A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation of the Returns to Legislative Oversight

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Especially since Ogul (1976) and Aberbach (1990), explanations for congressional oversight of bureaucracy have been incentive based: oversight became more common on the record between the 1960s and 1990s because the returns to it increased. Scholars are confident about a few broad, systemic changes in Congress as a whole that have increased returns to oversight in general. Thanks to Aberbach (1990) they are also confident of several traits of committee structure that are associated with oversight (e.g., decentralization, staff, information networks). Beyond this very little is known about causes of oversight, or how oversight relates to other control strategies such as judicial review, restricted discretion, or "deck stacking" administrative procedures. Indeed, the returns to oversight cannot be separated from the presence and productivity of other mechanisms for influencing agencies, and the need to exert that control in the first place. Moreover, essentially nothing is known about what characteristics of bureaus and bureau behavior cause them to be subject to greater oversight. Since the activity in question is not just congressional oversight, but congressional oversight of bureaucracy, one expects that actions and characteristics of both institutions factor into the returns of oversight to legislators. This research investigation expands our understanding of the returns to oversight. It combines formal modeling, empirical assessment of the implications of new and existing models, and "natural experiments" with watershed administrative law and political changes to locate the returns to oversight in a wider context of congressional attempts to influence agency behavior. It has the broader social value of providing new knowledge of variation in and causes of oversight across committees, the antecedents of oversight within the bureaucracy itself, and the place of oversight in a larger set of tools for congressional influence on agency behavior. In this project the researchers build an explicit model of oversight, restricted discretion, administrative procedures, and judicial review as alternative means (with varying reliability and cost) to influence agency readings of statutes; derive hypotheses about the effects of exogenous shocks such as court cases and salient political developments on the returns to oversight; empirically assess the implications of major administrative law changes on legislative control of bureaucracy; use relative political action committee contributions to members and nonmembers of oversight committees as a more direct measure of changes in returns to oversight than has been used in the literature (and one less tied to formal, on the record activities); refine existing indirect measures of changes in the value of oversight (e.g., calendar days devoted to it by various legislative committees) by accounting for committee attendance as a measure of hearing importance; provide a theoretically-based empirical account of the features of bureaucracies that increase legislative returns to overseeing them (e.g., extent of discretion, preference conflict with the legislature, major rulemaking activity, potential for fraud as measured by the GAO); and extend research on attributes of legislatures and committees (e.g., .small government. ideology, statutory oversight requirements) that increase the returns of oversight to them.