gailmard [at] stanford [dot] edu
Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab
Stanford Law School
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Lindsey A. Gailmard
I am a postdoctoral scholar at the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab) at Stanford University.
I study power relations embedded in structures of administrative law. Using quantitative and positive theoretical methods of social science, I show how the formal, textual, and procedural aspects of administrative law structure and channel the power of the state.
My dissertation explores strategic limits of the administrative presidency stemming from political appointees’ dual roles as agents of the president and managers of the bureaucracy. This view of appointee-careerist relations complicates standard notions of presidential control and bureaucratic power, by recognizing that appointees are reliant on presidential support to maintain their position within an administration.
Prior to joining RegLab, I completed a Ph.D. in Social Science at California Institute of Technology, and received a B.A. in Economics and M.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley and an M.P.P. from the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at University of Chicago.
Download my CV here.
Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab
Stanford Law School
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Publications
Gailmard, Lindsey, Ho, Daniel E., and Krass, Mark S. "Congressional Intervention in Agency Adjudication: The Case of Veterans Appeals." Forthcoming, Yale Law Journal.
Gailmard, Lindsey. 2024. “The Politics of Presidential Removals.” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization.
Guha, Neel and Lawrence, Christie and Gailmard, Lindsey A. and Rodolfa, Kit and Surani, Faiz and Bommasani, Rishi and Raji, Inioluwa and Cuéllar, Mariano-Florentino and Honigsberg, Colleen and Liang, Percy and Ho, Daniel E. 2024. “AI Regulation Has Its Own Alignment Problem: The Technical and Institutional Feasibility of Disclosure, Registration, Licensing, and Auditing.” George Washington Law Review 92 (6): 1473-1557.
Gailmard, Lindsey. 2022. "Electoral Accountability and Political Competence." Journal of Theoretical Politics 34 (2): 236-261.
Working Papers
Reputation and Capture R&R at Journal of Politics
Presidents rely on their political appointees to manage the bureaucracy on their behalf. Appointees often know more about their organizations than the president and, therefore, may be better positioned to generate bureaucratic support for the president’s agenda. Yet, bureaucratic cooperation may be easier for appointees to sustain the more policy reflects the views of careerists tasked with implementation. I consider a model in which an appointee dictates a policy that a bureaucrat exerts effort to implement. The president is uncertain of both her appointee’s management skill and the difficulty of the management problem her appointee faces. Instead, the president must infer the appointee’s skill by observing his policy choice and whether implementation was successful. In equilibrium, both talented and weak appointees may give additional policy concessions to bureaucrats to ensure bureaucratic cooperation and improve their reputation with the president. This incentive exists even when the appointee shares the president’s policy preferences. The results highlight fundamental strategic limitations of administrative tools to preserve presidential control over the bureaucracy.
The Persistence and Fragility of Bureaucratic Capacity
with Sean Gailmard
Political manipulation of bureaucratic agencies can undermine their performance. Yet, the dynamic effects of political management on bureaucratic capacity are not well understood. To address this question we develop a formal model that represents bureaucratic output as a team production process, and considers self-selection into bureaucracy by overlapping generations of agents. The model shows that transitory periods of poor management can have a persistent effect on selection into government and, as a result, bureaucratic performance. Further, high capacity bureaucracies are more vulnerable to persistent undermining through bad management—demonstrating the fragility of bureaucratic capacity—whereas medium capacity bureaucracies are insulated from management shocks—demonstrating the persistence of capacity in spite of interference.
In Progress
Hollow Consent: Redefining the Power Balance in Confirmation Bargaining
with Christina Kinane
Separation of powers designates the Senate as the primary check on presidents’ singular preferences for who will manage the executive branch. Yet, when presidents can choose their own acting appointees to fill vacant positions, they unilaterally manipulate the cost of confirmation delay by determining a new status quo. We argue that the president’s strategic selection among different types of acting appointees fundamentally alters the balance of power in confirmation bargaining. This ultimately undermines the Senate’s function to provide advice and consent and alters how the Senate exercises its ostensible veto power. We develop and analyze a new model of confirmation dynamics that explicitly integrates the president’s first-mover advantage and the constraint it creates for the Senate’s leverage over nomination decisions. Our findings offer a new understanding of confirmation decisions and delay that more accurately reflects the full range of the president’s unilateral authority in controlling the administrative state.
Reviewability and Statutory Control of the Bureaucracy
with Daniel E. Ho
Congress uses its legislative power to influence the structure of federal agencies through enactment of statutes. But statutes are not self-executing: agencies may fail to comply with statutory mandates. Understanding to what extent agencies abide by congressionally-imposed structure and process requires nuanced consideration of the enforcement mechanisms available to Congress. Unlike violations of procedural provisions, in practice there may be limited judicial recourse available to Congress for agency violations of, what we term, purely “structural” statutory provisions—such as provisions that prescribe agency organization distinct from public-facing procedures. This means Congress must provide incentives for agency compliance with such provisions. However, we argue that the ex post mechanisms of control available to Congress (e.g., the budgetary process) may not be credible if they are costly for Congress to exercise. In contrast, courts’ dedication to formalism may enable more credible albeit incomplete enforcement of Congress’s statutory mandates provided an agency’s action is reviewable. The formal results provide a mechanism by which judicial review influences agency compliance by demonstrating that ex post budgetary control may not be credible for Congress to exercise, while the empirical results highlight that internal bureaucratic structure does not necessarily follow from statute in practice.
An Experimental Study of Delegation
with Marina Agranov and Alexander Hirsch
The allocation of formal decision-making authority in organizations has a powerful effect on political and economic outcomes. We examine how individuals delegate decision-making authority to a better informed agent in an experimental setting, testing the key theoretical predictions of the canonical Holmström (1984) delegation model in the lab. While this model has been widely applied to study decision-making within firms and bureaucratic organizations, previous experimental investigations provide only limited insight into its applicability as a model of individual behavior. We develop an experimental interface that more closely approximates the information and choice environment in the model. This innovation allows a more faithful implementation of the model in the decision environment facing the subjects and, therefore, a more complete test of the model.