Jason A. MacDonald

Limitation Riders and Congressional Influence over Bureaucratic Policy Decisions

Limitation riders, which allow the U.S. Congress to forbid agencies from spending money for specific uses, enable congressional majorities to exert greater influence over bureaucratic policy decisions than is appreciated by research on policy making in the United States. I develop a theory of limitation riders, explaining why they lead to policy outcomes that are preferable to a majority of legislators compared to outcomes that would occur if this tool did not exist. I assess this perspective empirically by analyzing the volume of limitation riders reported in bills from 1993 to 2002 and all limitation riders forbidding regulatory actions from 1989 to 2009. In addition to supporting the conclusion that Congress possesses more leverage over agencies’ decisions than is currently appreciated, the findings have implications for advancing theories of delegation.

Quasi-Experimental Design, Constituency, and Advancing Women’s Interests: Reexamining the Influence of Gender on Substantive Representation

Research investigating whether female legislators provide more effective substantive representation on women’s issues than their male colleagues faces a significant methodological hurdle. Models used to estimate the effect of gender on representation inevitably omit constituency variables that affect the character of legislators’ decisions and are also correlated with gender, potentially biasing the estimates of the effect of gender. Employing a quasi-experimental research design as an alternative strategy, the authors remove this hurdle and estimate the influence of gender on representation free from this potential bias. The authors find that gender does affect representation and observe critical mass effects.

Bureaucratic Capacity and Bureaucratic Discretion Does Congress Tie Policy Authority to Performance

This article assesses whether the managerial capacity of agencies influences the volume of policy authority that lawmakers delegate. Examining a sample of agencies whose managerial capacities were assessed along the same criteria, and allowing for the comparison of performance across agencies, we observe that poorly performing agencies are more likely to lose policy authority. Our findings suggest that lawmakers promote effective policymaking by giving agencies the incentive to perform well and that models of discretion that do not account for performance underestimate the effect of another factor—policy conflict between the legislative and executive branches—on how much discretion agencies receive.

Agency policy preferences, congressional letter-marking and the allocation of distributive policy benefits*

When allocating distributive benefits, bureaucrats must balance their own policy preferences with requests from members of Congress. The elimination of earmarking may provide agency personnel with greater discretion in the allocation of distributive benefits. Using a novel data set of congressional letters written in support of their community’s air traffic control towers, we estimate a model that explores the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to issue national interest exemptions to continue operations at towers slated for closure as a result of budget sequestration. Our analysis suggests that members of Congress do not enjoy the influence they possessed under earmarking when using a new method, letter-marking, to influence how agencies distribute benefits.

What Moves Partisanship? Migration, State Partisan Environment Change, and Party Identification

We consider how state political environments can alter the party identification and political behavior of individuals. Using panel data well-suited to assess the influence of migration on individual-level phenomena, we find that migrants alter their party identifications toward the majority party of their new states. Applying the estimates from this analysis to the 2000 presidential election suggests that individual-level change can alter presidential election outcomes in states if migration patterns meet certain conditions.

Lawmakers' Preferences for Bureaucratic Discretion: The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996

Research on delegation stresses that chief executives are “privileged actors” well positioned to influence bureaucratic policy decisions. Therefore, legislative coalitions provide less authority to agencies when they disagree with executives about what policy should look like. Otherwise, executives would take advantage of voluminous agency discretion to direct bureaucrats to make decisions inconsistent with legislative coalitions’ policy goals. I stress that, in the U.S. lawmaking system, congressional committees are also privileged actors. As such—as with the president—those who experience policy disagreement with committees should wish to limit bureaucratic discretion. In addition, I examine individual lawmakers’ preferences for bureaucratic discretion to evaluate this perspective on agency design. As policy disagreement increases between senators and the Senate committee that oversees the agency/agencies receiving authority, senators prefer to limit the volume of discretion agencies receive.