Do finite time horizons constrain a legislature's ability to control the bureaucracy? I argue that legislators subject to legislative term limits enact legislation with less statutory discretion today to ensure that their preferences are implemented by the bureaucracy tomorrow since most legislators will not be around to monitor the bureaucracy over the long term. Although past works suggest that legislative term limits decrease legislatures' rate of bureaucratic oversight, I find that term-limited legislatures use ex ante means of bureaucratic control to a greater extent by granting less statutory discretion to the bureaucracy.

What is the effect of electoral uncertainty on a legislature’s preference for bureaucratic insulation? Previous research argues that an increase in electoral uncertainty results in an increase in a legislature’s preference for bureaucratic insulation, delegation of a program to an independent agency or multiple agencies, for a government‐regulated program. However, there is disagreement among political scientists on how to conceptually or empirically measure electoral uncertainty and bureaucratic insulation. I use the common conceptual definitions of electoral uncertainty and bureaucratic insulation from the legislative delegation literature in a within‐subject experiment of U.S. state legislators and legislative staff to assess the causal effect of electoral uncertainty on their preference for one of the four strategies of bureaucratic insulation. Once a legislature is subject to electoral uncertainty, I find that the respondents are more likely to delegate to an independent agency and multiple agencies that collectively implement a program.

Do judges selected by merit review commissions perform better than elected judges or those directly appointed by elected officials? This is a central question in both the academic study of state judicial institutions and the policy discourse about how to reform them. To address it, we take advantage of the variation in the means of the selection for trial court judges within Arizona, a state comprised of appointed, elected, and merit-selected trial court judges. This unique context allows us to use an objective measure of judicial performance – the reversal rate of trial court cases appealed to Arizona’s state appellate courts – to evaluate judges by their means of selection. We gather an original dataset on 2919 cases heard by 176 judges, estimating multivariate models that control for characteristics of cases and of judges. Overall, we find that elected judges have a lower reversal rate than merit-selected judges. Our findings question the conventional wisdom in the state courts literature in favor of merit selection and against judicial elections, and encourage further work on the effects of judges’ means of selection beyond state supreme courts to include state appellate and trial courts.