The U.S. bureaucracy routinely issues major public policy decisions that affect Americans’ lives. Government agency leaders make those decisions based on a subjective understanding of their agency’s available policy discretion. Over time, discretion has become a prominent theoretical construct in the bureaucratic politics and public administration literatures, but it is rarely measured directly. In this article, we create a new measure of agency policy discretion. We draw on research suggesting that discretion is derived from the bureaucracy’s key political principals: the elected executive, legislators, and interest groups. We use data from the American State Administrators Project and trigonometry to calculate the discretion area scores for 8,955 state agencies between 1978 and 2018. We then evaluate the measure through a series of construct validation assessments. The article offers an innovative and generalizable way to operationalize discretion that will advance future scholarship in organizational behavior, public administration, and bureaucratic decision-making.

中文翻译：

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美国公共机构政策自由裁量权的新措施

美国官僚机构经常发布影响美国人生活的重大公共政策决定。政府机构领导人根据对其机构可用政策自由裁量权的主观理解做出这些决定。随着时间的推移，自由裁量权已成为官僚政治和公共行政文献中的一个重要理论建构，但很少直接衡量。在本文中，我们创建了一种新的机构政策自由裁量权衡量标准。我们借鉴的研究表明，自由裁量权源自官僚机构的关键政治原则：民选行政人员、立法者和利益集团。我们使用美国州行政管理项目的数据和三角学来计算 1978 年至 2018 年间 8,955 个州机构的自由裁量权区域得分。然后，我们通过一系列构造验证评估来评估该指标。本文提供了一种创新且可推广的方法来实施自由裁量权，这将推动组织行为、公共管理和官僚决策方面的未来学术发展。