RESEARCH
Published Work
"Measuring the Influence of Political Actors on the Federal Budget" with Leah Rosenstiel. 2020. American Political Science Review.
When estimating the political determinants of the federal budget, scholars face a choice between using measures of funding and measures of spending as their outcome of interest. We examine the consequences of this choice. In particular, we argue that spending outcomes may serve as a poor test of the research questions scholars seek to answer, since spending data conflate competing budgetary influences, are downstream measures of the appropriations that originated them, and induce measurement error. To test our claim, we compare the spending data used in a recent study (Berry and Fowler 2016: American Journal of Political Science 60 (3): 692–708) with an original data set of military construction appropriations. While an analysis of the spending data produces a null result, the same analysis using the appropriations data provides strong evidence that legislators use their committee positions to distribute pork. Our findings have broad implications for studies that use measures of spending in the congressional and presidency literatures.
The publication is available here, and replication materials are available here.
The publication is available here, and replication materials are available here.
Ongoing Projects
"The Politicization of Congressional Staff" with Nathan Gibson and Leah Rosenstiel
Congress has experienced an increase in dysfunction, gridlock and polarization over the past several decades. While there are numerous causes behind these maladies, we hypothesize that the politicization of congressional capacity plays an important role. By this, we mean that the funding and staffing of congressional committees has become increasingly political, instead of being based primarily upon expertise or need. This paper explores changes in committee capacity in two ways. We first examine the broader context of committee resource allocation through several decades of House and Senate disbursement reports, exploring how political considerations may influence the allocation of budget and personnel resources within Congress. We second use an original data set of House and Senate telephone directories to track the employment and movement within Congress of all House and Senate staffers from 1977 to 2018.
"Information and Budgeting"
I develop a separation-of-powers model of the federal appropriations process in which legislators are unable to establish autonomous sources of expertise. Instead, knowledge of the implications of appropriations decisions is concentrated in the executive, and legislators may delegate agenda setting power by requiring non-binding presidential budget requests. In the model, Congress chooses whether to use information from the budget request or the previous year's appropriation when setting the current year's budget. The main result of the model is that, as policy becomes more complex, Congress is better off delegating agenda setting power to the President, even though budgetary outcomes are increasingly biased toward those preferred by the President. Moreover, enacted appropriations, if they move at all, are weighted averages relative to the players' ideal points and the previous year's appropriation, which may explain why budgetary changes are incremental in nature. Finally, the prospect of using the previous year's appropriation to gather information about the implications of budgetary outcomes moderates presidential budget requests and enacted appropriations.
