Book Project: Getting Their Act Together: Policy Goals, Public Narratives and Investigative Agenda-Setting in the Contemporary Congress.

This book offers a framework for understanding investigative agenda-setting in Congress: how committees decide which issues merit investigation, how X issue is selected over Y, and which facets of chosen issues should be publicly highlighted for the American people. I make two primary arguments. First, I argue that the investigative process in the contemporary Congress (defined as 1995-present) is centered on public narrative and performance, and that formal oversight tools designed to compel new information from targets have become less important than the presentation and processing of normative narratives on a public stage. Second, I propose a unique typology for understanding the full extent of investigative activity in the contemporary Congress, founded on committees’ pursuit of two public goods: change of status-quo policy and public accountability for institutions’ abuse of the public trust. This typology, which ultimately produces five distinct types of investigative activity, is built inductively from an original data set of all nonlegislative hearings held by all standing committees in the House and Senate from 1995-2024.

“The Purpose-Driven Congress: Measuring and Explaining Legislative Outcomes of House Investigations.” Revise and resubmit at Legislative Studies Quarterly. [email for draft]
What inspires and propels investigative work in Congress? Members consistently cite legislative action to claim credit for their investigations, but what makes certain inquiries more legislatively productive than others? In this paper, I link members’ investigative and legislative work and argue that committee investigations represent a crucial stage in the broader policymaking process in Congress. I assess the structure of House Oversight Committee investigations and the role of each component part in predicting legislative outcomes. I show that, contrary to their reputation as theatrical time-wasters, public, non-legislative committee hearings contribute to problem-solving via both individual and collective legislative action. Additionally, I offer a normative upside to the effects of partisanship on executive-targeted investigations: Committee investigations are more legislatively productive under divided rather than unified government..