These books provide important insights into the role that institutions play in shaping policymaking and political life and, particularly, how savvy political actors bend and break the rules of the game in pursuit of their ends. Rather than taking institutions as ironclad restraints on behavior, these books urge us to think about how well-positioned actors can push the boundaries of institutions that seemingly constrain them to achieve their goals, and in doing so, potentially transform the meaning and operations of the institutions themselves.

In Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy, Rachel Potter shines new light on the rulemaking process in the United States. The book demonstrates how bureaucrats navigate the technical and procedure-laden territory of promulgating regulations to advance their interests, and potentially subvert the interests of their political principals. Rather than adopting the view that procedural requirements serve as a means of political control that hem in the policy ambitions of bureaucrats and ensure their responsiveness to elected officials, Potter argues that bureaucrats can use and shape these procedures to their own ends. By recognizing that the implementation of procedures is fundamentally at the discretion of the agents they are meant to control, Potter turns the standard logic of procedures and political control on its head. Rather than serving to enhance the accountability of the administrative state to elected officials, the fact that bureaucrats themselves implement procedures may undermine that goal, at least in some cases, by increasing the costs of political intervention.

Potter’s argument suggests a number of interesting hypotheses about how bureaucrats should structure the rulemaking process under conditions when they are concerned about political oversight. As is often the case when we think about the bureaucracy, the politics is in the details. Potter draws on an extensive and nuanced understanding of the rulemaking process to identify clear junctures at which agency officials can turn their discretion over procedures to their advantage. The theoretical framework suggests that bureaucrats will seek to manipulate the clarity and complexity of the language included in rules, the timing of comment periods, and the time at which rules are finalized to elude the influence of unfavorable political environments.

To assess these arguments, Potter turns to an impressive dataset of nearly 11,000 significant regulatory actions agencies worked on between 1995 and 2014. Over the course of four empirical chapters, Potter illuminates several aspects of the rulemaking process. Several notable findings emerge, which together paint a picture of the degree to which bureaucrats strategically deploy procedures. Together, the findings suggest that, at least at the margins, bureaucrats press their procedural advantages to avoid adverse oversight environments.

First, Potter demonstrates that agencies write significantly longer preambles to rules (i.e., the portions of the rules that lay out the agency’s reasoning and purpose in the regulation) in the face of opposition from Congress, the president, and the courts, when each of these is combined with the opposition of mobilized interest groups. The length of these preambles serves as a signal to potential regulatory opponents that the agency has addressed and considered possible objections. Notably, the same dynamics do not appear to drive the readability of the text, suggesting that bureaucrats are not also writing increasingly inscrutable preambles to confound political oversight. One wonders, however, if there may be ceiling effects in this case. The standard text readability scores adapted by Potter to this context may simply be unsuited to picking up the nuances in readability that present in the specialized texts agencies write.

Potter also demonstrates that agencies respond to unaligned presidents and congressional majorities by manipulating comment periods, albeit in different ways. When presidents are ideologically opposed to agencies but interest groups are not, Potter finds that agencies offer extended comment periods, ostensibly to gin up support for their policy initiatives. With respect to Congress, the findings suggest that opposition to the agency in Congress and among interest groups leads to more comment periods being scheduled during congressional recesses, when it is more difficult for interest groups to mobilize principals against the agency.

The next chapter examines the amount of time that it takes agencies to finalize their rulemakings. Here again, Potter demonstrates that the choices bureaucrats make depend on their political environments, showing convincing evidence of “slow-rolling” and “fast-tracking” in the regulatory process. On the one hand, when principals are likely to be skeptical of agency policies, bureaucrats have incentives to delay their promulgation. On the other hand, when facing supportive principals, agencies will act to finalize their policies more quickly given the favorable political environment. Thus, through yet another means, agencies appear to turn procedural discretion toward achieving their own ends.

The final empirical chapter of the book focuses on the case of the Food and Drug Administration’s menu labeling regulations mandated by the Affordable Care Act. Drawing on interviews with administrative officials as well as contemporaneous reporting, Potter’s adept narrative helps to ground the large-N statistical analyses in previous chapters.

Overall, Potter’s work breaks exciting theoretical and empirical ground and forces readers to reconsider their prior beliefs about how and when procedures can and cannot result in responsiveness to political principals. Political scientists will grapple with and expand on Potter’s arguments in the years to come. First, a renewed focus on the incentives of bureaucrats and their agency (if not autonomy) in the timing of the regulatory process poses interesting challenges to the ways political scientists typically approach questions of political control. For instance, if an agency slow-rolls a regulation waiting for a more favorable principal, its promulgation may appear to be responsive to the new principal’s preferences, but we would typically overlook the non-responsiveness occurring in the years before. Second, this speaks to a broader need for a renewed focus on the motivations and actions of bureaucrats themselves in the regulatory process, in contrast to the top-down approach many studies of political control take. If bureaucrats indeed have the power to shape rulemaking in the way Potter suggests, then the normative implications of the results depend on this. Finally, most of the findings Potter presents suggest the importance of interactions between principals and the broader interest group environment. Future scholars will undoubtedly probe how interest groups (particularly when they are mobilized on both sides of an issue) facilitate and inhibit the procedural politicking Potter illuminates.

While Potter presents a convincing picture of strategic bureaucrats using existing institutions to advance their own interests, in Rule Breaking and Political Imagination, Kenneth Shepsle urges us to think broadly about the institutions that structure political action: where they come from, how they are sustained, and most importantly, how they change. Shepsle guides readers on a tour spanning millennia, providing engaging accounts of episodes of institutional transgressions and the individuals behind them. The narrative relatively seamlessly jumps from King David to Sulla and Caesar to Thomas Brackett Reed to Lyndon Johnson.

Behind these interesting stories lie important lessons for political scientists, particularly those that study political institutions and their impacts on behavior. For example, we should be at least somewhat wary of accounts that portray institutions as fixed and self-enforcing. Instead, the narratives Shepsle weaves focus on the fragility of institutions in some contexts. Through means ranging from blatant transgression to cunning reinterpretations of rules, the political actors portrayed in the book find more and less blunt or artful ways around institutional roadblocks to their political goals.

Shepsle stops short of offering a full-blown theory of rule breaking, but instead offers tantalizing hints at the types of calculations actors might make when deciding whether or not to chart a new course outside the strictures of formal and informal institutions. Perhaps even more exciting for scholars of institutions are the gestures made throughout the book at the links that may exist between instances of rule-breaking and institutional change. At several points in the narrative, one is tempted to see instances of rule-breaking as the harbingers of institutional erosion and recasting.

While students of political institutions in the rational choice framework have at times been accused of oversimplifying political actors, Shepsle’s narrative focuses to a large degree on the entrepreneurs of rule breaking and bending: their complex motivations, their attempts at unwieldy utility calculations in the face of substantial uncertainty, and, perhaps most importantly, their unique insights about how to break free of existing institutional arrangements.

Political scientists reading Shepsle’s book will undoubtedly be prompted to think about institutional change and evolution in new ways. The book raises important questions about the consequences of institutional transgression and reimagining. In particular, when are these episodes simply blips in the history of institutions and when do they facilitate wholesale institutional change? Even more importantly, how can we determine when rule breaking is a cause of institutional decline or when it reflects a process of erosion and rebuilding already in motion?

In sum, both of these books offer exciting new insights into the ways that political actors bend and break long-standing institutions and use them to their advantage. Both contributions will surely inspire new work on these topics. These books have obviously important lessons for political scientists, but I expect that they will find a place on reading lists and syllabi in other disciplines as well, including law, public policy, and public administration.