Oversight Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Ever since U.S. president George Washington recognized that “the House is an inquest” while Congress sought to review activities in the departments of the Treasury, war, and foreign affairs in the 1790s, Congress’s ight to oversee the executive branch has been common knowledge; that is, Congress reviews the decisions made and the processes used to make them. Oversight plays a potentially important function in a chain of accountability linking the public to public policy decisions; in theory, oversight can align the otherwise conflicting interests of legislators and agencies. Whether that potential is realized depends on when Congress performs oversight and on the effects it has on agencies.

Occurrence And Function

The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 charged Congress with exercising “continuous watchfulness” over executive organizations carrying out the law. But conventional wisdom pointed to a dearth of oversight in practice. Two simultaneous currents in the literature, one empirical and one theoretical, challenged this view in the 1980s.

First, Mathew McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz’s 1984 landmark paper, “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols vs. Fire Alarms,” distinguishes two types of oversight: police patrol, which they liken to a beat cop watching out for transgressions before problems arise, and fire alarm, which they compare to firefighters called to address problems only after they are recognized. McCubbins and Schwartz contend that legislators can and do empower interest groups to observe and participate in agency proceedings and trust these groups to “pull a fire alarm” to alert Congress to problems requiring congressional attention. They also argue that both the fire alarm approach and police patrol model can ensure agency accountability, but the fire alarm approach is more efficient for Congress, given the opportunity cost of legislators’ time.

Second, Joel Aberbach’s important empirical analysis, Keeping a Watchful Eye (1990), established that on-the-record oversight, in the form of hearings of congressional committees, does in fact occupy a substantial and growing share of Congress’s time. Aberbach’s overall time series findings have held up well in subsequent analyses with more recent data sets and alternative statistical models, such as his 2002 article “What’s Happened to the Watchful Eye?” and Sean Gailmard’s 2007 paper “Oversight and Agency Problems in LegislativeBureaucratic Interaction. ”This literature makes clear that time spent on oversight hearings increases under divided government and with increased federal bureaucratic activity (e.g., the volume of new regulations issued), while—controlling for other factors—resources such as committee staff have little effect. Nevertheless, even accounting for these factors, oversight activity strongly tends to increase over time for reasons not fully explained in the literature.

Oversight in congressional committees comprises one important channel of oversight. Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigations provide another. The GAO is a nonpartisan staff agency of Congress created in 1921 (originally as the General Accounting Office) to audit expenditures and analyze programs implemented in the executive branch. In her 2007 report, “Auditing Politics or Political Auditing?” Anne Joseph O’Connell documents that congressional requests for GAO studies increased dramatically in the 1970s and again in the 1980s. Together with Aberbach’s work on committee hearing activity, these findings indicate a marked increase in congressional oversight of the executive branch from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

Effects

Research on determinants of oversight does not in itself identify effects of oversight on executive organizations. Suggestions as to these effects are provided by (among others) Barry Weingast and Mark Moran in their 1983 article “Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Control: Policymaking by the FTC.” In this work, they show that decisions of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) respond to changes in ideology on congressional committees with jurisdiction over the commission. There are a variety of tools Congress could use (e.g., agency or program funding, agency statutory authority) to assert its will in this sense following oversight, though evidence that ties effects on agencies, or their responses, specifically to congressional oversight is largely circumstantial.

Broadly speaking, oversight can reveal two types of information about agencies to Congress: it can bring to light agency actions that would otherwise be unobserved, and oversight can reveal information that agencies possess about benefits of alternative policy actions, or about costs of maintaining programs, to legislators. Regarding agency actions, if agencies anticipate negative repercussions from taking actions congressional overseers do not favor—actions that will be revealed in oversight—they are less likely to take those actions in the first place. Regarding agency information, in their 1992 article “The Political Control of Bureaucracies under Asymmetric Information,” Jeffrey Banks and Barry Weingast contend that, by revealing information about agency costs of maintaining programs, oversight can limit inefficiencies. In their 1993 article “A Signaling Theory of Congressional Oversight,” Charles Cameron and Peter Rosendorff note that oversight can also send information from Congress to agencies. They argue that oversight signals a committee’s level of interest in a policy to the bureaucracy and therefore its commitment to follow up on implementation problems. This can itself motivate better agency performance.

Finally, Gailmard, in his 2009 essay “Discretion Rather than Rules: Choice of Instruments to Constrain Bureaucratic Discretion,” and Ethan Bueno de Mesquita and Matthew Stephenson, in their 2007 “Regulatory Quality under Imperfect Oversight,” note that oversight does not lead to greater agency accountability in any simplistic way. Gailmard points out that agencies anticipating oversight may have less incentive to reveal policy-relevant information through their regulatory policies than relatively insulated, “oversight-proof ” agencies. Oversight can allow Congress to apply revealed information to meet goals the agency does not necessarily prefer, giving agencies incentives to conceal information more deeply. Bueno de Mesquita and Stephenson contend that oversight can cause agencies to allocate effort toward observable tasks and away from unobservable ones—because only the former can inform the reactions of the overseer—but this can lead to lower quality policy than if there were no oversight at all.

Bibliography:

Aberbach, Joel. Keeping a Watchful Eye. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1990.
“What’s Happened to the Watchful Eye?” Congress and the Presidency 29, no. 1 (2002): 3–23.
Banks, Jeffrey, and Barry Weingast. “The Political Control of Bureaucracies under Asymmetric Information.” American Journal of Political Science 36, no. 2 (1992): 509–524.
Bueno de Mesquita, Ethan, and Matthew Stephenson. “Regulatory Quality under Imperfect Oversight.” American Political Science Review 101, no. 3 (2007): 605.
Cameron, Charles, and Peter Rosendorff. “A Signaling Theory of Congressional Oversight.” Games and Economic Behavior 5, no. 1 (January 1993): 44–70.
Gailmard, Sean. “Discretion Rather than Rules: Choice of Instruments to Constrain Bureaucratic Discretion.” Political Analysis 17, no. 1 (2009): 25–44.
“Oversight and Agency Problems in Legislative-Bureaucratic Interaction.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, August 2007.
McCubbins, Mathew, and Thomas Schwartz. “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols vs. Fire Alarms.” American Journal of Political Science 28, no. 1 (1984): 165–179.
O’Connell, Anne Joseph. “Auditing Politics or Political Auditing?” Research report, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, 2007.
Weingast, Barry, and Mark Moran. “Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Control: Policymaking by the FTC.” Journal of Political Economy 91, no. 5 (1983): 765–800.

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