Leavitt, Claire. 2024. “Good Governance and the Partisan Wars: The Effects of Divided Government on Administrative Problem-Solving and Oversight Agenda-Setting in Congress.” Forthcoming in Political Science Quarterly.
Congress’ constitutional responsibility to oversee and investigate the executive branch of government demands that instances of waste, fraud and abuse in the administrative state be checked, via both legislation and non-legislative committee hearings. In this article, I establish an oversight agenda for Congress using the non-partisan Government Accountability Office’s biennial identification of the most vulnerable federal agencies and programs; I then assess whether and how government-wide partisanship affects Congress’ ability to address this slate of issues. I find that, when government is divided, Congress is more legislatively productive on high-risk issues, and the House of Representatives is more likely to prioritize investigative hearings on high-risk issues. My results suggest a silver lining to the reality of partisan agenda control: pre-existing administrative problems identified by well-positioned and well-informed observers at GAO may get more attention when there is a partisan incentive for the legislature to investigate an opposition-controlled government.
Kriner, Douglas and Claire Leavitt. 2023. “Foreign Policy Oversight in the Obama and Trump Eras.” In Peace, War, and Partnership: Congress and the Military since World War II, ed. William Taylor. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. Available at: https://www.tamupress.com/book/ 9781648431371/peace-war-and-partnership/.
Covering the period from World War II through the Trump presidency, Peace, War, and Partnership: Congress and the Military since World War II unpacks the vital and dynamic relationship between Congress and the military, two entities that have worked together, at times with different purposes, to solve myriad important issues impacting the United States in both peace and war. Congress and the military have had their periods of cooperation. However, they have also had alternating periods of resistance to each other, based on distinct conceptions of national interests and divergent strategies. Their partnership has been a symbiotic relationship in which one entity or the other has ebbed and flowed in power depending on the circumstances. They have altered each other in far-reaching ways and transformed American society as a result of their liaisons. Peace, War, and Partnership analyzes the significant, powerful, and central relationship between Congress and the military. It investigates intersections of policy, politics, and society to theorize the impact of this relationship on the United States in the modern era. This work also offers a better understanding of earlier attempts by policy makers in Congress and the military to provide national security, contextualizing highly relevant current issues such as military service, proliferation, foreign intervention, national security, joint operations, diplomacy, alliances, mobilization, post-conflict resolution, citizenship, and military innovation. It illuminates crucial questions involving military policies in American democracy, and their sway on America historically and today, sparking and informing public debate about its implications now and for the future.
Mettler, Suzanne and Claire Leavitt. 2019. “Public Policy and Political Dysfunction: The Policyscape, Policy Maintenance, and Oversight.” In Can America Govern Itself?, eds. Lee, Frances and Nolan McCarty. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108667357.
We provide an overview of the concept of the “policyscape,” a dense network of policies that structure the current political order, and then assess its relationship with four aspects of American institutional behavior: the creation of new policies; the maintenance of existing policies and programs; policy “thickening” that may lead to additional gridlock and dysfunction during what is an already laborious lawmaking process; and the monitoring of the current policyscape through executive oversight in Congress. We address, among other questions, why new and broad-reaching policy reforms have been scarce in recent years; why Congress has failed to update extant policies in accordance with social, economic, political, and technological developments; and how partisan polarization has affected Congress’ ability to oversee policy implementation and hold the executive branch accountable for administrative failures.
Christenson, Dino P., Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Claire Leavitt. 2016. “Judicial Networks.” In Oxford Handbook of Political Networks, eds. Victor, Jennifer Nicoll, Alexander H. Montgomery and Mark Lubell. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Available at: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190228217.013.20.
We present a comprehensive summary of the networks of actors and concepts in the courts with particular attention to those that are thought to influence political outcomes across branches. We explore burgeoning literatures in networks of legal precedents, issues, judges, clerks, jurists, lawyers, and legal briefs. In addition to discussing the frequently employed tools and measures used to study these networks, we describe the varying processes of data collection. In doing so we highlight the relative strengths and weaknesses of the current literature and lay out an agenda for further research in the courts and beyond.