By adding entrepreneurship to professional and administrative power (based on expertise), a commissioner can recruit the special interests with a stake in his or her work. At the same time, entrepreneurship is the key to securing some independence for the commissioner from such interests. The proliferation of social programs since the 1960s has generated a number of competing constituencies for most major programs. We maintain that this pattern of multiple, conflicting constituencies gives public administrators better opportunities to be selective in the formation of coalitions and in the balancing of the power of competing claims. Commissioners studied here found that they must simultaneously create support for the interests they represent and harness those interests in working coalitions. Recognizing and using the patterns of coalitions among constituencies is, we maintain, political entrepreneurship. It is also the pragmatic, if unstable, supplement to the commissioner's expertise-based social power.
Social-Norm-based, Legitimate Power
Since he or she is legally commissioned by a collectivity, a commissioner of public goods is vested with legal authority, or legitimate power, as defined by French and Raven and elaborated by R. M. Emerson.21 Such a collectivity, however, seldom acts explicitly. A dominant coalition of powerful groups actually authorizes the commissioner. For almost all commissioners, that dominant coalition includes the legislature, the executive, and, less formally but not less powerfully, the active special-interest groups with a stake in the work of the commission. The dominant coalition may be rigid and stable but more often is quite flexible, changing as focal concerns change. Moore believes that police commissioners usually must make their actions conform to the expectations of the currently dominant coalition of constituencies. Sometimes, however, they propose an action that has wide appeal, thus creating public support that they may use as a base of socially legitimate power to change their organization.
The dominant coalition arranged that the commissioner be legally authorized in the interest of providing some needed public goods and some deserved private goods. The commissioner, by personal and professional commitment, aspires to provide those goods but is dependent on the concerted action of the coalition of constituencies to do so. Therefore, he or she is subject to influence by the joint actions of the ascendant coalition. Thus, the commissioner has a domain-limited legitimate power over members of the collectivity, a power that was derived from, and can be withdrawn by, an often shifting ruling coalition of the collectivity. For that reason, political entrepreneurship in forming and joining coalitions not only supplements expertise but also becomes the means of consolidating and stabilizing one's legal authority.
Reward-based Power
To the extent that the public and its dominant coalitions are dependent on the commissioner for rewards of public goods, they will comply with the commissioner's instructions. In addition, the commissioner can reward with private goods: money, prestige, privileges, and other perks. Some rewarding privileges are allocated to special, eligible clients; some prestige to certain employees of the commission; and some money to those who supply the commission. As long as those clients, employees, and suppliers are obliged to the commissioner for continuing eligibility, employment, and sales, they will conform to the instructions of the commissioner concerning the implementation of her or his policies.
The commissioner's reward power, like any reward power, is effective only as long as the rewards continue and the groups involved depend on the commissioner for the rewards. A limit is set when the rewards become institutionalized and are regarded as a right. Then the rewards no longer serve as a basis of power.
Punishment-based Power
The commissioner, as an officer of the state, has at his or her disposal a particularly important tool-the coercive power that is reserved by law exclusively to the state. Such coercive power is authorized to control felons, the infectiously ill, the mentally disabled, or others whose acts represent a danger to society at large.
Unlike reward power, which makes a relationship more attractive, coercive power makes it more unattractive. Inflicting punishment, even fully justified punishment, induces those who are punished to try to avoid the person who punishes. Further, the public is always uneasy about the exclusive delegation of the coercive power of the state, because there is always the potential for misuse. The public, and its agents in the news media, often perform' 'watchdog" functions to make sure that coercive power is not abused. Moreover, as Lawlor shows in his speech on public health commissioners who must cope with AIDS, the coercive power of the commissioner is often based on statutes that were written long ago and have not been amended as the concepts of freedom and privacy have developed. Generally, the tendency to be cautious about the exercise of coercive power is also justified by the outdatedness of many statutes.
Coercive power is the power to punish and is thus a private harm rather than a private good; watchdogs are supposed to ensure that such harms are distributed only to those who deserve them, according to some social norm of justice. But social norms in general are often vague. The boundaries of acceptable private harms are frequently ambiguous and differ according to the watchdog. Moore shows this ambiguity of the norms of justice quite eloquently in his analyses of "like cases treated alike" by police.
Social-Based Power
The commissioner has many bases of social power, but all of them are narrowly limited in one way or another. Professional expertise, including policy-implementation expertise, is limited by the degree of public respect for the expertise of the profession and by the lack of a sound base in science or doctrine. Additionally, the power of special-interest coalitions requires that expertise be supplemented by entrepreneurship. Authority or legitimate power is limited by its base in the shifting coalitions with a stake in the programs of the commission. Reward power is limited by the changing availability of rewards from sources other than the commissioner and by a tendency toward institutionalization, transforming rewards to rights. Coercive power, the power to punish, is limited by its aversiveness and the watchdog functions of constituents and the news media.
The reward, coercive, and expert powers of a commissioner are also significantly restricted by the distance between them and their first-line subordinates. The "street-level" agents of many commissioners-agents such as prison guards, public health nurses, welfare workers, hospital attendants, and police patrolmen -operate far from the surveillance of the commissioner. They must rely on the respect of such agents for the legitimate power of the commission and on their respect for the standards of their professions-kinds of respect often undermined by the shifting dominant coalitions that must legitimize the comissioner's power and the tenuous bases of professional standards. Paradoxically, commissioners must also rely on the capacity of street-level bureaucrats for adaptive innovations that transcend, and sometimes circumvent, the legitimate and expert power available.
