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AbstractHow do state legislatures use statutory language to control policy implementation by state agencies? In this article, I consider—in a specific policy area and time period—the extent to which this decision is affected by legislative anticipation of the likely actions of state courts. Previous literature has argued that the legislative use of statutory language to control bureaucrats varies with the availability of nonstatutory methods of control, but it does not explicitly consider the potential role of courts. My expectations are derived from a simple formal model of executive–legislative relations and are supported when I test them using data on the number of words added to a state's Medicaid laws from 1995 to 1996. In particular, I find that state legislatures write longer, more constraining, statutes when the likelihood that state courts intervene on their behalf is neither very high nor very low.

Oversight hearings should be an important congressional tool for controlling recalcitrant agencies, but it is not clear that this should always be equally true. The logic of principal‐agent models of legislative policy control implies that oversight might sometimes, but not always, be superfluous to said control. Here, I reintroduce oversight hearings to theories of policy control and argue that congressional committees conduct oversight hearings primarily as a response to the extent to which agencies have different policy preferences from them and as a function of their capacity to conduct hearings cheaply. I test these hypotheses using committee hearings data (PolicyAgendasProject) from both theU.S.House ofRepresentatives and theSenate from 1947 to 2006 and provide support for theoretical arguments about the institutional nature of legislative policymaking strategies and ultimately help clarify the role of oversight in legislative‐executive relations.

Initiated by a 1996 Georgia statute, "radical" civil service reform quickly swept the United States. This article explains the wax and eventual wane of state efforts to increase the number of at‐will employees at the expense of the population of fully protected merit system employees. Using an event history approach to explain this policy diffusion with state‐level variables, the author shows that electoral competition and gubernatorial powers are the most significant determinants of this kind of policy diffusion. Whereas previous literature concluded that these reforms ceased spreading because the new programs were failing to create the promised governmental efficiency, this article argues that the institutional conditions for these human resource management policies have been less propitious in recent years. The article signifies an important contribution in that it brings civil service reform back into the scope of policy diffusion literature and identifies political insights into a perpetually important question.

To what extent has direct democracy, specifically the ballot initiative process, served to substitute for perceived deficiencies of representative democracy in the United States? Despite extensive literatures on both direct democracy and democratic representation, there exist very few direct evaluations of the interplay between the two. I examine whether variation in the frequency of a state's initiative use is related to the extent to which that state's representative institutions lack electoral competition. I find that initiative states with a higher percentage of uncontested elections for representative office see more initiative use than states with more competitive elections, conditional on the ideological divergence between citizens and legislators. The results contribute much to our understanding of the processes driving cycles of initiative use and identify a tangible consequence of the presence of misrepresentative state institutions. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

To what extent has direct democracy, specifically the ballot initiative process, served to substitute for perceived deficiencies of representative democracy in the United States? Despite extensive literatures on both direct democracy and democratic representation, there exist very few direct evaluations of the interplay between the two. I examine whether variation in the frequency of a state's initiative use is related to the extent to which that state's representative institutions lack electoral competition. I find that initiative states with a higher percentage of uncontested elections for representative office see more initiative use than states with more competitive elections, conditional on the ideological divergence between citizens and legislators. The results contribute much to our understanding of the processes driving cycles of initiative use and identify a tangible consequence of the presence of misrepresentative state institutions.

This article examines the implementation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in three states: Massachusetts, Georgia, and Ohio. It examines the effectiveness of four theoretical driving forces in explaining implementation using a multiple case study analysis. Data were compiled using legislative histories, key informant interviews, public record, and media content analysis and were analyzed using a triangulation of sources. Findings suggest that the driving forces as conceptualized in the literature are only partially helpful when examining the implementation of federal redistributive health policy in these states. A pursuit of rationality approach was the most explanatory of the driving forces followed by an organizational‐policy fit when there was limited capacity to implement new policy. Overall, implementation was found to be more related to state‐level capacity and the state's previous programmatic experiences. Policy innovation was more likely to occur when capacity was high and where goals agreement drove the process.

Theory suggests that Congress should delegate more policymaking authority to the bureaucracy under unified government, where lawmakers are less worried about the president orchestrating "bureaucratic drift." Yet, all unified governments come to an end, making broad delegations potentially advantageous to future lawmaking coalitions ("coalitional drift"). We seek to assess how lawmakers simultaneously limit the risk of each of these pitfalls of delegation. Our answer is rooted in Congress's ability to spur agency rulemaking activity under unified government. Specifically, we expect statutes passed under unified government to require agencies to issue regulations quickly and for enacting coalitions to use oversight tools to influence agency policy choices. Such "proximate oversight" allows coalitions to cement policy decisions before a new election changes the configuration of preferences within Congress and the executive branch. We assess our argument using unique data on both congressional rulemaking deadlines (1995–2014) and the speed with which agencies issue regulations (1997–2014).

Research stresses that congressional committees increase their oversight of the bureaucracy during divided government. We extend this research by developing an explanation, rooted in a more dynamic view of policymaking, for why Congress would sometimes conduct vigorous oversight under unified control as well. In short, committees seem to engage in what we call "retrospective oversight" and take advantage of newly friendly executive administration to refocus existing policy made under a past opposition president. We assess our perspective using two separate sources of data on oversight hearings spanning more than 60 years and find support for our claims regarding retrospective oversight.