"The authors provide one of the first detailed inquiries into the records of Bill Clinton and the Republican-led legislature, exploring the degree to which the regulatory process has been influenced by presidential partisanship, ideological shifts in Congress, and other forces both within and external to the government bureaucracy. Noting the potential impact of globalization and accelerating technological change, they assess the value that current models drawn from agency theory, subsystems theory, and bureaucratic politics have in explaining recent policy transitions and consider how theories about regulatory policy can be made more useful for analyzing future trends."--BOOK JACKET.