Hye Young You (Alesina Seminar)

See the seminar's full schedule here: Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy

Today's Speaker

Hye Young You (Princeton), "Bureaucrats in Congress: The Politics of Interbranch Information Sharing"

Abstract

Congress often relies on bureaucrats’ information for policy production. However, scholars lack an empirical understanding of what drives information sharing between bureaucrats and legislators. We argue that the partisan alignment between a bureaucrat and legislator determines the amount and type of information transmitted. Using new comprehensive data on bureaucratic witnesses in committee hearings, as well as a new measure of the informational content of testimonies, we show that less analytical information is transmitted between a bureaucrat and legislator pair when the legislator is a presidential out-partisan than a co-partisan, and that this effect is heightened when the bureaucrat is a political appointee. At the aggregate hearing level, the collective amount of analytical information from bureaucrats is lower under divided government than unified government but is offset by the analytical information from non-bureaucratic witnesses. These dynamics provide a nuanced understanding of the information transmission between bureaucrats and Congress.

Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.

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See the seminar's full schedule at the Alesina Seminar page.

All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.