What Improves State Legislative Oversight? Hint: It’s Not Professionalism

• In Event: Legislative Oversight

Abstract

Over the past two years we investigated legislative oversight across the 50 states. Using interviews, document reviews, legislative hearings, media reports, and academic literature, we assessed the state’s institutional resources and its legislators’ use these resources to oversee the work of the executive branch. We rated the states on a series of categories: performance audits produced by their analytic bureaucracies, use of these audits in the budget process and in committee hearings, administrative rules review, advice and consent, sunset reviews and other mechanisms to oversee the executive branch.
We assumed, as did many scholars with whom we discussed this project, that legislative professionalism would be an important predictor of oversight. Our preliminary findings challenge this hypothesis. We find only a small, weak correlation between conducting evidence-based, solution-driven legislative oversight and the state’s legislative professionalism. Many part-time legislatures excel at overseeing the work of state agencies, while some highly professional legislatures give it short shrift or engage in partisan posturing rather than improving the performance of public programs.
So what seems to improve legislative oversight? To our surprise, interim committees, a feature of part-time legislatures, seem to make a very positive contribution to oversight. Legislatures assign specific oversight tasks to a small group of legislators who are paid per day to meet and focus exclusively on a state problem. Examples include: whether the state’s pre-K programs are effective, why there are riots at juvenile detention facilities, or how to resolve the legal challenges federalism creates for drug control on Native American reservations.
Some states require partisan balance on interim committees or other committees that focus on oversight. For example, Idaho, with only six Democrats in its lower chamber, requires that three of them serve on the oversight committee to ensure partisan balance. How do these committees avoid gridlock? What role does the minority party play in the process?
As we continue analyzing our data, we probe best practices in states that do oversight well. Many of these states have part-time legislatures. During the past few years, the country has observed the problems with partisan oversight at the national level; we seek to shed light on effective alternatives by examining practices in the “laboratories of democracy,” the 50 states.

Authors

• Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson, Wayne State University

• Lyke Thompson, Wayne State University