Interest-Driven Oversight and the Failure of Congressional Control of the Bureaucracy.

Abstract

This dissertation presents an examination of congressional oversight of administrative agencies. In order to exert control and ensure that legislative mandates are faithfully carried out, Congress needs its members to act as overseers of the bureaucracy. I characterize congressional control of agencies as an institutional public good and argue that the chamber faces a collective action problem in providing it.

The problem for the chamber is that it relies on the voluntary efforts of individual members to help advance collective goals, creating incentives for those members to shirk their oversight responsibilities. Despite these incentives, existing studies show that the chamber regularly performs oversight, suggesting that concerns about congressional control may be overstated. The explanation for oversight provided in this dissertation suggests that such conclusions would be hasty.

I depart from most literature on congressional control by focusing on the choices made by individual members, attempting to more clearly specify the individual-level incentives that lead (or do not lead) to oversight. First, I provide new evidence from individual-level behavior that members regularly make the choice to involve themselves in oversight of agencies. Next, I propose an explanation for oversight.

Instead of advancing chamber goals, I argue that members use oversight to advance the policy goals of organized interests, receiving electoral support in exchange. What appears to be active oversight is actually members selectively applying pressure to agencies in an effort to ensure that policy benefits go to key interest groups. The following two chapters take up the task of testing that explanation, looking at how the oversight agenda is set within committees and which members actively choose to engage in oversight.

By highlighting a disconnect between the needs of Congress as an institution and the incentives faced by individual members of Congress, this dissertation calls into question the ability of Congress to collectively defend against Executive Branch encroachment.