Synthesis and Pharmacological Evaluation of Novel Anti-Tb Agents and Gsk-3beta Inhibitors

The three essays that comprise this dissertation contribute to our understanding of the politics of the U.S. bureaucracy by analyzing how issue-specific political conflict affects the design of federal agencies and the amount of administrative discretion delegated in law.

The essays modify existing models of bureaucratic delegation and agency design to account for issue conflict and test these models empirically, indicating that issue conflict leads presidents and members of Congress to restrict bureaucratic discretion and establish agencies with designs that insulate policy administration from political influence.

Overall, this dissertation reveals how the explanatory power of delegation and agency-design models is enhanced when one accounts for the levels of conflict that characterize particular issues; shows that, by refocusing attention from inter-branch conflict to issue conflict, a general model of policy insulation can subsume models of delegation and agency design; suggests that the bureaucratic preferences of presidents and members of Congress may be aligned more often than existing research indicates; and, by incorporating issue-specific politics into recent theoretical models, strengthens the link between recent and classic works in political science.