Bureaucratic Access in National Policy Agenda Setting Process: Participation, dispersion, and centrality

Abstract Drawing insights from past scholarship, this paper offers theoretical expectations and empirical measures to examine federal bureaucrats' access to the congressional pre‐legislation agenda‐setting process on the issue of global warming and climate change (GWCC). Based on an original dataset covering all congressional GWCC hearings and testimonies from 1976 to 2007, we employ both traditional indicators and two new measures to assess three key elements of congressional agenda access—participation, dispersion, and centrality – and further test the hypotheses derived from our conceptual and theoretical arguments. Our analyses provide strong and persistent evidence, revealing that the federal bureaucracy, relative to other types of witness groups (e.g., academia, industry, and non‐profit), was the most frequent, dispersive, and central player in the congressional GWCC agenda‐setting process during the early years when the issue was new and fluid. Our study contributes to the scholarship on bureaucratic access in Congress and offers new theoretical insights and empirical measures to gauge bureaucratic multifaceted strength in the national policy agenda‐setting process.