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Abstract
This paper explores the speed of rulemaking in American state governments. Drawing on a unique data set of over 250,000 individual rules issued by states from 1993 through 2009, we introduce new measures of the speed and breadth of rulemaking in American state bureaucracies, providing a new way of evaluating the incidence of rulemaking delay within and across governments. We focus specifically on how professionalism and oversight powers of state legislative and executive branches affect rulemaking speed and find that states with more professionalized legislatures and governments with extensive legislative/executive oversight powers experience greater delays in rule adoption. These findings provide important new insights into the politics of regulatory delay and suggest disparate ways in which sub-national governments approach regulatory policymaking in a federal system.

Abstract
Scholars of American politics debate the consequences of polarized and divided government on lawmaking but have largely neglected the impact of institutional conflict on the policy outputs of the bureaucracy. We argue that lawmaking gridlock creates opportunities and demands for governors and civil servants to pursue policy goals through rulemaking. To explore these dynamics, we draw upon a comprehensive dataset of over 150,000 proposed and adopted rules issued by US state agencies from 1994 through 2009 and compare differences in rulemaking output within states across periods of divided and unified party control. We find that policy conflict (measured by the presence of a party divided legislature) leads to a 3%–7% increase in the number of proposed and adopted rules. We then explore how variation in state powers of legislative oversight affect rulemaking, and find that these effects are concentrated in governments with weaker powers of legislative review. Our research speaks to debates in the literature regarding the nature of bureaucratic policymaking and highlights practical consequences of legislative gridlock and partisan polarization.

Legislative scholars have theorized about the role of committees and whether they are, or are not, tools of the majority party. We look to the states to gain more empirical leverage on this question, using a regression discontinuity approach and novel data from all state committees between 1996 and 2014. We estimate that majority‐party status produces an 8.5 percentage point bonus in committee seats and a substantial ideological shift in the direction of the majority party. Additionally, we leverage a surprisingly frequent, but as if random occurrence in state legislatures—tied chambers—to identify majority‐party effects, finding similar support for partisan committees. We also examine whether the extent of committee partisanship is conditional on party polarization or legislative professionalism, but we find that it is not. Our results demonstrate that parties create nonrepresentative committees across legislatures to pursue their outlying policy preferences.

AbstractFederal agencies perform many important tasks, from guarding against terrorist plots to mailing social security checks. A key question is whether Congress can effectively manage such a large and influential bureaucracy. We argue that Congress, in using oversight to ensure agency responsiveness to legislative preferences, risks harming agency morale, which could have negative long-run effects on performance and the implementation of public policy. More specifically, we argue that oversight's effects on agency morale are conditional on whether oversight is adversarial or friendly. We assess our claims using a novel data set of the frequency and tone of hearings in which federal agencies are called to testify before Congress from 1999 to 2011 and merge it with data on agency autonomy and job satisfaction. Our findings suggest that agency morale is sensitive to congressional oversight attention, and thus speak to questions regarding democratic accountability, congressional policymaking and the implementation of public policy.

The authors examine the administrative procedures acts (APAs) of separation of powers and parliamentary systems. They examine sixteen national APAs (thirteen parliamentary and three presidential) and forty-eight APAs from the U.S. states that have institutional structures analogous to the presidential systems. They identify a very stark difference between the parliamentary and presidential APAs. While all of the presidential system APAs place constraints on both adjudicative and rulemaking activities, only two of the parliamentary APAs make any reference to rulemaking at all. The authors present an institutional explanation for this observation based on recent work on veto players and delegated discretion to administrative agents. They argue that the presence of partisan veto players discourages focus on rulemaking in APAs. Adapted from the source document.

The authors examine the administrative procedures acts (APAs) of separation of powers and parliamentary systems. They examine sixteen national APAs (thirteen parliamentary and three presidential) and forty-eight APAs from the U.S. states that have institutional structures analogous to the presidential systems. They identify a very stark difference between the parliamentary and presidential APAs. While all of the presidential system APAs place constraints on both adjudicative and rulemaking activities, only two of the parliamentary APAs make any reference to rulemaking at all. The authors present an institutional explanation for this observation based on recent work on veto players and delegated discretion to administrative agents. They argue that the presence of partisan veto players discourages focus on rulemaking in APAs.

New and emerging collaborative responses to sex offender management are challenging traditional notions about how treatment providers and probation and parole officers (POs) deliver services to this difficult population. Typically, sex offender treatment professionals provide community-based services to offenders who are supervised by POs. Yet, no comprehensive survey has investigated how treatment providers and POs collaborate and view their relationships with each other. This national random survey examined the beliefs and behaviors of community-based adult sex-offender treatment providers concerning various types of provider and PO interactions and collaborative models. Overall, treatment providers reported that they value frequent and substantive communication with POs concerning mutual clients. There was, however, considerable diversity in practice and opinion among providers with regard to POs leading, coleading, and observing sex offender treatment groups. Treatment providers' opinions about various clinical, ethical, and legal issues evident in these collaborative approaches are examined.