Policy-Specific Expertise and the Importance of Organizational Leadership in Shared Administrative Governance: Evidence from US Federal Cooperative Agreements

This study analyzes US federal cooperative agreements (CAs) that reflect federal agencies’ willingness to invest in shared administrative governance with third-party organizations. A logic anchored in organizational economics predicts that US federal agency investments to collaborate with other non-federal organizations is positively related to an agency head’s policy-specific expertise, and that this relationship will take on greater importance when collaborating with nonprofits and private firms. These propositions are tested analyzing a novel database of 241,730 US federal CA decisions awarded by 31 federal agencies between 1988 and 2008. The statistical findings reveal support for this logic, especially for larger, more complex CAs with non-governmental organizations. The evidence also reveals that federal agencies’ CA award decisions generally have little, if any, discernible statistical association; other agency level factors such as an agency leader’s managerial skills, agency politicization, agency staff professionalism, and the loyalty of agency heads to appointing presidents (JEL H11, H57, H83, L33, & M59).