The Influence of Divided Government on Policy-Making
and Bureaucratic Autonomy
John D. Huber
Columbia University
Charles R. Shipan
University of Iowa
and
Madelaine Pfahler
University of Michigan
August 14, 1998
Prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, Boston, MA, September 3-6, 1998. The authors would like to thank
Maureen Comfort and Todd Austin for excellent research assistance and The Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation for financial support.
Abstract
Most studies of legislative control of agencies have focused on national level institutions.
In this paper we undertake a comparative study of political control by looking at state
legislatures and the control of Medicaid policy. We develop and test a theory about the
conditions under which state legislatures should opt to rely on detailed legislation (ex
ante control) in order to limit the discretion of agencies. Our theoretical argument
demonstrates that several factors can influence the use of ex ante control and that these
factors need to be considered interdependently. More specifically, we look at the
interaction between institutional context, legislative capacity, and the availability of
alternative mechanisms for control. In addition, we demonstrate that different types of
divided government should have different effects on ex ante control. We then test this
theory using a dataset consisting of all state-level bills in the area of Medicaid and health
policy from 1995 and 1996.
Introduction
It would be difficult to overstate the role that political bureaucracies play in
policymaking. Bureaucracies implement policies that legislatures have enacted, and they create
policies where legislatures have avoided doing so. They can act to regulate industries, to
distribute benefits and costs, and to redistribute wealth. They tackle policy areas as disparate as
telecommunications, the environment, transportation, and public health. Bureaucratic
involvement in policymaking is a pervasive condition of modern political life.
Given the important role that bureaucracies play in policymaking, it is not surprising that
political scientists have long sought to understand the relationship between legislatures and
agencies. In particular, scholars have attempted to ascertain whether, to what extent, and under
what conditions legislators influence the actions of agencies. Understanding this relationship is
essential to democratic theory, as it focuses attention on the legitimacy of the role played by
unelected policymakers in a representative democracy. Furthermore, it sheds light on the actions,
abilities, and motivations of legislators.
Much of the focus of this literature has been on the U.S. Congress, and much of the
debate has centered on the question of whether in fact Congress controls the bureaucracy.1 This
is a difficult question to answer, as it requires fairly precise information on legislator preferences
and agency outputs. But while settling the empirical issue has been difficult, in addressing this
question, scholars have clarified several strategies for control, including the use of budget
processes,2 routine ex post (or contemporaneous) oversight3, and ex ante mechanisms whereby
legislators use legislation itself to structure agency decision-making processes.4
1
See Huber and Shipan (1998) for a review of recent theoretical developments in this literature. Earlier
reviews can be found in Ogul (1976), Rockman (1984) and Ogul and Rockman (1990).
2
Recent theoretical treatments include Banks (1989) and Bendor, Taylor, and Van Gaalen (1987).
3
See, for example, Aberbach (1990) and Weingast and Moran (1983).
4
Examples of research focusing on ex ante control include McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast (1987, 1989),
Drotning (1992), McNollgast (1992), Moe (1990a), and Macey (1992). For overviews and critiques of this
approach, see Robinson (1989), Hill and Brazier (1990), Mashaw (1990), and Spence (1997).
Recently, scholars have begun to develop and test arguments about how features of the
political environment influence strategies for ex ante and contemporaneous control. Epstein and
O’Halloran (1994), for example, develop a model which provides a logic for why legislators will
be more likely to limit agency discretion during divided government. They further develop and
test these ideas in Epstein and O’Halloran (n.d.). Bawn (1995) looks at a similar set of issues,
focusing primarily on tradeoffs between taking advantage of the expertise that bureaucrats
possess and controlling agency drift. Her theory indicates that the optimal level of discretion that
legislators give to agencies will be a function of a systematic interaction between the technical
and procedural uncertainty that legislators face.
Although this research has done a great deal to improve our understanding of delegation
processes in Congress, it suffers from limited variation in potential explanatory factors. A focus
on Congress does allow for variation across time. However, it allows for little variation in many
of the institutional details – the institutional context – that we will argue play a significant role in
determining the design of delegation. Put differently, the parochial focus of this theoretical
literature has made it difficult to address more general issues about how the structure of decisionmaking institutions in the political environment influences strategies for legislative control.
Ignoring the broader institutional context for political decision-making seems unwise. It
seems likely, for example, that if the political institutions in a particular system facilitate ex post
control, that ex ante mechanisms should be less important in that system. Similarly, the impact of
variables like divided government and technical uncertainty on discretion strategies should not be
the same everywhere, but should depend on factors such as the institutional resources that
legislators possess. More generally, we should expect the importance of the control strategies
that have been identified in the previous literature to vary with specific features of a system’s
political institutions.
Our primary objective in this paper is to develop and test comparative arguments about
how several types of political institutions influence the propensity of legislators to limit agency
2
discretion in the legislation that they adopt. Our analysis, then, focuses explicitly on ex ante
means of control, with the objective being to understand when, and under what conditions,
legislators will attempt to spell out in detail what actions bureaucracies should or should not take.
The explanatory variables that we wish to draw attention to can be grouped roughly into three
categories. First, there is the political context, which captures whether legislators will have
incentives to engage in efforts to limit agency discretion. The political context has often been the
central focus in studies of Congress, with scholars looking in particular at conflict between the
legislature and the president (which varies over time). The second two categories we examine,
however, are generally fairly constant within systems over time, but vary across systems.
Professional capacity influences whether the legislature has the ability to engage in ex ante forms
of control. And alternative institutional arrangements provide legislators with alternative (and
usually ex post) means of influencing the actions of agencies.
We argue that all of these factors should not be treated as having merely independent
effects, but rather that they are important in conjunction with each other. The political context
may have an independent effect on a legislature’s use of ex ante control, as it can provide the
incentive for a legislature to engage in such control. But the extent to which the political context
influences ex ante control is also dependent on whether or not alternative institutional
arrangements exist for exercising legislative control over agencies. In other words, legislators’
decisions about whether or not to engage in ex ante control are dependent on whether they think
they can rely on alternative means of control.5 Similarly, the extent to which the political context
influences ex ante control depends on the legislature’s professional capacity. Some legislatures,
for example, might want to engage in ex ante control, but may simply lack the political capacity
5
The only study that explicitly looks at the trade off between ex ante and ex post means of control is Bawn
(1997). In this study, Bawn identifies which members of Congress are likely to favor ex ante control and
which are likely to favor ex post control. For a discussion of how ex ante control might affect ex post
control, see Olson (1996).
3
do so. Thus, professional capacity can be viewed as a necessary condition for the legislature to
engage in ex ante control.
To test our theoretical argument about the conditions under which legislators will use ex
ante controls, we rely on a novel data set that looks at all bills related to health care and Medicaid
enacted by U.S. states over a two year period.6 The data includes considerable institutional
variation, as states differ greatly in terms of the three categories discussed above – political
context, legislative capabilities, and alternative institutional arrangements. By looking at a single
policy area across all states, we have variation on the variables in these categories, which allows
us to test the extent to which these factors influence the use of ex ante control. Thus, this dataset
allows us to avoid a limitation of most previous work on legislative control, which has been
limited to examining only the institutional variation that occurs across time.7
The paper proceeds as follows. In the following section, we spell out our theoretical
argument about how different variables will affect ex ante control. In so doing, we attempt to
refine arguments about the impact of divided government on ex ante control, distinguishing in
particular between divided government where the legislature is itself divided, and divided
government where the legislature is unified. We also spell out how the various forms of divided
government will influence legislative strategies to limit discretion in various institutional
contexts. After describing the theoretical argument, we discuss why Medicaid health policy is an
appropriate area in which to test our arguments. We then present our empirical tests. The
conclusion summarizes the main results and discusses ideas for future work.
When will legislators attempt to limit agency discretion?
Our argument is a simple one about costs and benefits. Limiting agency discretion by specifying
precise policy details in legislation is costly to legislators. Since there are alternative strategies
6
Below we spell out the advantages of focusing on this data.
4
for controlling bureaucrats that do not require ex ante legislative effort, the amount of detail that
legislators place in legislation should depend on the magnitude of these costs, and on the expected
benefits of paying them. If autonomous bureaucrats are likely to generate policy outcomes that
legislators desire, then using legislation to micro-manage agency behavior is unnecessary. In
other words, because it provides few benefits, micro-management should be infrequent when
bureaucrats and legislators have similar preferences. If, on the other hand, autonomous
bureaucrats are unlikely to act in the interests of legislators, then there can be a benefit to using
legislation to micro-manage agencies. Whether legislators engage in micro-management should
depend on the costs of doing so. If the costs of writing detailed instructions are sufficiently low,
legislators will be more likely to spell out in legislation the precise details of how the agency
should make and implement policy. As these costs increase, such efforts to limit agency
discretion should decline.
Stated abstractly, the argument is very simple. The key, of course, is to specify how the
political and institutional environments affect the expected costs and benefits of limiting agency
discretion. That is the task that will occupy most of this section.
Divided government and legislative control of agencies
We begin by asking, “What factors should affect the benefits to legislators of ex ante
control?” The answer depends largely on a comparison of the expected outcomes with and
without ex ante efforts to control. Previous research, of course, has provided an important
foundation for answering this question, focusing our attention on both the preferences of the
actors and the technical complexity inherent to the policy choice.
The benefits of granting discretion should obviously increase as the objectives of
legislators and agents converge (Bawn 1995, Epstein and O’Halloran 1994, n.d.). If legislators
7
Ideally one would have data over time and across political units. In this paper we have only crosssectional data, although the collection of data on a longer time series is in progress.
5
and bureaucrats want to achieve the same outcomes, then ceteris paribus, legislators will want to
give bureaucrats substantial autonomy (because if bureaucrats are given limited discretion, they
will have fewer incentives to gain expertise, and fewer opportunities to use it). If legislators and
bureaucrats want to achieve different outcomes, on the other hand, legislators will want to grant
bureaucrats less autonomy, and instead specify in legislation the details of the decision
procedures to be followed, and the outcomes to be pursued.
We therefore need to understand the factors that affect the degree of congruence between
legislative and agency preferences. One obvious factor is divided government. Divided
government should influence the benefits of limiting agency discretion because executives
typically have a strong impact over the preferences and actions of leaders in executive agencies.
Thus, if the legislature is of one party, and the executive of another, we should expect the
legislature and agency to have more divergent preferences than when executive and legislature
are of the same party. And if the preferences of the agency diverge from those of legislators, then
the immediate benefits of specifying details in legislation should be larger than if these
preferences converge. Epstein and O’Halloran (n.d.) provide evidence to support this argument in
the U.S. Congress.8
In bicameral systems, however, divided government can take one of two forms. It may
be the case that during divided government, a unified legislature opposes the chief executive. In
other words, one party controls both chambers of the legislature but does not control the
executive. We call this divided-unified government. Alternatively, it may be the case that the
legislature is itself divided, with one chamber being of the same party as the chief executive, and
the other chamber being of a different party. This we call divided-divided government. It is
8
Hamm and Robertson (1981) also provide evidence about the impact of divided government on ex post
efforts by state legislators to control agencies.
6
important to distinguish between these two forms of divided government, as the costs to
legislators of adopting ex ante control strategies will differ across the two.9
The legislature, of course, cannot unilaterally determine the amount of agency discretion
that exists in the acts that become law. The chief executive typically must sign legislation in
order for it to take effect. And in exactly the situation in which the legislature most wants to
write detailed legislation – divided government – the chief executive most wants to avoid detailed
legislation, preferring instead that the agency be free to do his or her bidding, relatively
unconstrained by the legislature.
The chief executive should accept any legislative proposals that lead to an outcome that
he or she prefers to the status quo. This may often be a rather large set, and during dividedunified government, the unified legislature opposing the executive can choose any policy that it
likes from this set of acceptable policies. But during divided-divided government, the two
chambers must engage in bargaining and compromise in efforts to choose the outcome that will
ultimately be proposed to the chief executive. The chamber that shares the same preferences as
the executive during divided-divided government will have few incentives to include language in
legislation that constrains agencies, and will often have incentives to leave agencies
unconstrained (to take advantage of agency expertise). It should therefore fight attempts by the
chamber that opposes the chief executive to include ex ante control language. Thus, although we
should expect some increase in ex ante legislative control over bureaucrats during any type of
divided government (because the chamber opposing the executive has some bargaining leverage),
it should be more difficult for the legislature to impose ex ante control during divided-divided
government than during divided-unified government.
In sum, the impact of divided government on ex ante efforts to control agencies should
depend on which type of divided government exists. Such ex ante efforts should always be larger
9
Clarke (1998) also differentiates between these two types of divided government. He shows that
budgetary conflict between the legislature and the executive increases under divided government, but only
7
under any type of divided government than under unified government. But the legislature’s
ability to use legislation as an instrument for control should be greater during divided-unified
government than during divided-divided government.
Professional capacity, divided government, and ex ante control.
Should these arguments about divided government be independent of the institutional
context? Research on American state legislatures suggests that that answer should be “No.” In
particular, this research suggests that legislative professionalization, or legislative capacity,
shapes relationships between legislators and agencies. Rosenthal (1981), for example, finds that
oversight efforts increase with legislative staff and the time available for work. And Hamm and
Robertson (1981) find that legislative professionalization influences oversight strategies. 10
Professional capacity should also be crucial for engaging in ex ante control. Legislators
must have the ability to write the legislation that will constrain the agency in the ways that
legislators desire. Even if the political environment indicates substantial benefits from writing
detailed legislation, legislators will not do so unless they can afford the costs. That is, any time
legislators are deciding how much detail to put into legislation, they need to consider the costs of
doing so.
One type of cost is informational. If legislators attempt to use legislation effectively to
give precise instructions to agencies about what sorts of policies to adopt – that is, if they attempt
to limit agency discretion in the implementation process – then legislators need information and
expertise about which specific policies will yield desired outcomes. They also will need to know
which specific groups need to be consulted, and how conflicts between these groups should be
resolved. The cost of obtaining this information will be a function of the legislators’ knowledge
and expertise.
when the legislature is unified (i.e., what we call divided-unified).
10
A good overview of legislative professionalization can be found in Squire (1992).
8
Knowledge and expertise may depend on experience – legislators who have been around
a long time may learn important things. Information costs may also be a function of the
legislative institutions themselves. If legislators have extended staffs, it will obviously be easier
for them to gather information that is necessary for limiting discretion. And if the legislature is
highly institutionalized, with a large number of specialized committees and support staff, then it
will also be easier for the legislature to draft detailed legislation. So the ability of legislators to
write legislative details will often be due to factors regarding the professionalization of the
legislature itself.
Opportunity cost is also important. One type of opportunity cost is simply time, and in
particular the amount of time available to the legislature for conducting its business. If there is
plenty such time, then the costs of paying a great deal of attention to a particular issue will be
relatively low. But as the time available to discuss issues decreases, the opportunity cost of
spending a great deal of time on a particular issue will increase. If legislators decide to specify in
great detail what an agency should do in a specific policy area, they will be forced to spend less
time on other policy areas or on other legislative activities. On the other hand, if legislators
simply delegate responsibility over a policy to an agency, they will have more time to spend on
these other activities.
Another type of opportunity cost is one faced by individual legislators themselves. Not
all legislators can devote all of their professional energies to their legislative careers. Often
times, legislative careers are part time jobs that are relatively low paying. If an individual
legislator depends heavily for his or her livelihood on activities unrelated to being a legislator,
then the opportunity costs of devoting a great deal of attention to legislative responsibilities will
be relatively large. In such situations, legislators should be relatively less inclined to attempt to
micro-manage agencies.
These observations suggest that we should embed our arguments about divided
government into an institutional context that is shaped by the degree of professional capacity. In
9
particular, although divided government should always influence the benefits of ex ante control,
the ability of legislators to take advantage of these benefits should depend in large part on their
professional capabilities, conceptualized as informational resources and opportunity costs of
legislative effort. The greater these resources, and the lower the costs, the greater the (positive)
impact that divided government should have on legislative efforts to limit agency discretion.
And since the costs to the legislature of limiting agency discretion are smallest during dividedunified government, the impact of professional capacity on efforts to limit agency discretion
should be greater during divided-unified government than during divided-divided government.
Alternative institutions for legislative control of agencies.
Legislators, in weighing the costs and benefits of writing detailed legislation, must also
consider their alternative options for controlling agency behavior. As the costs of alternative
methods decline, legislators should be more willing to use these substitutes, and less willing to
pay the costs of limiting agency discretion in legislation itself. It is therefore important to
consider how the institutional context shapes the costs of alternative control strategies, and thus
the benefits of limiting discretion.
In this section, we consider three such alternatives: the role of the courts, legislative
review of agency rulemaking activities, and legislative influence over agency appointments.
Institutions that shape the reliability of these alternatives, we argue, should influence legislative
strategies vis-à-vis agency discretion. That is, there should be a substitution effect, with strategies
to limit discretion being influenced by the availability of alternative strategies for influencing
agencies. But this substitution effect should manifest itself only when there are incentives to
limit discretion (e.g., during divided government). Moreover, if legislative professionalization
affects the ability to limit discretion, then the substitution effect should increase with legislative
professionalization. We spell out these arguments below.
10
First, consider the role of the courts, and in particular the selection of judges. Scholars
have widely noted that legislators can use the courts as an ally in the quest to ensure compliant
agency behavior (Melnick 1994, Shipan 1997). If agencies try to adopt rules that are contrary to
the court's interpretation of the legislature's wishes, then the court can force the agency to change
its behavior. But whether such an ex post strategy for legislative control of agencies is reliable
depends on the preferences of the judiciary, which are largely influenced by institutional
arrangements. If the courts can be relied on to enforce the wishes of the legislature, then the
benefits of limiting agency discretion will be lower than in situations where the courts are
unlikely to side with the legislature and against the agency.
The key institution in this context is the method of selecting judges. Judges can be
chosen in a variety of ways, with some rules being more likely than others to result in judges that
have the same preferences as the legislature. In some of states in the U.S., for example, judges
are appointed by the governor, with little or no input from the legislature. During divided
government, this obviously will not result in judges that can be trusted by the legislature to do its
bidding. In other states, however, the legislature has a direct or indirect role in judge selection.
In general, we should expect that if the institutions for selecting judges favor the executive, the
opportunities for legislators to use judges to enforce legislative decision-making during divided
government should decline. The use of ex ante controls during divided government should
therefore be greater when the legislature plays little role in selecting judges.
Next, consider the ex post opportunities that legislators themselves have to review agency
activities. The argument here is straightforward. There exists considerable variation in the
opportunities that legislators have to influence the rules that agencies adopt during the policy
implementation process. If legislatures have a direct, institutionalized opportunity to instruct
agencies about the types of rules that they wish to have promulgated, and if legislatures have an
opportunity to veto or even amend and approve agency rules (as is possible in West Virginia),
then legislatures can obtain their desired outcomes ex post and the benefits of specifying precise
11
details in legislation will decline. If no such opportunities exist, then incentives to limit
discretion will increase. Thus, legislators should be less likely to use legislation to limit agency
discretion in situations where institutional arrangements permit legislators ex post opportunities to
influence agency behavior. Of course, such arguments only apply where legislators expect agents
to act contrary to their interest (e.g., during divided government).
Finally, consider agency appointments. This variable works somewhat differently than
the two previously discussed institutions, both of which are about ex post control of agency
behavior. Control of agency appointments is an ex ante strategy that influences the legislature’s
incentives to limit agency discretion in much the same way as divided government. Above we
argued that divided government should affect the benefits of ex ante efforts to control agencies
through its influence on the preferences of bureaucrats in executive agencies. But the influence
of divided government on agency preferences does not always depend exclusively on the
preferences of the chief executive. In some systems, the executive can proceed with agency
appointments rather autonomously, while in others the legislature can play an important role in
the process of choosing the personnel to head agencies. The impact of divided government on
agency discretion should therefore be influenced by the institutions specifying executive and
legislative roles in the appointment of legislative personnel. As the legislative role increases, the
benefits to legislators of limiting discretion during divided government should decline because
divergence between legislative and agency preferences should decline.
The legislature's power to approve agency appointments may not, one should recognize,
actually permit a great deal of control over the nature of agency appointees. After all, there is no
real status quo in such appointment games (McCarty and Razaghian 1998), and the executive
may therefore have considerable latitude, even when the legislature’s role appear large. The other
two alternative institutions for affecting control do not suffer this defect as they both allow ex
post influence over agency decision-making. We may therefore reasonably expect the
substitution effect to be strongest for the two ex post control mechanisms.
12
To this point, we have ignored the impact of legislative professionalization on the
substitution effect arguments. But like divided government, the impact of alternative methods for
agency control on legislators’ discretion strategies should depend in part on legislators’
professional capabilities. If these capabilities are low, then the impact of alternative possibilities
for control should not affect ex ante efforts (because ex ante efforts will be low regardless). But
as these capabilities increase, then ex ante efforts to control legislators should be smallest in
situations where alternative institutional arrangements permit ex post control.
We also have not discussed the impact of the two different types of divided government
on the substitution effect. Here we should expect the substitution effect to be strongest when the
costs of limiting agency discretion are largest. Since these costs are higher during divideddivided government than during divided-unified government, the substitution effects should be
largest during divided-divided government.
**
The hypotheses that emerged from the discussion in this section are summarized in Table
1. There are two important points to note about these hypotheses. First, our expectations about
legislative efforts to limit agency discretion always involve an interaction between the political
context, the professional capacity of the legislature, and the political institutions that shape
alternative strategies for control. The political context affects the need to limit discretion – if
legislators and bureaucrats wish to achieve the same objective (because, for example, government
is unified), then control of the agency is not problematic. Professional capacity affects the ability
to limit discretion – if divided government creates the need for control, legislators must have the
resources and ability to do so. And if the political environment and legislative capacity interact to
create incentives and possibilities for control, then the extent to which legislators seek to limit
discretion depends on whether alternative, ex post instruments of control exist. Limiting
discretion ex ante may be less important if it is possible to affect agency by these other means.
(Table 1 about here)
13
Second, when we think about divided government, we must be careful to specify the
precise type of divided government. The cost to legislators of limiting discretion is greater during
divided-divided government than during divided-unified government. Thus, all else equal,
legislative efforts to limit discretion will be greater during divided-unified government than
during divided-divided government. And the institutional substitution-effects should be strongest
during divided-divided government. The next task is to test these hypotheses.
Limiting agency discretion: Medicaid and state health policymaking
Our measure of ex ante efforts to limit agency discretion in a state is the total number of new
words that the state enacted into law in 1995-96 (in non-appropriations legislation) on issues
related to any aspect of medical care that is provided to Medicaid recipients. We therefore will be
analyzing a cross section of states following the 1994 election. In this section, we describe the
central substantive focus of our data – the Medicaid program – and we argue that the number of
words that legislators devote to this topic is a reasonable proxy for legislative efforts to limit
agency discretion (with more words implying more limits on discretion).
Why Medicaid and medical care?
We focus on health care and Medicaid for five reasons. First, Medicaid requires political
decision-making on a roughly similar set of issues in all states. The Medicaid program was
created by Title XIX of the Social Security Act in 1965. It is a jointly funded Federal-State
entitlement program that provides medical care to low income and certain needy populations.
Although the federal government sets broad eligibility and benefit guidelines, each state is
responsible for setting its own specific eligibility standards, and states have considerable
autonomy in developing their programs. Each state determines the scope of services available,
payment rates to providers, and methods for program administration. Consequently, there are
considerable differences in the programs across states. An individual who is eligible for Medicaid
14
in Minnesota, for instance, may not be eligible in Nevada, or may be eligible for a quite different
package of services. And a physician who provides Medicaid patients with services in Michigan
might receive compensation quite different from what a physician providing similar services in
Iowa might receive.
Second, in the 1980s and 1990s rising Medicaid expenditures, an increase in the number
of Medicaid eligibles, and a push for health care reform at the national level put Medicaid reform
at the top of state political agendas. According to the most recent Health Care Financing
Administration (HCFA) figures, total Medicaid program payments increased from $47.7 billion
dollars in 1987 to $152.9 billion dollars in 1996 (HCFA 1998). The number of individuals
eligible for Medicaid across all states also increased from 23.1 million in 1987 to 36.1 million in
1996 (HCFA 1998). Medicaid spending is of particular concern, however, not just because it is
increasing, but because it is becoming a larger share of the states’ total health care spending.
According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, Medicaid spending as a share of
state and local expenditures increased from 1.0 percent in 1966 to 5.7 percent in 1990
(Congressional Research Service 1993).
For state and local governments, Medicaid represents the single largest category of health
spending (Congressional Research Service 1993, p. 112). As might be expected, however, the
burden of Medicaid spending is not consistent across the states. In 1995, total Medicaid spending
as a percent of total state budgets ranged from a low of 6.1 in Alaska to a high of 38.2 in
Louisiana (Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured 1998). Most states fell within the
10 percent to 25 percent range. This cost pressure attracts the attention of legislators trying to
control spending and of interest groups wanting a share of the profits, both of which contribute to
Medicaid policy being an important agenda item. According to a House committee aide in the
Florida legislature, “the line-item this year for Medicaid HMOs alone is 800 million dollars,”
which gets “lots of attention from a lot of lobbyists. They all want a piece of it….[it] is micromanaged to death.”
15
In addition, events at the federal and state level have encouraged states to take up health
care and Medicaid reform efforts. After the unsuccessful attempt at national health care reform
and with the midterm 1994 Republican landslide election, policy makers wanting health care
reform have largely focused on the states (Sparer 1996, Leichter 1996, Schneider 1997). Several
states, including Tennessee, Hawaii, Oregon, Florida, Vermont, Massachusetts, Minnesota and
Washington had made efforts at major state health care reform by 1995, which helped to highlight
the role that the states could play in health system reform nationally. Furthermore, in 1993, the
Clinton administration issued new guidelines regarding waivers from federal rules. The outcome
of these guidelines, which were designed to streamline HCFA’s review process, was to encourage
states to reform their Medicaid programs (Schneider 1997). In sum, rising costs and a focus on
health care reform by the Clinton administration has put the reform of state health care systems,
especially of the Medicaid program, on state agendas in the 1990s. As a result, we are confident
that in a two-year cross section of data we have a large enough selection of bills that we will get a
reasonably accurate measure of legislative directives to agencies on this issue.
Third, the politics of Medicaid are contentious. Powerful interest groups representing
both providers and recipients are acutely interested in the vast amount of money at stake. Yet the
political situation is complicated by the fact that neither the provider nor recipient groups are
themselves homogeneous. Providers such as nursing homes, home-health care agencies,
community clinics, pharmacists, physicians, and hospitals all vie for available money, although
the degree to which each of these groups is interested in the Medicaid program in any state will
depend on the compensation offered to them. Recipients, including the elderly, disabled, and low
income families with children, desire comprehensive services. To muddy the landscape further,
with the move to managed care in some form in most states, managed care companies along with
traditional insurance companies have also entered the scene. The heterogeneity of these groups
means that Medicaid politics involves claimants with varying amounts of political and economic
resources (Kronebusch 1997). Therefore, the politics of Medicaid may vary from state to state
16
depending on the cohesiveness of groups, the resources available, the receptiveness of state
policymakers and the specific issue at hand. But the universal conflict of interest across states
guarantees heated political debate and differences in the objectives of the major political parties.
Fourth, Medicaid and health care politics present difficult informational problems to
legislators. Decisions regarding the Medicaid program are many and varied. Policymakers need to
decide on reimbursement levels for services. They need to determine eligibility guidelines,
including issues such as deciding which additional groups, outside the federal mandates, the state
wants to cover. There are regulatory issues for nursing homes and other care facilities. And there
are decisions about what types of providers should be allowed to provide Medicaid services.
When a state moves to Medicaid managed care, a whole new set of issues arises. Policymakers
need to decide which populations should be moved into managed care arrangements. They must
consider whether to implement managed care statewide or county by county. In order to secure
managed care arrangements, they must decide on a method for selecting managed care
organizations to provide services and negotiate how to educate and enroll the recipients in the
new program. These decisions cover a spectrum of informational needs. At the least, state
policymakers are interested in the effects of different financing and administrative arrangements
on the cost, quality, and availability of health care. Yet, each of these questions is huge in and of
itself. Thus, state lawmakers clearly face very real costs if they wish to micro-manage agency
behavior by adopting legislation that limits discretion.
Finally, state Medicaid agencies have a great deal of responsibility in administering
Medicaid programs. At a minimum, they are required to make detailed implementation and
management decisions. For example, they track eligibility and manage enrollment in the program,
they are responsible for payments to hospitals, physicians, pharmacists and managed care
organizations, and they may design and oversee the bidding the process for managed care
contracts. Yet the degree of discretion that agencies will have can be minimized or maximized
though legislative action. For example, in some states detailed decisions of how to move to
17
Medicaid managed care were made in the legislature, where details were spelled out in hundreds
of pages of substantive bill text. In other states, the legislature charged the agency with designing
and implementing the move. The law consisted of a few lines and granted close to complete
discretion to the agency. That Medicaid agencies have so much responsibility, but can still be
granted more discretion, is significant. Legislators have real choices about the benefits and costs
of granting this discretion under different political and institutional arrangements.
In sum, across all states, legislators have found it necessary to tackle health care issues
relating to the Medicaid program. Because Medicaid is such a complicated and expensive
program with contentious politics on diverse issues, state lawmakers face difficult political and
informational problems. The politics of Medicaid, therefore, present very real choices about how
much discretion to grant to agencies that already are vested with a great deal of responsibility for
this program.
Measuring the dependent variable.
Our dependent variable is the sum of new or “added” words contained in all relevant
legislation for the 1995-96 time period. We identified relevant legislation in each state by
searching Lexis’s “Advanced Legislative Service” data base. For each state we used the search
terms “Medicaid” and “medical assistance,” as well as any state-specific names for Medicaid
programs (such as “MediCal” in California or “MC+” in Missouri).11 We retained any nonappropriations bills that turned up in this search that were related to the provision of medical care.
If bills were only partially relevant (i.e., only partly about health care) we edited out the irrelevant
portions. We then used a macro in Microsoft Word to count all the words in the legislation that
were new.12
11
We include 46 states in our analysis. In the future we plan to add California, Virginia, and Arizona to the
dataset. Nebraska is omitted from the analysis because it has a unicameral legislature.
12
Lexis publishes the entire text of adopted acts, but it includes in this text notation that enables users to
identify which portions of the text were added, and which previously existed.
18
We feel that the raw number of words is a reasonable proxy for the efforts by legislators
to exercise ex ante control over agency discretion. Our justification for using this proxy is
straightforward: the more words included in legislation, the more detailed and complex are its
instructions to agencies. When designing a new children’s health initiative, for example, it takes
a great many more words for the legislature to specify who is to be covered, what sorts of
enrollment techniques should be used, which procedures should be followed, and so on, than it
does to simply ask the agency to “do something” without providing any additional instructions.
Thus, word count serves as a strong, if imperfect, proxy. In the tests below, we expect that the
number of words should increase with the incentives and opportunities to limit agency discretion.
The empirical tests
Table 2 presents the results of our tests of the hypotheses in Table 1. The dependent variable,
Added words, is described in the previous section. A positive coefficient indicates more words,
and thus greater effort to limit agency discretion. The main independent variables measure the
various forms of divided government, legislative professionalization, and alternative institutions
for agency control. In addition, since legislative attention to Medicaid-related legislation should
be influenced by the demand for such legislation, we should expect the number of words to
increase with the size of a state’s Medicaid program. Thus, all of the OLS models we estimate
contain a control variable, Medicaid expenditures, which is the Medicaid expenditures/per capita
in the state. This variable is statistically significant and positive in all models.
(Table 2 about here)
In column 1 we include only Divided government, a dummy variable that takes the value
1 if the government is either divided-divided or divided-unified.13 The coefficient has the wrong
13
In our sample, 15 states have divided-unified government, 8 states have divided-divided government, and
23 states have unified government.
19
sign, and its standard error is enormous, thus providing no support whatsoever for the general
hypothesis about divided government.
In column 2 we break down divided government into its component parts. Divideddivided is a dummy variable that takes the value 1 if there is divided-divided government in the
state; Divided-unified is similarly defined. We expect the legislature to do more to limit
discretion in divided-unified than during divided-divided government. The results do not support
this hypothesis, as the coefficients for the two divided governments are both measured with
considerable error (although the coefficient for Divided-unified is, as expected, much larger than
the coefficient for Divided-divided).
Our theory, however, holds the divided government (properly defined) should matter not
only on its own, but also in conjunction with other factors. Thus, next we consider the interaction
of divided government with legislative capacity. In unreported bivariate tests we considered the
impact of several legislative organization variables on Added words. These included legislative
compensation, the number of legislative staff, whether the legislature meets annually or not, and
the number of legislative committees. Of these, only the compensation variable had a statistically
significant impact. We therefore use Compensation as the variable tapping legislative capacity.
It measures the annual compensation to members of the lower house.14
Column 3 includes the interaction of the two divided government variables with
Compensation, as well as the divided government variables by themselves. Our expectation (H3)
is that as compensation increases, the impact of divided government on discretion should also
increase, with the effect being larger during divided-unified government than during divideddivided government. For compensation sufficiently large, this is precisely what we find. The
coefficient for Divided-unified is negative and statistically significant, but the coefficient for
Divided-unified×Compensation (also significant) is positive. If one considers the two coefficients
14
We obtained the data for Compensation and other state level variables discussed below from The Book of
the States.
20
together, on can see that discretion decreases (Added words increases) during divided-unified
government if legislative compensation in a state exceeds 12,798 dollars. In our data, the median
salary is 12,500, so the divided-unified hypothesis is supported for exactly half of the states. Or,
put differently, there exists a necessary level of legislative capacity, below which the divided
government hypothesis is incorrect.
The Divided-divided coefficient, by contrast, is not statistically significant (p=.14, twotailed test), and the Divided-divided×Compensation is significant, but much smaller than the
corresponding coefficient for divided-unified. If one takes these estimates as true (i.e., ignores
the insignificance of Divided-divided), then legislators will do more to limit agency discretion
under divided-unified than divided-divided government whenever legislative compensation is
greater than 5,826 dollars.15 As expected then, if legislative capacity permits legislators to limit
discretion, efforts to do so will be much greater during divided-unified government than during
divided-divided government.
The model in column 4 introduces the two variables that enable us to test the substitution
effect for the ex post control variables. Courts is a dummy variable that takes the value 1 if state
political institutions require appellate court judges to be chosen either by the legislature or by a
state wide election using a partisan ballot. In such cases, a legislature can more comfortably rely
on the courts to have preferences similar to its own. And Legislative veto is a dummy variable
that takes the value 1 if state political institutions allow some form of veto by the state legislature
over administrative rules. Each of these variables is included in the model in four different ways:
interacted with the two forms of divided government (e.g., Courts×Divided-divided), and
interacted with the two forms of divided government and Compensation (e.g., Courts×Divideddivided_Compensation). We expect that for salaries sufficient large, the substitution effect
15
This salary is exceeded by all but 11 states in our sample.
21
variables should have negative effects, and that these effects will be greater (i.e., more negative)
during divided-divided than during divided-unified government.
Several results from the model in column 4 are supportive of our arguments. The
coefficient for the courts variable in divided-divided government is negative, large, and very
precisely estimated.16 During divided-unified government, on the other hand, the court variables
are measured with considerable error, and could hardly be considered statistically distinguishable
from zero. Thus, in situations where the costs of limiting discretion are high (divided-divided
government), and where courts are most likely to have preferences similar to those of legislators,
legislators are less inclined to limit agency discretion in their efforts to control agency behavior.
The same substitution effect is not found during divided-unified government, when the costs to
the legislator of limiting discretion are much lower.
The legislative veto produces similar results. There is no statistically significant effect
during divided-unified government. But there is the expected substitution effect during divideddivided government, if salaries are sufficiently large (greater than 18,258 dollars). Thus, during
divided-divided government, legislators who have the professional resources to limit discretion
will be less likely to do so in situations where they have a veto over agency decisions.
Finally it is worth noting that the results for the simple divided government variables are
fairly stable when compared with column 3. The net effect of the two divided-unified variables,
for example, is positive whenever salaries exceed a modest 7,627 dollars. The results are less
precisely estimated for the divided-divided variables, and the net effect is not positive in this
model unless salaries exceed 28,554. A consistent story that comes out of this analysis, then, is
that the precise nature of divided government matters a great deal when it comes to assessing
legislative strategies to limit discretion. When there is a unified legislature against the governor,
limiting discretion is attractive, regardless of the available substitutes for controlling agencies.
16
The Courts_divided-divided variable is omitted because given the small number of observations in this
cell, it is almost perfectly correlated with Courts_divided-divided_compensation.
22
But when the legislature is itself divided, it is much more difficult to limit discretion, and
substitute strategies have great appeal.
In column 5 we add a variable to test the substitution effect for legislative control over
agency appointments. Finance is a dummy variable that takes the value 1 if state political
institutions allow state legislators to approve the selection of the cabinet official in charge of
financial affairs.17 This variable, recall, is of somewhat questionable theoretical relevance because
it is unclear how much a legislative veto over gubernatorial appointments should affect the nature
the appointments. We should also note that our Finance variable is likely measured with
considerable error. In the Book of the States data, the table providing this information about
executive appointments is very complicated and difficult to interpret, with footnotes adding
qualifications for nearly every state. Since we do not have a great deal of confidence that
Finance is measuring what we want it to, a somewhat more skeptical interpretations of these
results is warranted.
Not surprisingly, given the collinearity created by interacting all the variables with
divided government and compensation, the standard errors jump around quite a bit in comparison
with column 4. Nevertheless, the results for the Finance variables in Column 4 do not support
the substitution effect argument. Finance_Divided-unified and Finance_Dividedunified_Compensation are both significant. But contrary to expectations, for compensation
sufficiently large, the effect is positive (implying that legislators are granting less discretion to
agencies when legislators have some say over agency appointments). In these results, the net
effect has the wrong sign whenever legislators earn more than 11,124 dollars. We also find that
the results for Finance interacted with the divided-divided variables are not statistically
significant. Our expectation for this variable was that it would be more negative that the results
17
We also examined a variable that focused on the legislature’s role in choosing the cabinet official in
charge of health. These variables are virtually identical.
23
for the Finance variable interacted with the divided-unified government (because substitution will
be most attractive when the costs of limiting agency discretion are highest).
The judicial appointments results are fairly consistent with column 4. All of the variables
are now statistically significant. During divided-unified government, the effect, as with the
administrative appointments variable, is again in the wrong direction in states where legislators
earn more than 11,940 dollars. But during divided-divided government, we find the expected
(negative) substitution effect, and it is quite large
With respect to the legislative veto of agency rules, all of the variables are measured with
considerable error, although the parameter estimates give us the expected negative effect in most
cases. During divided unified, the net effect is negative whenever the legislative compensation in
the state is less than 39,296 dollars, which covers the vast majority of states in our sample.
During divided-divided government, the net effect is negative whenever compensation is greater
than 18,608 dollars.
Conclusion
States are often described as laboratories of democracy. The usual connotation of this statement
is that states represent ideal locations in which to try out different policy ideas and options.
However, states can be viewed as laboratories in a different sense: they allow us to test and
develop theories that cannot be tested, or perhaps even developed, with a sole focus on the United
States Congress.
In this paper we have used the states in exactly such a manner. Our central interest was
in determining which factors affect legislative control over agencies. More specifically, we
looked at ex ante control, which legislators implement by enacting detailed legislation that limits
agency discretion. State legislatures provide an ideal testing ground for our theory because they,
unlike Congress, provide variation on many of our key explanatory variables.
24
Our theoretical approach builds on two key insights. First, like many other studies, we
acknowledge that divided government should influence the legislature’s incentive to limit agency
discretion. However, we take this a step further by noting that there are two different types of
divided government: divided-unified, in which one party controls both houses of the legislature
but not the executive branch; and divided-divided, in which each chamber of the legislature is
controlled by a different party. As we detail in the paper, these two types of divided government
should result in different levels of ex ante control. More specifically, we expect that ex ante
control will be more common during divided-unified government than during divided-divided
government, and similarly that it will be more common during either type of divided government
than during unified government.
Second, institutional choice – here, the decision to limit discretion -- is shaped by
institutional context. Theories of institutional choice must understand and take into account the
relevant institutional context in which specific institutions are chosen. To this end, we argue that
there are a set of explanatory factors that need to be considered interdependently. The political
context – for example, whether government is divided or unified – can provide legislators with
the incentive for wanting to implement ex ante control of agencies. At the same time, however,
we argue that the legislature’s professional capacity also needs to be taken into account. A
legislature that has little professional capacity may have the incentive to use ex ante control, but it
may not have the capability to do so. Thus, the political context, which we measure using the
types of divided government discussed above, and the legislature’s professional capacity, which
we measure by using the legislature’s salary, need to be interacted.
Similarly, our theory demonstrates that we need to take into account whether alternative
arrangements exist for the control of agencies. To the extent that these exist, legislators will have
less of a need to rely on ex ante control. When legislators can use a legislative veto to strike
down agency actions with which they disagree, or when they can rely on like-minded courts to
force agencies to act in certain ways, they are likely to rely on these less costly substitutes rather
25
than ex ante control. Once again, however, these factors need to be interacted with variables that
denote whether government is divided-divided, divided-unified, or unified. A legislature that has
the incentive and the ability to engage in ex ante control may not do so because of the availability
of other, less costly, options.
To test our theoretical argument, we use a dataset consisting of all state-level laws
relating to Medicaid and health care passed in 1995 and 1996. Regressing the number of new
words of legislation added for each year and for each state on a set of independent variables, we
find that the results generally support our hypotheses. First, we show that divided government by
itself cannot account for the variance in our dependent variable. However, when we also take
into account the professionalization of the legislature, and whether there are alternative methods
of control, we find evidence that divided government does influence ex ante control. The
findings generally show that legislatures need not only the incentive to implement ex ante control,
not simply because they have the incentive to do so, but also because they have the capability and
lack alternatives.
It is worth emphasizing that although less detailed legislation implies greater discretion,
an increase in discretion does not imply decreased control. In fact, our results show that after
controlling for the political environment, cross-state variation in discretion is accounted for in
part by how much opportunity for ex post control exists. Thus, in order to account for control,
analysts must recognize that ex post control can serve as a substitute for ex ante control.18
Future research should build on this work in several ways. First, while we have included
a number of important independent variables, several other variables also should be considered.
Factors such as term limits, sunset laws, the use of legislative hearings, and other
18
In this respect our work is somewhat similar to that of Bawn (1997). However, as we noted earlier, her
work focuses on intra-institutional effects, whereas ours focuses on inter-institutional effects.
26
contemporaneous means of control might affect a legislature’s use of ex ante control.19
Furthermore, many states use appropriations legislation to provide significant substantive
instructions to agencies. We need to take such legislation into account, either by subsuming it
within our current dependent variable, or by controlling for it as an independent variable.20
Second, we plan to extend our dataset to cover a ten-year period, providing us with
variation across time as well as across states. This will allow us to examine a number of other
issues concerning the dynamics of the relationship between legislatures and agencies. It is
possible, for example, that states in which divided government is the norm will show very
different patterns of ex ante control than will states in which divided government occurs only
infrequently. A state that has had divided government for a number of years may be less likely to
have more new words added in any given year than a state that has only recently moved to
divided government. The logic here is that in the former state, the legislature may well have
spelled out details in the past. A longer time series will allow us to examine such possibilities.
On a related note, a longer time series will allow us to examine the degree to which
electoral competitiveness affects ex ante control. A state in which the same party regularly
controls certain branches of government may be less likely to use ex ante control than a state in
which parties alternate control. Similarly, legislators in states with a high level of turnover may
be less likely to rely on ex post tactics, fearing that their opponents would be in power in the
future and in control of these ex post tools. Thus, the substitution effect derived from alternative
institutional arrangements, such as the legislative veto, may be conditional on the degree of
political competition within a state.
19
We also might use more nuanced versions of some of our variables. In our analysis, for example, the
legislative veto is coded as a simple dichotomous variable, yet clearly differences exist across states in how
this mechanism works. The same is true for court and agency appointments.
20
In addition, we might also treat such legislation as a dependent variable in its own right. Interviews we
conducted in Michigan suggest, for example, that states may be more likely to include substantive language
in appropriations bills under divided-divided government than under other forms of government.
27
While all of these additions and topics will allow us to refine our analysis, our current
approach already has considerable power. Divided government does affect the degree of
legislative detail, but the exact effect of divided government is contingent on whether government
is divided-divided or divided-unified. Furthermore, divided government might provide the
incentive for legislators to engage in ex ante control, but legislators also need the capacity to do
so and need to lack viable substitutes for such control.
28
Table 1
Summary of hypotheses about legislative efforts to limit agency discretion
H1: Legislative efforts to limit agency discretion should be greater during divided government
than during unified government.
H2: Legislative efforts to limit agency discretion should be greater during divided-unified
government than during divided-divided government.
H3. During divided government, legislative efforts to limit discretion should increase with
legislators’ professional capacity. The effect of legislative capacity should be greatest during
divided-unified government.
H4. During divided government, legislative efforts to limit agency discretion will be weakest in
systems where political institutions permit legislators to influence agency appointments than in
systems where they do not. This substitution effect will increase with legislative
professionalization, and will be stronger during divided-divided government than during dividedunified government.
H5. During divided government, legislative efforts to limit agency discretion will be weakest in
systems where the institutions for selecting judges are likely to result in judges with preferences
that are similar to those of legislators. This substitution effect will increase with legislative
professionalization, and will be stronger during divided-divided government than during dividedunified government.
H6. During divided government, legislative efforts to limit agency discretion will be weakest in
systems where political institutions create opportunities for ex post legislative review of agency
rules. This substitution effect will increase with legislative professionalization, and will be
stronger during divided-divided government than during divided-unified government.
29
Table 2:
OLS Models of State Legislative Efforts to limit agency discretion
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Medicaid
Expenditures
44825**
(15234)
44865*
(15802)
35024*
(15391)
34953*
(18392)
54442*
(23614)
Divided
Government
-218
(5690)
--
--
--
--
Divided-unified
--
334
(7205)
-15997*
(7154)
-20060
(12502)
27481
(17222)
Divided-divided
--
-1261
(5485)
-11511
(7583)
-15134
(9194)
-8026
(5829)
Divided-unified x
Compensation
--
--
1.25*
(.61)
2.63*
(1.15)
-1.78
(1.45)
Divided-divided x
Compensation
--
--
.48*
(.29)
.54
(.36)
.27
(.18)
Courts x
Divided-unified
--
--
--
5306
(12343)
-23642*
(10383)
Courts x Div-uni
x Compensation
--
--
--
-.89
(1.1)
1.98*
(.73)
Courts x
Divided-divided
--
--
--
--
--
Courts x Div-div
x Compensation
--
--
--
-8.9**
(.78)
-6.52*
(2.70)
Legislative Veto x
Divided-unified
--
--
--
-7788
(13979)
-18863*
(10360)
Leg Veto x Div-uni
x Compensation
--
--
--
-.79
(1.4)
.48
(1.08)
Legislative Veto x
Divided-divided
--
--
--
209971**
(27274)
137699*
(76565)
Leg Veto x Div-div
x Compensation
--
--
--
-11.5**
(1.5)
-7.38
(4.66)
Finance x
Divided-unified
--
--
--
--
-42048*
(15467)
Finance x Div-uni
x Compensation
--
--
--
--
3.78**
(1.25)
Finance x
Divided-divided
--
--
--
--
-4036
(203670)
Finance x Div-div
x Compensation
--
--
--
--
-.01
(.79)
-8143
(8807)
-8165
(9109)
-2839
(8620)
-2801
(9979)
-13027
(13026)
Independent
Variable
Constant
30
R-Square
.15
.15
.29
.34
.47
N=
46
46
46
46
45
Note: The dependent variable is Added Words to Medicaid-related legislation in 1995-96 (see text for
details). Positive coefficients reflect less agency discretion. Number in parentheses are White standard
errors. *p < .10, **p < .05.
31
References
Aberbach, Joel. 1990. Keeping a Watchful Eye. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.
Banks, Jeffrey S. 1989. Agency budgets, cost information, and auditing. American Journal of
Political Science 33:670-99.
Banks, Jeffrey S. and Barry R. Weingast. 1992. The political control of bureaucracies under
asymmetric information.” American Journal of Political Science 36:509-24.
Bawn, Kathleen. 1995. Political Control versus Expertise: Congressional Choice About
Administration Procedures. American Political Science Review 89 (1): 62-73.
-----. 1997. Choosing Strategies to Control the Bureaucracy: Statutory Constraints, Oversight,
and the Committee System. Journal of Law Economics, and Organization 13: 101-126.
Bendor, Jonathan, Serge Taylor, and Roland Van Gaalen. 1987. Politicians, bureaucrats, and
asymmetric information. American Journal of Political Science 31:796-828.
Clarke, Wes. 1998. Divided Government and Budgetary Conflict. Legislative Studies Quarterly
23: 5-23.
Congressional Research Service. 1993. Medicaid Source Book: Background Data and Analysis.
A Report
Drotning, Lucy. 1993. An Alternative Approach to Congressional Control: The Case of the 1990
Clean Air Act Amendments. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester.
Epstein, David, and Sharyn O'Halloran. 1994. Administrative Procedures, Information, and
Agency Discretion. American Journal of Political Science 38 (3): 697-722.
-----. N.d. Delegating Powers. Manuscript, Columbia University.
Hamm, Keith and Roby D. Robertson. 1981. Factors Influencing the Adoption of New
Methods of Legislative Oversight in the U.S. States. Legislative Studies Quarterly
6:133-50.
Health Care Financing Administration. 1998. http://www.hcfa.gov/Medicaid/2082-1.htm.
Table 1.
Hill, Jeffrey S., and James E. Brazier. 1990. Constraining Administrative Decisions: A Critical
Examination of the Structure and Process Hypothesis. Journal of Law, Economics, and
Organization 7 (2): 373-400.
Huber, John and Charles R. Shipan. 1998. Legislators and Agencies: A Theoretical Reappraisal.
Paper presented at the Comparative Legislative Research Conference, University of Iowa,
April 16-18, 1998.
Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. 1998.
http://www.kff.org/state_health/factsheets/statesheet_t17.html. Table 17.
32
Kronebusch, Karl. 1997. Medicaid and the Politics of Groups: Recipients, Providers, and Policy
Making. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 22(3): 839-878.
Leichter, Howard M. 1996. State Governments and their Capacity for Health Care Reform. In
Health Policy, Federalism, and the American State, eds. Robert F. Rich and William D.
White. Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute.
Macey, Jonathan. 1992. Organizational Design and the Political Control of Administrative
Agencies. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 8: 93-110.
Mashaw, Jerry L. 1990. Explaining Administrative Process: Normative, Positive, and Critical
Stories of Legal Development. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 6: 267298.
McCarty, Nolan, and Rose Razaghian. 1998. The Division of Bureaucratic Control: A Model of
Executive Appointments and Legislative Oversight. Presented at the Annual Meeting of
the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.
McCubbins, Mathew D., Roger G. Noll, and Barry R. Weingast. 1987. Administrative
Procedures as Instruments of Political Control. Journal of Law, Economics, and
Organization 3 (2): 243-277.
-----. 1989. Structure and Process, Politics and Policy: Administrative Arrangements and the
Political Control of Agencies. Virginia Law Review 75: 431-482.
McCubbins, Mathew D., and Thomas Schwartz. 1984. Congressional Oversight Overlooked:
Policy Patrols versus Fire Alarms. American Journal of Political Science 28: 167-179.
McNollgast. 1992. Positive Canons: The Role of Legislative Bargains in Statutory
Interpretation. Georgetown Law Journal 80 (3): 705-742.
Melnick, R. Shep. 1994. Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights. Washington, DC: The
Brookings Institution.
Moe, Terry M. 1990a. The Politics of Structural Choice: Toward a Theory of Public
Bureaucracy. In Organization Theory: From Chester Barnard to the Present and
Beyond, ed. Oliver E. Williamson. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ogul, Morris S. 1976. Congress Oversees the Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press.
Ogul, Morris S., and Bert A. Rockman. 1990. Overseeing Oversight: New Departures and Old
Problems. Legislative Studies Quarterly 15 (1): 5-24.
Olson, Mary K. 1996. Substitution in Regulatory Agencies: FDA Enforcement Alternatives.
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 12: 376-407.
Robinson, Glen O. 1989. Commentary on 'Administrative Arrangements and the Political
Control of Agencies': Political Uses of Structure and Process. Virginia Law Review 75:
483-498.
33
Rockman, Bert. 1984. Legislative-Executive Relations and Legislative Oversight. Legislative
Studies Quarterly 9: 387-440.
Rosenthal, Alan. 1981. Legislative Behavior and Legislative Oversight. Legislative Studies
Quarterly 1:115-131.
Schneider, Saundra K. 1997. Medicaid 1115 Waivers: Shifting Health Care Reform to the
States. Publius 27(2):89-109.
Shipan, Charles R. 1997. Designing Judicial Review: Interest Groups, Congress, and
Communications Policy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Sparer, Michael D. 1996. Medicaid Managed Care and the Health Reform Debate: Lessons from
New York and California. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 21(3):433-460.
Spence, David B. 1997. Administrative Law and Agency Policy-Making: Rethinking the
Positive Theory of Political Control. Yale Journal on Regulation 14: 407-450.
Squire, Peverill. 1992. Legislative Professionalization and Membership Diversity in State
Legislatures. Legislative Studies Quarterly 17:69-79
Weingast, Barry R., and Mark J. Moran. 1983. Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional
Control: Regulatory Policymaking by the FTC. Journal of Political Economy 91: 765800.
34