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"
| interbranch_bargaining_and_discretionary_appropriations.pdf |
The federal power of the purse is constitutionally vested in the legislative branch, yet Congress delegates agenda-setting power over the budget to the executive. I develop a theory of the annual appropriations process to explain Congress’s continuing rationale for doing so. In the model, the President has more information than Congress about the implications of budgetary decisions. Congress may base its appropriation on either the presidential budget request or the previous year’s appropriation, but movements away from either policy entail greater uncertainty about the ultimate policy outcome. The model identifies the political determinants of presidential budget requests and congressional appropriations, including the conditions under which legislators revise requests or, in some cases, strategically accommodate them. I test the theory on a granular and comprehensive panel of discretionary appropriations. The analysis shows that, contrary to the findings of the extant literature, legislators regularly accommodate presidential proposals and that these accommodations are more likely as preference divergence between the branches decreases. Moreover, when legislators choose to revise presidential proposals, their revisions are increasing in both preference divergence and legislative capacity. The study has important implications about the nature of budgetary politics and the role of executive influence over legislative policy making.
"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.
