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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Let me first thank my committee members, Doug Dion, Chuck Shipan, Chris Jensen, Ray Riezman, and especially my chair, Fred Boehmke. As I wrote much of this thesis a thousand miles from Iowa, Fred did a wonderful job keeping me on task from afar. In the early going, Fred suffered through numerous false starts and I will be forever grateful for his patience and confidence. Doug Dion has taught me everything I know about formal modeling, but I ask the reader to consider any inelegance or obfuscation contained herein outside of the realm of his influence-I blame my own sometimes messy mind, while I credit Doug for much of what may be good about this research. I had the great fortune to learn what the academic study of American politics was from Chuck Shipan in my first ever graduate seminar. Since then, I have attempted (often unsuccessfully) to emulate Chuck's precision and clarity of thought and prose. I owe much of my substantive knowledge of delegation to conversations I have had with Chris Jensen, both when he was the principal and I his agent and through our fruitful coauthoring experiences. Finally, I am grateful to Ray Riezman for agreeing to serve on my committee and for sharing some of his vast and diverse knowledge with me. I appreciate the hard work and attention of all my committee members, and I am extremely fortunate to have written under them. The errors, oversights, awkward phrasings, failures of insight, and overlong, tedious asides in this dissertation are all entirely my own. This work has benefitted from the eyes and attention of a range of colleagues iii and friends over the years. I have presented much of this work at various conferences and would like to thank specifically those panel participants whose attention has immeasurably improved these chapters: John Patty, Josh Ryan, and Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson. Parts of these chapters were also presented and thoughtfully discussed during two summers of the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) summer programs, at Washington University in St. Louis in 2008 and The University of Michigan in 2009. Kirk Randazzo, Phil Arena, and Brian Fogarty helped to validate (and to partially correct) my early visions of this thesis. In addition, I am grateful for the support of all of the graduate student seminar participants and have incorporated many of the insights (the ones that I was able to recall) that they more informally offered. In addition, I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Iowa. Among these friends, I would lik...