Alan Wiseman
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Office: 2186A Derby Hall
154 N. Oval Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43210
(614) 292-8196
email: wiseman.69@osu.edu
Working Papers In Circulation
Delegation
and Positive-Sum Bureaucracies
I develop a formal model to investigate why Congress would choose to delegate authority to an agency whose actions can be controlled, ex post, by a President with divergent policy preferences. Because the President and the Congress might find different policies to be salient to their constituencies, I demonstrate that executive review of agency rulemaking can benefit both branches of government, relative to legislative delegation without the possibility of such review. In trying to undermine the impacts of executive oversight, agencies propose policies that could benefit Congress if the President chose not to intervene in agency policymaking. If the President does intervene, it will establish policy outcomes that can be more desirable than what would ensue absent such review. This joint-desirability of executive review is more likely when congressional and presidential policy preferences are relatively aligned, and when congressional and agency policy preferences are relatively divergent. Executive review can increase social welfare depending on the relative effectiveness of the President’s oversight of agency policymaking. These results provide insight for why institutions such as the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) continue to survive in a separation of powers system despite their potential to advantage one branch of government at the expense of the other.
Legislative
Effectiveness in Congress (With Craig Volden)
In this paper, we argue that members of Congress differ in their abilities to guide their sponsored and cosponsored bills through the legislative process. We discuss the prospects for generating systematic measures of effectiveness, and carry out the construction of such measures for the 106th House of Representatives. Analysis of these measures reveals significant limitations on members of the minority party, on ideological extremists, and on women and minorities in their attempts to advance their legislative agendas. Further intriguing patterns of effectiveness at different stages of the legislative process emerge with important implications for theories of committee deference, party leadership, seniority, and the electoral connection. We discuss the prospects of extending our approach to include both houses of the 93rd to the 110th Congresses, to include amendment activities, and to account for the importance of bills, their referral committees, and their areas of substantive interest. Finally, we argue that these new measures can be important tools to address major questions of legislative behavior.
A
Theory of Government Regulation and Self-Regulation with the Specter
of Nonmarket Threats (With Craig Volden)
We develop a game-theoretic model wherein government establishes a mandate for product quality, without possessing effective enforcement abilities, and a firm chooses whether to comply with the government standard for quality. After bringing a product to market, the firm faces the possibility of nonmarket reactions by interests such as trial attorneys and consumer activists, who might sue in the case of product-induced damages, or reveal the firm’s quality choice to consumers through investigatory and publicity activities. Equilibrium results identify conditions under which firms will engage in meaningful self-regulation, by either voluntarily selecting a high quality standard for their product, independent of government mandate, or comply with a government mandate for high quality, even though government lacks enforcement power. Our results have direct implications for how political actors might choose to regulate certain industries based on the market value of different product qualities, the danger associated with various products, and the nature of the interest group environment.
Information,
Accountability, and the Politics of Investigations (With Kenneth W.
Shotts)
We develop a game-theoretic model that identifies the conditions under which a political executive such as a president can exert control over an appointee who decides whether to investigate possible legal violations. Because investigations are a necessary precondition for law enforcement, the politically-appointed investigator exerts significant influence over whether, and the extent to which, laws and rules can be enforced in a meaningful way. We demonstrate that the availability of a randomly drawn replacement investigator can give investigators incentives to act in ways consistent with executive preferences, particularly when the investigator's preferences diverge from those of the executive. However, the availability of a random replacement can induce some types of relatively executive-friendly appointees to behave dogmatically, even deviating from an executive's preferred actions, to avoid replacement. We identify how the availability of a clear ideologue as a possible replacement can induce greater congruity between executive preferences and investigator actions without inducing similar pathologies. Our results have broad implications for the politics of law and regulatory enforcement in the United States and other developed democracies.
