Legislative Oversight Processes In U.S. States James D. Harder

more cracking the whip, but when we mismanage money no one get fired To answeryour question, we don’t conduct oversight. (Committee Staff, TX06)As these anecdotes illustrate, in U.S. states, the rationale and importance of legislative oversightis clear. Legislative oversight seeks to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of publicorganizations and their use of public resources. Yet states’ capacity to perform oversight is lessclear. Limits on time, resources and professionalism within the legislative institution, especiallyat the state level, presents real constrains to legislatures’ capacity to perform oversight. Thisdissertation explores how states reconcile the need for oversight with the limitations placed onits practice.Research QuestionsThis logic forms the foundation of this dissertation’s two research questions. First, I aimto produce greater understanding of how state legislative institutions conduct oversight underdiffering levels of legislative professionalism. This takes a grounded research approach thatconducts in-person interviews to examine how scholarly concepts function in practice. The firstresearch question asks:How do state legislatures cope with variable levels of professionalism to produce legislativeoversight?This requires that I include states from the spectrum of differing levels of professionalism, aswell as differences across other traits, to ascertain the ways that the legislative institutionsmitigate the constraints of professionalism to produce oversight.As a secondary aim, I seek to explore the importance of relationships and informalprocesses in the oversight process. The distinction between informal and formal processes islargely empirical. In practice, stakeholders move fluidly between the two. Further, informal and2

formal processes have a relationship similar to a binary star. At the heart of understanding each,and their connection to each other, is unearthing how actors perform these functionscollaboratively. This takes the perspective of the individual to understand how stakeholdersnavigate through legislative oversight networks. To this end, the second research questionexplores:How do stakeholders develop relationships and use informal processes to achieve goals in thestate legislative oversight process?This question is primarily concerned with asking stakeholders about how formal actions likecommittee meetings, statutory action, and requests for information are complimented byinformal actions like persuasion, reputation, and underlying, sometimes termed latent, forms ofoversight.It is difficult to resolve the discrepancy between the stated importance of legislativeoversight and the institutional limitations to producing oversight. Interviewees throughout thisresearch unequivocally spoke of their responsibilities in oversight, frequently lamenting theirinability to devote more time and resources to oversight. This contradiction pervades theinterviews in this research and draws attention to the importance of perspective. A stakeholder’sviewpoint, area of interest, motivations, even current attitude can lead to fluctuations in theways that individuals perceive and make sense of experience. Throughout this dissertation Iemphasize gaining a multiplicity of perspectives that inform how states merge the need foroversight and the constraints in pursuing it. This also draws attention to the need to have severalstates of variable levels of professionalism, as well as other historical, institutional, and normeddifferences, to help comprehend how differences vary across contexts.3

Research DesignI approach these questions through a qualitative, interview-based framework. Five statesare included in this research design: California, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and WestVirginia. These five states provide a mix of high-, hybrid-, and low-professionalism states.These states also provide a wealth of other differences, including political composition, thepresence of legislative term-limits, variable levels of legislative interim periods, and otherinstitutional differences that are more thoroughly discussed in Chapter 3.Interview selection was based on the need to provide a comprehensive set ofperspectives. This resulted in an inclusive group of stakeholders that included thirty-three totalinterviews (and one panel). This was comprised of ten legislators, nine legislative supportagency staff, eight committee staff, five legislative staff, and one executive departmentlegislative liaison. Interview selection grew to meet the evolving interests of the project. Forexample, in the first state, Virginia, interviews were conducted with four legislators. Theseinterviews demonstrated the need to include the perspective of staff and other stakeholders. Inthe next two states, California and Texas, the importance of independent review organizations(e.g., the California Auditor’s office, Texas Sunset Advisory Commission) emerged leading toadding interviews with these roles in two additional states, West Virginia and North Carolina.This allowed the research design to be reflexive to the ideas and concepts that were important tointerviewees letting the logic that initially motivated the project, drawn out of the scholarlyliterature, to be shaped by experience in the field.In this analysis, I choose not to quantify or measure legislative oversight outcomes.Judgment of this nature would have been difficult, if not impossible, to construct consistentlyacross cases. Instead I focus on how different stimuli and factors changed the processes and4

relationships within legislative oversight. This follows Huber & Shipan’s (2002) belief in themethod of comparative statics. They argue “we do not make claims about the level oftransparency, or control, or responsiveness, but we can make claims about the factors thatshould influence these levels.” Similarly, I do not make claims about the level or quality of astate’s legislative oversight, instead I attempt to isolate the factors that impact oversightoutcomes and processes.1However, that is not to say that interviewees don’t explain or insinuate that highperformance or quality. For example, one leadership staff member mused:There’s no set way to do any of this [oversight]. Good politicians know how to use yourhearings. Using threats like “I’m not going to approve your budget till you give me X.”It comes down to the raw talent of the politician [the best oversight is done bysomeone that is] always looking for opportunity and seizes it. Maxine Waters wasparticularly adept at this. In the area of working injuries she would flat out say “I’m notgonna approve your budget until you get this done” (Legislative Staff, CA14).This is an obvious judgment on quality, drawn from an individual perspective and their own setof motivations. In short, as a researcher I attempt to isolate my own judgments about oversightperformance and elevate instances where interviewees spoke to their own assessment oflegislative oversight outcomes.1Beyond this immediate rationale I argue that assessment of legislative oversight quality wouldbe almost impossible to construct. I am highly skeptical of authors that use metrics likecommittee hearings, administrative review, and statutory/Constitutional powers (e.g., legislativeveto, sunset laws) to rank or evaluate legislative oversight outcomes.5

In each state that I visited I encountered contrasting interviews. This comprised bothhigh-quality oversight actors that deeply understood the first and second level ramifications ofoversight processes and people that struggled to formulate basic definitions of what legislativeoversight is. Several interviewees had obviously thought critically about their role in bringingabout oversight and how it was advantageous to achieving their broader legislative goals.Conversely, there were people that thought legislative oversight was an executive function andhad not consciously/intentionally conducted oversight to date.For instance, at the beginning of an interview in California I sat down and quipped“Let’s talk legislative oversight.” The legislative staff interviewee immediately jumped backwith “I assume you’re gonna be talking about term limits. Term limits destroyed oversight. It’stotally ridiculous” (CA06). Term limits, though imposed in 1990, were on the minds of nearlyevery Californian I spoke to. As the above quote illustrates, members of the legislativeinstitution have useful and informed insights into the work they do. These insights are reflectiveabout the broader legislative institution and, though only indirectly, are often deeply related tothe scholarly literature. Similarly, though interviewees were unaware of the scholarly literature,they frequently were cognizant of how phenomena interacted in practice.In many ways this comes from the multiple perspectives that legislators embody. Oneoutgoing Assemblyman who had chaired multiple committees, used to work in a Californiaexecutive department, and had been a long-serving City Council member. He exclaimed:Oversight is a critical function. Once you pass a bill it’s left in the hands of others Inlocal government you have a quasi-administrative role in the practice of laws. In thelegislature, I have no authority or ability to say “here’s how we want the lawadministered” When I write a bill into law I know what I mean, but when I reflect6

back on my days as a state administrator I wonder what their interpretation will be. Youthink it’s crystal clear, but it might not be so when others look at it you’re dependenton translations (Legislator, CA10).Another junior Assemblyman who had previously worked as a legislative staffer remarked“Often the threat of legislation is more effective than the legislation itself That’s why I givelean time to get in line” (Legislator, CA11). An incoming Assemblyman understood theramifications of the state’s reformed term-limit system, which decreased the service cap from14 to 12 years, but allows members to complete their entire service in one chamber:The potential my class has to create more oversight, which has fallen to the wayside.We can build the authority to really do oversight because it really requires multipletouch points over the full implementation of a bill. Longevity allows more explorationof the rationale (Legislator, CA07).These three members each recognized important themes in the legislative oversight scholarship:implementation and the need for rule review, latent oversight, and the erosion of oversightbrought on by term limits (respectively). Their capacity to identify and articulate these broadlyaccepted concepts in the scholarly literature confirms much of the work in the existing literatureon state legislatures and oversight.Interviewing individuals drawn from multiple perspectives throughout the legislativeprocess provides a basis to generate causal arguments for how characteristics affect the broaderlegislative institution. For example, institutional arrangements employed in multiple states (e.g.,professionalized program evaluation staff) can offer understanding of how similarities and7

dissimilarities manifest into processes across states. Within states, the confirmation of certainphenomena or processes functioned bolsters the internally quality of the conclusions in thisstudy. This produced both confirmation of existing theories, and in some cases stimulatespromising new ideas that need to be explored by future scholars.Scholarly ContributionsAs stated above, this research confirms several phenomenon in the current scholarshipon state legislatures. For instance, a primary contribution of this project is corroboration of thenegative impact of term-limits on professionalism. In the state of California, interviewees spokeof the negative externalities that term limits present to the advocacy and practice of oversightwithin the legislative institution. This validates earlier scholars work on the negative influenceof term-limits on professionalism and the aggregate legislature. Further, the observations in thisresearch create a direct linkage between term limits and the erosion in the quality of legislativeoversight itself. This establishes a clear connection between secondary effects of term limits(e.g., lack of tenure in legislators) and its impact of oversight (the need for more direction andownership from staff on oversight matters).Similarly, this research extends the burgeoning work on the importance of state andfederal independent review organizations. The importance of legislative support organizationsin conducting oversight, especially in low professionalism states with long legislative interimsis profound. Stakeholders from an array of perspectives expounded on the importance of highlyprofessionalized staff with a clear mandate for autonomous action that resided in independentreview organizations like the Texas Legislative Budget Board and Virginia Joint LegislativeAudit and Review Commission. This provides a foundation for further exploration of how8

legislative support organizations like these in states, and the Government Accountability Officeat the federal level, play a role in how oversight operates.Another important contribution of this research was reexamining a definition forlegislative oversight. The majority of interviewees employed nearly textbook definitions oflegislative oversight including committee hearings, review of gubernatorial administration, andother reviews that sought to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of government operations.However, many interviewees defined legislative oversight as a nuanced and open-endedprocess. Numerous participants also discussed a multiplicity of actions that fell into what theyconsidered to be oversight. Along these lines, two interviewees contended:Oversight has many forms even things like critical hearing, listening, and getting toknow the issues are important oversight features. (Support Agency Staff

area of limited prior scholarship. The findings of this research demonstrate that legislative oversight is a low priority of legislative actors. Consequently, the rationale for and practice of legislative oversight is largely based on the context within the specific state. Individual