The Fate of Policy Analysis in Congressional Decision Making: Three Types of Use in Committees

Abstract

TW A TITHIN the past two decades, Congress has dramatically enhanced its analytic capability, increasing the number and responsibilities of its professional staff (Malbin 1979; Salisbury and Shepsle 1981) and the quantity and quality of its analytic information (Commission on the Operation of the Senate 1976; Frantzich 1982). Two new congressional support agencies have been created, the Office of Technology Assessment and Congressional Budget Office, and the policy analysis components of the other two, the Congressional Research Service and General Accounting Office, have been significantly upgraded. The fate of policy analysis in congressional decision making, however, remains unclear. Research on the use of analytic information has focused almost exclusively on the executive branch, perhaps in response to suggestions that the potential for using policy analysis in Congress appeared to be quite limited (Davidson 1976; Jones 1976; Dreyfus 1977). In addition, research on congressional decision making has yet to produce models which explicitly connect floor voting choices, which are not likely to be directly influenced by policy analysis, with the activities which precede and structure those choices, activities in which the influence of analytic information is likely to be much stronger. This article is an attempt to provide some theoretical context and empirical underpinning to discussions of both the use of policy analysis in Congress and the implications of that use for congressional decision making. Such an endeavor contributes in two more general ways to greater understanding of the role of analysis in public decision making. First, it extends the scope of research, which has been largely restricted to administrative organizations. Investigating the use of policy analysis in legislative environment forces explicit attention to the political factors which affect use, something often ignored. Second, the legislative setting presents, in stark terms, the basic difficulty of combining expert advice with democratic political institutions, which MacRae contends is a major problem of contemporary democratic societies (1976: 169). Congress, the institution once envisioned to be tied most closely to the common sense of the common man, is now being confronted with increasingly complex problems that appear to require considerable specialized knowledge. An