Influencing the Bureaucracy: The Irony of Congressional Oversight

Does the president or Congress have more influence over policymaking by the bureaucracy? Despite a wealth of theoretical guidance, progress on this important question has proven elusive due to competing theoretical predictions and severe difficulties in measuring agency influence and oversight. We use a survey of federal executives to assess political influence, congressional oversight, and the policy preferences of agencies, committees, and the president on a comparable scale. Analyzing variation in political influence across and within agencies reveals that Congress is less influential relative to the White House when more committees are involved. While increasing the number of involved committees may maximize the electoral benefits for members, it may also undercut the ability of Congress as an institution to collectively respond to the actions of the presidency or the bureaucracy.     

When private governance impedes multilateralism: The case of international pesticide governance

Private standards play an increasingly important governance role, yet their effects on state-led policymaking remain understudied. We examine how the operation of private agricultural standards influences multilateral pesticide governance with a particular focus on the listing of substances under the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, a treaty-based information-sharing mechanism that allows countries to refuse hazardous chemical imports. We find that private agricultural standard-setting bodies use the Rotterdam Convention's pesticide list to develop their own lists of banned substances. This alters the Rotterdam Convention's intended role, impeding efforts to add substances to the treaty, as attempts by private actors to impose stricter governance than state actors can undermine the potential for international state-based governance to become more stringent. We characterize this as a “confounding interaction” whereby institutional linkages between actions by public and private actors with broadly aligned goals results in unexpected negative consequences for governance.     

Don't Sweat the Details! Enhancing Congressional Committee Expertise Through the Use of Detailees

In contrast to the dramatic growth in the size and influence of the executive branch over the past 40 years, congressional committee staffing levels are at an all‐time low. Faced with growing demands to produce legislation and to conduct oversight of executive branch policymaking, Congress can and does supplement its existing staff by borrowing personnel, known as detailees, from federal agencies. Using an original dataset of detailees from 1997 to 2015, we analyze the degree to which congressional committees rely on detailees to increase legislative capacity. We find that committees in the House and Senate use detailees in different ways to further both legislative and oversight initiatives.     

Discrimination Towards Ethnic Minorities: How Does it Relate to Majority Group Members’ Outgroup Attitudes and Support for Multiculturalism

We examined how ethnic discrimination targeting ethnic minority group members would affect majority group members’ attitudes and multiculturalism towards ethnic minority groups in the context of Turkish–Kurdish interethnic conflict. Study 1 (N = 356) demonstrated that the extent to which majorities (Turkish) believed there was ethnic discrimination towards minorities (Kurdish) in the Turkish society was associated with positive outgroup attitudes and support for multiculturalism through decreased levels of perceived threat from the outgroup. Study 2 (N = 82) showed that Turkish participants who read bogus news reports about the prevalence of ethnic discrimination towards the Kurdish were more positive towards this ethnic group (higher levels of support for multiculturalism, culture maintenance, and intergroup contact) compared to participants in the neutral condition. Furthermore, participants who were presented with lower levels of discrimination (few companies have been discriminatory against the Kurdish) were more positive towards Kurdish people than participants who were presented with higher levels of discrimination (most companies have been discriminatory against the Kurdish). Regardless of the intensity of discrimination, information about the prevalence of ethnic discrimination improved majority members’ attitudes towards ethnic minority groups. Practical and theoretical implications of the studies were discussed.