A new measure of US public agency policy discretion.

This article focuses on developing a new, perception-based measure of agency policy discretion within the U.S. bureaucracy, defined as the area in which state agencies can make major policy decisions independently of influence from their key political principals: elected executives, legislators, and interest groups. Using data from the American State Administrators Project (ASAP) spanning 1978 to 2018, the authors calculate "Discretion Scores" for 8,955 state agencies by applying trigonometric methods to survey responses about perceived influence from these principals. Validation analyses confirm that the measure aligns with established theoretical expectations, showing higher discretion for agencies with popularly elected leaders or appointment methods more removed from political control, and lower discretion for agencies in specialized policy domains subject to greater interest group influence. The measure offers a flexible tool for future research across multiple disciplines and levels of analysis, with the data publicly available for scholarly use.