically, any executive -- either a president or a cabinet minister -- can have control
problems within his own branch. In Taiwan, the declining electoral performance of the KMT
meant that there was an increased threat of a successful no confidence vote against the KMT
government. So, to shore up his position within the party, President Lee Teng-hui found it
necessary to appoint ministers from a rival faction within the KMT, whose members favored
more reforms than his faction. Consequently, the rival faction ministers confronted entrenched
bureaucrats loyal to Lee, while Lee found himself in conflict with those same ministers, who he
had been forced to appoint. These reformist ministers had an incentive to manage delegation to
Lee’s bureaucracy. At the same time, Lee had an incentive to limit the power of the rival faction
ministers. Administrative procedures designed to open up the bureaucracy to the public could
serve both of these goals.
Specifically, I argue that the KMT reformist ministers wanted to change the party’s
image from one of entrenched corruption and favoritism towards wealthy private interests to
one of a “clean government” party. To do so, it was necessary to rein in the bureaucracy in
order to break the iron triangle-like relationship between bureaucrats, wealthy business
interests and, in some instances, organized crime.
Convention