Strategic oversight and the institutional determinants of legislative policy control

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to explain variation in legislative strategies to control policymaking across institutional contexts. Of these many strategies, I focus particularly on the use of statutory language meant to direct agency action and on the use of oversight hearings. I argue that while low levels of oversight activity need not imply that a legislature is helplessly abdicating policymaking responsibility to unelected agencies, this may be the case in some circumstances. With the goal of establishing when the lack of oversight may mean such normatively problematic abdication, I develop a signaling model of delegation and oversight which proposes that oversight depends on institutional features (such as legislative capacity, the existence of legislative term limits and a legislative veto), political features (such as policy conflict within the government and within the legislature and the policy preferences and activism of important judicial actors), and the legislatures initial delegation of policymaking discretion to an agency. Critically, the pursuit of either strategy depends on alternative strategies available as well as on the likely actions of other institutions with the power to affect policy outcomes. The dissertation extends our theoretical understanding of legislative-executive relations and provides one of the first large-scale empirical analyses of legislative policymaking. In the first empirical chapter of this dissertation, I assess the predictions of the theory concerning congressional oversight activity from 1947-2006. I find that both the extent to which a congressional committees ideology diverges from an agency’s and the policy-specific expertise of said committee affect the number of oversight hearing