There are two key organizational dimensions to bureaucratic politics theory. The first deals with behavior. The primary goal here is to explain why bureaucrats and bureaucracies do what they do. The general presumption is that bureaucracies pursue important public missions and make numerous policy decisions, yet have only vague guidance from statutes. If legislatures, the institutions formally responsible for the goals of public agencies, only partially account for what bureaucracies do and why they do it, what explains the rest? The second deals with institutional structure and the distribution of power. The primary goal here is to understand how a bureaucracy’s formal lines of authority, its relationship to other institutions, and the programs and policies placed within its jurisdiction all combine to determine the relative political influence of a broad range of political actors.