Rachel Augustine Potter (PhD, U-M Political Science, 2014) has received the APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award and the Richard E. Neustadt Book Award (best book on the American presidency) for Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy (University of Chicago Press 2019).
Bending the Rules explores how unelected bureaucrats leverage procedures in order to exercise influence in the policymaking process of the Congress, the president and the courts. The book illuminates our understanding of how government policy decisions are made by public agencies.
Rachel Augustine Potter is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. Her research interests include American political institutions, regulation, public policy, public administration, and the separation of powers.
In January 2020, she testified before the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Her comments (beginning at 9:35) focused on changes in the capacity of the executive branch over time:
