Delaying Democracy: Capacity and Political Control at the FEC

• In Event: New Perspectives on the Political Control of the Bureaucracy

Abstract

Studies of congressional control of the bureaucracy generally focus on oversight of agency action, leaving questions of personnel to executive politics scholars. Yet, Congress controls the ability for agencies to act in the first place through budget appropriations that fund staffing levels and establish agency capacity. What happens, then, when Congress is subject to the regulatory and enforcement decisions from the agency they can control through personnel? In this paper, we leverage theories of agency capture to offer a new perspective on the political motivations for Congress's control of agency action. Specifically, we consider the Federal Election Commission (FEC), an agency which regulates members of Congress and their campaigns. We argue that, especially for personnel-heavy agencies making time-sensitive decisions, agency capacity is an effective tool of congressional control that has been largely overlooked. Using an original dataset of 1,273 cases brought by the FEC between 2004 and 2014 and new data on contemporaneous personnel levels, we demonstrate that congressional determinations of personnel levels and politicization influence FEC enforcement times. We find that FEC enforcement times are positively correlated with agency capacity as measured by total employees. Surprisingly, we also find that FEC enforcement times are longer when there are fewer political appointees than career civil servants.

Authors

• Christina M. Kinane, Yale University

• Kevin Xiao