RESEARCH
Published Work
"Measuring the Influence of Political Actors on the Federal Budget" with Leah Rosenstiel. 2020. American Political Science Review 114(2): 603-608.
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
"Interbranch Bargaining and Discretionary Appropriations"
The allocation of budgetary resources is an essential feature of American government, and each year Congress and the President actively bargain over hundreds of billions of dollars in the annual appropriations process. I examine the bargaining outcomes of this process. Using an original data set of account-level appropriations from fiscal year 1960 to 2021, which as far as I am aware is the most comprehensive and granular panel of the U.S. discretionary budget yet assembled, I find that appropriations outcomes are more responsive to ideological changes among legislators than among presidents, and this effect appears to be stronger in the House than in the Senate. Moreover, I find evidence that executive-legislative relations differ between the chambers. That is, presidents strategically propose budget requests to counteract House preferences but not Senate ones, and the House reports bills that oppose presidential preferences while the Senate reports bills that accommodate them. I also use an instrumental variables design to identify the causal effect of presidential budget requests on enacted appropriations. Finally, I show that Congress systematically revises budget requests less as the amount of education and training within an agency’s workforce increases.
"Information and Budgeting"
The federal power of the purse is constitutionally vested in the legislative branch, yet since 1921, Congress has delegated proposal power over the budget to the President. I develop a separation-of-powers model to explain Congress's continuing rationale in doing so. In the model, the executive has more information than legislators about an agency's budgetary needs. Congress has different preferences than the President, but movements away from the budget request entail greater uncertainty about the true state. The main result of the model is that, as policy becomes more complex, Congress is better off delegating agenda setting power, even though budgetary outcomes are increasingly biased towards the President. Moreover, the ability of Congress to base its policy decision off either the budget request or the previous year's appropriation tends to constrain large-scale changes, which may explain why budgetary changes tend to be incremental in nature. Finally, enacted appropriations, if they move at all, are a weighted average of Congress's ideal point and the policy on which legislators base their appropriations decision. The model generates several predictions about the political determinants of discretionary appropriations, which I then test empirically.
"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.
