The American State Administrators Project: A New 50‐State, 50‐Year Data Resource for Scholars

• Published date: 01 May 2021
• Author: Jason Webb Yackee,Susan Webb Yackee
• Date: 01 May 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13334

558 Public Administration Review • May | June 202 1

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 3, pp. 558–563. © 2020 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13334.

Susan Webb Yackee is a professor of

public affairs and political science at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also

serves as the Director of the La Follette

School of Public Affairs. Yackee’s research

focuses on the policymaking process,

public management, and regulation. She

won the 2019 Herbert A. Simon Career

Contribution Award from the Midwest

Public Administration Caucus for her

scholarly contributions.

Email: yackee@wisc.edu

Jason Webb Yackee is a professor of

law at the University of Wisconsin Law

School. His research centers on business

law, international transactions, and

administrative law and politics. Yackee’s

work has been published widely in journals,

such as the

Journal of Politics

and

George

Washington Law Review

. An earlier paper

with Susan Yackee, published in

JPART

, won

a “best paper” award from the Midwest

Political Science Association.

Email: jyackee@wisc.edu

The American State Administrators Project: A New 50-State,

50-Year Data Resource for Scholars

Abstract: We present the American State Administrators Project (ASAP), a decades-long survey of state agency leaders.

This remarkable dataset provides a 50-state chronological portrait of state administrative leaders, what they think,

and what their agencies do. The dataset has traditionally been closely held but is now being shared with the broader

scholarly community for the first time. We use this article to demonstrate the dataset’s potential to advance theory

and knowledge of the modern administrative state through the example of principal-agent theory. As we show, the

ASAP data allow us to reorient scholarship away from an empirical focus on how the president/governor, legislature,

and other political principals try to influence the bureaucracy and toward a fuller appreciation of how bureaucrats

formulate and administer public policy in a political environment. Such a refocusing is critical because it better

recognizes the “agency” held by bureaucratic agents within modern governance.

Evidence for Practice

• This Viewpoint provides an overview of—and makes publicly available—the extensive American State

Administrators Project (ASAP) data. This dataset explores the attitudes, views, and experiences of state

agency leaders in all fifty states from 1964 to 2008.

• The dataset contains over 11,500 survey responses and provides the evidentiary basis to explore numerous

theoretically and practically oriented questions about state administration, including those related to the

evolution of federal-state relations, to the contracting out of government services, and to sources and patterns

of influence over public policy decisions.

• The dataset will be of great interest to scholars and students seeking to expand knowledge regarding how the

on-the-ground experiences of state agency leaders have changed over time.

One of the odder things about many

applications of principal-agent theory to the

public bureaucracy, both at the federal and

the state level, is that agency officials rarely make much

of an appearance. Who they are, what they think, and

what they do all too often get subsumed into abstract

models or are left unmeasured in empirical studies

that emphasize the desires of their political principals.

Professor Deil Wright, an eminent and beloved scholar

who spent most of his career at the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill, had other ideas. Bureaucrats

mattered, and, what is more, they were interesting.

In one of his last articles before his death in 2009,

Professor Wright cheekily nodded to the assumption

that to study state agency decision-making was to be

exiled in “dullsville” (Brudney and Wright2010). For

him, it was anything but dull, and indeed he devoted

his entire professional life to carefully compiling a

remarkable survey-based dataset of state agency leaders

that allows us to trace the evolution of the modern

bureaucracy over time, across agencies, and across all

50 states.

That dataset—the American State Administrator

Project (ASAP)—is the subject of this article. Much

of Professor Wright’s published work using the

ASAP data was co-authored, either with faculty that

he brought into the project or, more frequently,

with graduate students, whom he would invite

to serve as co-authors or to use the ASAP data in

their own research. Professor Wright was especially

generous in using ASAP as a mechanism to mentor

women and international graduate students. Those

students—now accomplished scholars in faculty and

administrative positions across the globe—share his

passion for the empirical study of the bureaucracy,

and they owe their success, in part, to Professor

Wright’s mentorship.

That legacy is an important one, but Professor Wright

hoped that after his death ASAP would continue and

the data would be more widely shared and used. In

accordance with his wishes, we implemented a new

survey in 2018, inspired by ASAP but including

some modifications to reorient the survey toward new

Jason Webb Yackee Susan Webb Yackee

University of Wisconsin Law School University of Wisconsin-Madison

Viewpoint Article

Stephen E. Condrey

andTonya Neaves,

Associate Editors