Influencing the Bureaucracy: The Irony of Congressional Oversight

Abstract

Does the president or Congress have more influence over policymaking by the bureaucracy? Despite a wealth of theoretical guidance, progress on this important question has proven elusive due to competing theoretical predictions and severe difficulties in measuring agency influence and oversight. We use a survey of federal executives to assess political influence, congressional oversight, and the policy preferences of agencies, committees, and the president on a comparable scale. Analyzing variation in political influence across and within agencies reveals that Congress is less influential relative to the White House when more committees are involved. While increasing the number of involved committees may maximize the electoral benefits for members, it may also undercut the ability of Congress as an institution to collectively respond to the actions of the presidency or the bureaucracy.

Who Polices the Administrative State?

“…In addition, evidence from this study suggests that past concerns about the overall efficacy of congressional oversight are well warranted. Whereas existing scholarship suggests the multiplicity of legislative principals creates collective actions problems that reduce oversight (Gailmard 2009;Clinton, Lewis, and Selin 2014), this study suggests that private communications may pose additional obstacles and lead to coordination failures. Thus, evidence that informal oversight is comparatively free of ideological and partisan considerations is not sufficient to guarantee that legislatures effectively police shared goals in policy implementation.…”

What Makes an Agency Independent?

“…As such, I estimate models with a number of controls. First, because the number of committees that oversee an agency may affect the relative influence of the agency's political principals (Clinton, Lewis, and Selin ; Gailmard ; Hammond and Knott ; Laffont and Tirole ; Miller and Hammond ), I control for the number of committees that have oversight jurisdiction over each agency . Second, I control for the ideology of each agency (Clinton and Lewis ) to account for the possibility that an agency's ideology either affects the actual influence over agency policy or else influences executives’ perceptions of influence.…”

Measuring Latent Constructs in Nonprofit Surveys with Item Response Theory: The Example of Political Ideology

“…It is also of interest to those who study "interest groups" (often nonprofit organizations) (Poole and Rosenthal 2007;Bonica 2013;Mason 2015;Ainsworth 1993;Ainsworth and Sened 1993;McKay 2010), as well as in public management scholarship (Clinton et al 2012;Clinton and Lewis 2008;Bertelli and Grose 2009;Clinton, Lewis, and Selin 2014;Chen and Johnson 2015). Scholars have long been interested in the interplay between politics and political actors, institutions and ideology.…”