Jeremiah Cha (APRW)

Today's Speaker

Jeremiah Cha (Department of Government), "The President and the Clerics: Interbranch Bargaining and Subcommittee Influence in Federal Appropriations"

Abstract

Since the birth of modern political science, legislative committees have been celebrated for their contributions to the making of public policy. Despite elegant theoretical scholarship that characterizes the nature of committee policymaking and rich qualitative research that documents the committee policymaking process, whether and how committees affect policy outcomes is largely unclear. We study committee influence in the context of inter-branch bargaining over appropriations. In contrast with previous work, which relies on a relatively small sample of budgetary line items, we introduce a comprehensive dataset of presidential budget requests and congressional appropriations for each subunit of the federal government from 1971 to 2020 (n = 10,800), drawing from annual reports from the Office of Management and Budget. Connecting these data with the composition of the subcommittee exercising jurisdiction over each appropriation line item, we test the hypothesis that presidents are less successful in realizing their preferred budgetary outcomes as a subcommittee is more ideologically distant from the president. Results from our within-subunit empirical analyses substantiate this expectation. Our findings provide new evidence about how the composition of legislative committees affects policy outcomes and illustrate a mechanism through which Congress can limit the president's agenda-setter advantages in budgetary politics.

The American Politics Research Workshop (Gov 3004) meets all academic year, Tuesdays, 12:00 - 2:00 PM, in CGIS K354. This workshop presents an opportunity for graduate students and Harvard faculty to present and receive feedback on their current research. The workshop highlights key theoretical and empirical findings from Harvard affiliates on topics related to American politics. 

All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.