Dissertation
"Beyond Chadha: The Modern Legislative Veto as Macropolitical Conflict.”
This dissertation examines the competition among the legislative and executive branches of the government to affect political outcomes in a constitutional system of shared powers. Given the prominence of the federal bureaucracy as an additional institutional actor, an increasingly common expression of congressional power is the legislative veto, which has proliferated in recent decades despite being declared unconstitutional in INS v. Chadha (1983). Presidents have resisted this encroachment on executive policy making by using institutional resources such as the presidential veto and signing statement to influence bureaucratic contract design. In order to analyze the dynamics of this macropolitical conflict, a series of hypotheses derived from principal-agent theory, with a special emphasis on the notion of “multiple principals,” are tested using an original data set of legislative veto provisions from 1932–2006. The empirical results suggest that Congress strategically uses the legislative veto to increase its influence on bureaucratic policy making, whereas presidents utilize multiple institutional resources to create countervailing pressures on bureaucratic officials. Results from this study illuminate central questions regarding institutional conflict between the legislative and executive branches.