1 The Impact of Interest Groups and Administrative Capacity on Access to VA Disability Benefits

Congress helps to create implementation networks through chartering organizations, which gives these organizations legitimacy as actors within the network. Many of these organizations play dual roles as service providers and as interest groups who advocate for their members. Using insights from the literature on networks and on interest groups, we hypothesize that variation in the resources of network actors, specifically political power, will explain variation in the performance of the network surrounding Veterans Disability Compensation. We find that variation in the political power of chartered veterans groups explain variation in performance but only in terms of access. We find that political power does not affect the ability of the network to generate demand or improve effectiveness. 3 New Governance as an analytic framework points our attention toward how the interaction of public and private organizations influences policy implementation (Heinrich, Hill and Lynn 2004). Policy implementation is a function not only of the public bureaucracy charged with implementing the law but of the combinations of organizations, both public and private, that exist in the policy or implementing network (O’Toole 1997). Although the scholarly attention to implementing networks or structures is relatively new, the federal government has, for a long time, helped to create and develop networks of organizations to assist in policy implementation (O’Toole 1997; Hall and O’Toole 2000). One way that Congress has done so is through the chartering of not-for profit corporations, such as the American Legion, the National Educatio