SCIENCE@home

The Constraining Power of the Purse: Executive Discretion and Legislative Appropriations

Alexander Bolton,Sharece Thrower

Published 2019 in Journal of Politics

ABSTRACT

Discretion is fundamental to understanding interbranch interactions in the US separation-of-powers system. Yet, measuring discretion is challenging. The few existing measures have difficulty capturing both delegation and constraint in a consistent way over time. In this article, we propose a novel measure of executive discretion based on legislative appropriations to all agencies, weighted by spending limitations imposed by Congress in appropriations committee reports. We provide evidence for the validity of the measure, including a test of the ally principle to establish construct validity. Finally, we demonstrate the wider utility of the measure by employing it to evaluate hypotheses about how political control over the bureaucracy influences congressional policy making in the context of discretion. We show that agency design and presidential control are important factors in congressional decisions. Overall, we present a versatile measure of discretion that researchers can use to explore a variety of questions in American politics.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2019

  • Venue

    Journal of Politics

  • Publication date

    2019-07-24

  • Fields of study

    Political Science

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.1086/704330
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-88 of 88 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-20 of 20 citing papers · Page 1 of 1