Legislative organization and congressional review of agency regulations

Abstract

Although researchers have demonstrated that legislators possess a variety of instruments with which to limit bureaucratic discretion, it is not clear to what extent these instruments are used by legislators whose preferences are representative of chamber majorities. This article examines the role that committee membership, preferences, and other factors play in legislators' use of congressional review, a new instrument through which agency regulations can be nullified by joint resolutions of disapproval. It uses logistic regression to demonstrate that in the 105th House of Representatives, legislators were more likely to seek to disapprove agency regulations the greater the divergence of their preferences from the median member of the committee of jurisdiction. Committee membership, however, did not affect the use of congressional review. These results, which diverge from previous research in several respects, underscore that it is not yet possible to draw definitive conclusions about the connection between the organization of Congress and legislative-executive relations that hold across policy areas and instruments of political control.