Politics, structure, and public policy: The case of higher education

This article examines whether governance structures facilitate or impede political forces by testing two competing hypotheses concerning the ability of bureaucratic structures to insulate higher education policies from politics. Centralized structures both create autonomy and facilitate access by environmental forces. This study examines the structures of higher education boards to gain a better understanding of how they interact with politics to affect higher education policy. To the extent that variation in governance structures is correlated with bureaucratic autonomy, it should limit the ability of elected officials to influence education policies. The transaction costs of individuals seeking to influence overall agency policy are lowered, however in more centralized organizations. Political actors can focus their attention on a single geographic site rather than multiple sites that are adapting to different sets of institutional arrangements and different local environments. These hypotheses are tested in a 47-state, 8-year analysis.