Congressional oversight and electoral accountability

Legislative oversight allows Congress to investigate potential wrongdoing by executive branch actors. We present a model in which an incumbent exercises oversight and chooses to take corrective action against the executive before going up for reelection. We show that partisan types who prefer to take corrective action regardless of the probability of wrongdoing will always conduct oversight, but sincere types who only want to correct legitimate wrongdoing will exercise restraint to avoid appearing too partisan and losing reelection. The model also shows that oversight is increasing in the probability that the incumbent is partisan and the probability that the challenger is sincere. Finally, we present two case studies, the Elián González custody case and the attack on the Benghazi embassy, to illustrate our theory.

Not a Democratic or a Republican problem’: the US Congress and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan

The withdrawal from Afghanistan caused a mixed reaction in the US Congress. There is a significant difference between how the legislative branch reacted first to the decision to withdraw and then to its immediate implementation. The 117th Congress considered the circumstances of the withdrawal from the perspective of congressional oversight of the executive power’s actions. Lawmakers used several instruments within the framework of their constitutional powers to achieve this goal.

Errors in Public Management and Congressional Oversight

It is widely believed that “fire alarm” oversight (i.e., reactive oversight that responds to the complaints of interest groups) rather than “police patrol” oversight (i.e., precautionary congressional surveillance), better promotes the performance of government agencies by efficiently reducing bureaucratic moral hazard. However, fire alarm oversight can lead to bureaucrats being falsely accused by interest groups who provide biased information to members of Congress of failure to properly implement a policy, thereby causing an unnecessary administrative delay in public management. This article suggests a formal model that compares fire alarm and police patrol oversight and examines the development of congressional oversight mechanisms in the United States.

Conclusion

The US intelligence community’s reliance on contractors challenges accountability both in theory and in practice. When intelligence is outsourced, accountability cannot be approached through the sole prism of executive control, congressional oversight and judicial review, as is so often the case in the academic literature. To explore the evolving accountability regime for intelligence contractors, this book has proposed a new model of intelligence accountability as a process that brings together a variety of stakeholders across the three branches of government and broader society. In practice, these stakeholders’ willingness and ability to hold contractors to account differs and evolves....