Committee Hearings Research Articles

Race, Contact Effects, and Effective Lawmaking in Congressional Committee Hearings

Race, Contact Effects, and Effective Lawmaking in Congressional Committee Hearings

Conceptualising the People's Parliament Approach in the Parliament of Malaysia

This study explores the Parliament of Malaysia’s transition towards a more public-friendly institution, part of a global trend towards transparent and people-centric parliamentary processes. Utilising 16 articles from the Inter-parliamentary Union’s Public Engagement Hub and additional literature, the research compares Malaysia’s initiatives with those of the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. The analysis focuses on public engagement strategies such as public broadcasting of sessions, committee hearings, public visits, research services, and the potential for a parliamentary budget office and petition systems. Findings indicate Malaysia’s progress in some areas, like public broadcasting and committee hearings, while identifying gaps in others, like interactive visitor experiences and comprehensive digital engagement. The study highlights the challenge of balancing security with accessibility, especially under legal frameworks like the Protected Areas and Protected Places Act 1959 (Act 298). Recommendations include enhancing the Parliament’s virtual tour and establishing a more engaging visitor centre. The study concludes that while Malaysia has made commendable strides in public engagement, there are opportunities for improvement, particularly in areas requiring substantial legal and structural changes. This study contributes to understanding the dynamics of public engagement in parliamentary processes, underscoring the significance of a People’s Parliament spirit in democratic governance.

Talking past each other: Institutional complexity in public projects

Large-scale public projects often experience delays and cost overruns, in part because they require extensive coordination between numerous organizations, both private and public. In this paper, we draw on the perspective of new institutionalism to explore differences between stakeholders in large-scale projects. We develop a topic modeling approach based on a state-of-the-art computational text analysis technique and apply it to a set of transcripts from parliamentary select committee hearings in the United Kingdom to uncover cultural-cognitive differences that reflect a variety of institutional logics. The application of this technique to four different projects reveals significant institutional differences between groups of actors. We argue that greater awareness of these institutional differences may support attempts to understand why large-scale projects experience such significant management challenges and how such challenges could be addressed. We use data for the period 2000–2019 from two different sectors, defence, and public transport.

Information Resilience in Networks: An Analysis of a National Security Legislation Evidence Base

Governance theory emphasises that networks are pivotal to societal governance and related steering mechanisms. One important means of steering is legislation, the evidence base of which is built on the interaction between social actors and the expert hearings related to the legislative process. This research uses network analysis to examine the construction of a legislative knowledge base and the information resilience displayed in the related networks. The data are derived from experts (n=440) appearing in committee hearings on five proposed acts of parliament. The results show that the expert consultations behind the legislation are official-oriented and illuminate the limited information produced by the private sector and a narrow view of scientific expertise. The network reveals epistemic authorities – mainly representing the security cluster – acting as gatekeepers. A more systemic approach is needed to build an evidence base encompassing the views on societal phenomena derived from different disciplines.

Police patrols, fire alarms, or ambulance chasers? Parliamentary oversight of European monetary policy and banking supervision

The parliamentary oversight of the European Central Bank (ECB) is frequently criticised for its lack of focus in both monetary policy and banking supervision. While Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) can publicly question ECB decisions in these fields, they often use committee hearings for other purposes, such as expressing political positions on issues that may or may not be related to ECB activities. This article aims to conceptualise such variation by expanding the seminal distinction between ‘police patrols’ and ‘fire alarms’ to include two novel categories – ‘planning bureaus’ and ‘ambulance chasers’. To illustrate the applicability of our typology, the article provides the first systematic comparison of the Monetary and the Banking Dialogues (2014–2021), combining a qualitative content analysis of 1,504 parliamentary questions with insights from interviews with MEPs. The findings highlight the pervasiveness of fire alarms and ambulance chasing in the parliamentary practice of overseeing the ECB.

Performing ignorance of state violence in Aotearoa New Zealand

In 2019, the New Zealand government established a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care to investigate the abuse and neglect of children, young people and vulnerable adults in Aotearoa/New Zealand between 1950 and 1999. The public hearings, witness statements and interim reports have charted horrific violence by state and faith-based workers including torture, sexual assaults, serious physical violence, and layers of neglect and discrimination. Māori have been especially targeted as victims of abuse and harms. This article considers the multiple layers of ignorance-making from state representatives. It shows how state agencies have navigated Commission hearings through 10 strategies that demonstrate some acknowledgement of their offending and trauma-making while simultaneously minimising their responsibility and resecuring their institutional legitimacy as protectors of the vulnerable and saviours of Te Tiriti (the Treaty of Waitangi), ethics and integrity. This careful performance stands at odds with the ongoing layers of violence and harms in state care.

Flexible Estimation of Policy Preferences for Witnesses in Committee Hearings

Abstract Theoretical expectations regarding communication patterns between legislators and outside agents, such as lobbyists, agency officials, or policy experts, often depend on the relationship between legislators’ and agents’ preferences. However, legislators and nonelected outside agents evaluate the merits of policies using distinct criteria and considerations. We develop a measurement method that flexibly estimates the policy preferences for a class of outside agents—witnesses in committee hearings—separate from that of legislators’ and compute their preference distance across the two dimensions. In our application to Medicare hearings, we find that legislators in the U.S. Congress heavily condition their questioning of witnesses on preference distance, showing that legislators tend to seek policy information from like-minded experts in committee hearings. We do not find this result using a conventional measurement placing both actors on one dimension. The contrast in results lends support for the construct validity of our proposed preference measures.

Epistemic and ontological shifts in the making: (re)defining the episteme of Puerto Rico’s education at the turn of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT At the turn of the twentieth century, conceptualizing the Puerto Rican child and the Puerto Rican citizen took on discourses of difference that were steeped in Progressive Era rationalities about eugenics that embodied normalized beliefs about “ability” and “fitness” traveling between the United States and Puerto Rico. These epistemic and ontological shifts in the making were not only about developing the intellectual strengths of Puerto Rican students; they were also about creating a particular “type” of student for US statehood. Discourses of race, intelligence, hygiene and morality were incorporated into the languaging of the Senate Bill 2254 Committee Hearings. These discourses of difference were also part of the rationale for enacting and marking difference under Puerto Rico’s new school laws. Moreover, these discursive formations circulating in Puerto Rican education and society created a set of principles of regulation and observation that was used to rationalize biological determinants for citizenship. Central to deciding Puerto Rico’s legal, political and educational future was the scrutiny of the moral, intellectual, racial, hygienic, economic and educational conditions of Puerto Rican students.

Utah gets license for masters in addiction counseling

It took two years of work and a 50‐page report, but Richard Nance got Utah to create a new Office of Professional License Review to be the screening arm of the Division of Professional Licensure. Any new license had to go through an application and review process, he told ADAW. “We were the first,” said Nance, former president of the Association of Utah Substance Abuse Professionals (AUSAP). “In 2023, I had my senator run the [Medication Aide Certified] MAC license bill, but the head of the Senate Business and Labor Committee refused to allow it a committee hearing because it ‘hadn't been through the OPLR process.’ There wasn't an OPLR process yet. Once it was created, I spent the summer of 2023 writing the application and working with the OPLR people to fix errors in the process,” Nance said.

Good Governance and the Partisan Wars: The Effects of Divided Government on Administrative Problem Solving and Oversight Agenda Setting in Congress

Abstract Congress’s constitutional responsibility to oversee and investigate the executive branch of government demands that instances of waste, fraud, and abuse in the administrative state be checked via both legislation and nonlegislative committee hearings. In this article, I establish an oversight agenda for Congress using the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office's (GAO) biennial identification of the most vulnerable federal agencies and programs. I then assess whether and how government-wide partisanship affects Congress’s ability to address this slate of issues. I find that, when government is divided, Congress is more legislatively productive on high-risk issues, and the House of Representatives is more likely to prioritize investigative hearings on high-risk issues. My results suggest a silver lining to the reality of partisan agenda control: preexisting administrative problems identified by well-positioned and well-informed observers at GAO may get more attention when there is a partisan incentive for the legislature to investigate an opposition-controlled government.

Still Underrepresented? Gender Representation of Witnesses at House and Senate Committee Hearings

ABSTRACT We know very little about the women who testify before congressional committees. Here we present data on the women who appeared as witnesses out of the 36,950 persons who gave testimony before 7,750 subcommittees and committees. We consider the roles of political party, party control, gender of chiefs of staff, location of hearings, and chamber rules among other factors to explain the underrepresentation of women witnesses. We find that women are dramatically underrepresented. Ultimately, the presence of Democratic women staff directors and women committee chairs, as well as initiatives to track witness diversity, increase the likelihood of women testifying.

Legislative science advice in Chile: exploring twelve years of knowledge producers participation in environmental committee discussions

ABSTRACT Exploring who participates in Congress committee hearings is key to assess how diverse and representative these spaces are. This article focuses on participation in Congress committees during the discussion of environmental bills in the last twelve years (2010-22) in Chile, specifically concentrating on the sub-group of knowledge producers – higher education, experts and think tanks – as committee hearings are a privileged access mechanism for science to reach the law-making process. Results show limited participation in addition to gender and geographical location biases in this sub-group of knowledge producers, raising concerns regarding the quantity and diversity of who provides evidence and research knowledge to Congress committees. These findings suggest further attention should be given to the way the participation of a more diverse group of knowledge producers to these privileged deliberative arenas can be improved.

The Art of the Review

What’s a book review for? You might think it’s to supply a summary of the book. Time is short. We’re drowning in stuff to read; it’s hard to keep up even if you dutifully apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and read very fast. Courts are constantly publishing new opinions. And—even though you’re used to this familiar feature of American law, you should still notice how startling it is—they’re also publishing unpublished opinions, with indefensible rules about whether or how they count as precedents lawyers can cite. Legislatures are publishing floor debates, not to mention committee hearings, and passing new statutes, the latter apparently written by Bulgarian bureaucrats struggling in their fifth semester of English as a second language. Don’t get me started on what the agencies are up to. (Quick! how many pages were added to the Federal Register while you read this paragraph?) Especially if you fear that some books should have been articles and that most law review articles are too long, you can be forgiven for basking in deep and abiding gratitude to the reviewer who boils things down. If you’re the tiniest bit unscrupulous, you can then pretend to have read the book yourself. You can even cite it, though I hope you have enough of a scholarly conscience left to feel uneasy about that morsel of cheating. (I hope too that “scholarly conscience” is not an oxymoron.) And you can be baffled or annoyed—I am—by the kinds of “reviews” that sometimes appear in, oh, The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, where the ostensible reviewer can barely be bothered to mention the book she’s allegedly reviewing, but just wants to tell you what she would have said had she written a book on the topic.

HOW IS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF HALAL SELF DECLAIRE CERTIFICATION IN MICRO AND SMALL ENTERPRISES IN SURABAYA?

This research aims to explore, analyze, and evaluate the implementation of halal certification for micro and small businesses through BPJPH (Indonesian Halal Certification Agency) and to understand how this certification process functions for these businesses in Surabaya from an Islamic economic perspective. Conducted as part of the Wijaya Putra University's Higher Education Research Strategic Plan for 2020–2024 in the field of Managing Innovation and creative Industry, this study utilizes a descriptive qualitative method. Data collection involved observation, interviews, and note-taking, followed by analysis stages including data collection, reduction, presentation, conclusion, and verification. The findings indicate that the BPJPH halal certification process for micro and small businesses in Surabaya in 2023, particularly for food products, involves several stages from online registration to certification approval after inspections and a Fatwa Commission hearing. From an Islamic economic standpoint, halal certification applies ethical principles such as aqidah, Siddiq, and Amanah, emphasizing the significance of halal food, assurance, security, and consumer protection for both consumers and business operators.

Implementasi Sertifikasi Halal Self Declaire Pada Usaha Mikro Dan Kecil Di Surabaya

. The aim of the research is to find out, analyze and evaluate the implementation of halal certification for micro and small businesses through BPJPH and to find out, analyze and evaluate how halal certification through BPJPH works for micro and small businesses in the city of Surabaya from an Islamic economic perspective. This research was carried out in accordance with the strategic research plan of Wijaya Putra University for 2020 - 2024 in the leading areas of managing innovation & creative industry with research topics on standardization and competitiveness of MSMEs and creative industries. This research uses descriptive qualitative research methods. This research data was collected through observation, interview and documentation techniques which were validated through method triangulation and source triangulation techniques and then analyzed through the stages of data collection, data reduction, data presentation and drawing conclusions and verification. The findings of this research are that the BPJPH self-declaration halal certification process for micro and small businesses in 2023 in the city of Surabaya which is dominated by food products rather than beverage products is carried out in several stages. First, registration is carried out online on the halal application and accompanied by a halal process companion from a BPJPH representative institution bringing the specified documents. Second, the halal process assistant from the BPJPH representative agency will carry out an inspection to check the suitability of the completeness of the files in the field. Third, holding a fatwa commission hearing to assess whether the product can be accepted or rejected. Fourth, products accepted at the fatwa commission hearing will be approved for certification. Halal certification in a sharia economic perspective applies three ethical principles, namely, aqidah, shiddiq, and amanah which are related to the urgency of halal certification not only for consumers but also business actors, including, among other things, the importance of eating halal food, providing guarantees and a sense of security as well as consumer protection

From political science to politicizing science? A study of the discipline’s presence in the debates of the United States Congress, 1981–2021

ABSTRACT This article examines how politicians consider political science and political scientists in the United States and more specifically in the United States Congress. The main idea is to examine Congressional debates in the specific timeline starting from the 1980s with an explicit focus on the argumentation of members of Congress. The interest lies in examining how members include references to political science or political theory in the debates and to what extent scholars and their works are cited in the debates. The article contributes to the discussions of political science as a discipline in the United States. Furthermore, it examines how the relationship between political science and politics is not only understood but also defined in the political debates of the United States. The article aims to shed light on how politicians are invoking political science and scholars in plenary session debates in contrast to employing expert statements in committee hearings or in the process of drafting bills and other governmental policies.

Native Fascism: Evansville’s 1948 Wallace Riot

ABSTRACT: In April 1948, Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace arrived in Indiana to much controversy. The conservative state did not welcome Wallace, and veterans’ organizations actively organized to disrupt his speaking engagements. On April 6, at the Progressive Party’s Evansville campaign event, a mob attacked Wallace supporters, causing injuries and pushing the isolated town into the national spotlight. In the wake of the riot, a local professor was fired for his involvement in the Wallace campaign, and the radical CIO Local 813 became the subject of U. S. House committee hearings. Anticommunist hysteria gripped the Evansville community. What happened in Evansville on April 6 was part of a populist fascism in the United States propelled by anti-communism and enacted by veterans’ organizations. While national politicians dominate histories of anti-communism, some of the greatest damage done during the 1940s and 1950s occurred when other Americans, specifically veterans’ groups, violated the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.

Native Fascism: Evansville’s 1948 Wallace Riot

ABSTRACT: In April 1948, Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace arrived in Indiana to much controversy. The conservative state did not welcome Wallace, and veterans’ organizations actively organized to disrupt his speaking engagements. On April 6, at the Progressive Party’s Evansville campaign event, a mob attacked Wallace supporters, causing injuries and pushing the isolated town into the national spotlight. In the wake of the riot, a local professor was fired for his involvement in the Wallace campaign, and the radical CIO Local 813 became the subject of U. S. House committee hearings. Anticommunist hysteria gripped the Evansville community. What happened in Evansville on April 6 was part of a populist fascism in the United States propelled by anti-communism and enacted by veterans’ organizations. While national politicians dominate histories of anti-communism, some of the greatest damage done during the 1940s and 1950s occurred when other Americans, specifically veterans’ groups, violated the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.

Roadblocks at every turn: What reproductive health experts say about barriers to legislative abortion advocacy

ObjectivesAdvocacy is an important part of the reproductive health care profession, but barriers to participating in the legislative process are not well understood. This study examines the barriers experts in reproductive health experience to testifying at state legislative committee hearings regarding abortion. Study designWe conducted in-depth semistructured interviews with 40 experts in reproductive health, including obstetrician gynecologists (OBGYNs), midwives, pediatricians, nurses, primary care providers, and professional advocates. We analyzed the interview transcripts using an inductive coding process. ResultsWe identified four barriers to testifying at state legislative committee hearings regarding abortion. First, our interviewees described a tension between claiming expertise and stigma: those without direct experience in abortion care often felt too unqualified to testify, but representing oneself as an abortion provider came with stigma that made communicating with legislators difficult. Second, issues of power and identity informed interactions in committee chambers, as well as the structure of advocacy work more broadly. Third, institutional constraints shaped what experts could say and whether they could rely on their professional affiliations for support. Finally, fear of harassment and violence kept many of our interviewees from testifying, especially those who were active abortion providers. ConclusionsThese barriers appear unique to testifying on abortion and represent a complex web of hurdles that experts in reproductive health must navigate to participate in this part of the policymaking process. ImplicationsOur findings suggest multiple strategies for improving the state of expert involvement in abortion policymaking, including expanding the pool of testifiers to include nonabortion providers and experts with a range of backgrounds, as well as supporting organizations that link experts to training and advocacy networks.

The realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada.

To examine the impact of the Canadian MAiD program and analyze its safeguards. A working group of physicians from diverse practice backgrounds and a legal expert, several with bioethics expertise, reviewed Canadian MAiD data and case reports. Grey literature was also considered, including fact-checked and reliable Canadian mainstream newspapers and parliamentary committee hearings considering the expansion of MAiD. Several scientific studies and reviews, provincial and correctional system authorities have identified issues with MAiD practice. As well, there is a growing accumulation of narrative accounts detailing people getting MAiD due to suffering associated with a lack of access to medical, disability, and social support. The Canadian MAiD regime is lacking the safeguards, data collection, and oversight necessary to protect Canadians against premature death. The authors have identified these policy gaps and used MAiD cases to illustrate these findings.