AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP
Alexander Love: “Testing the Legitimacy Benefits of Proceduralism”
Abstract: The sociological legitimacy of bureaucratic policymaking is said to derive from an adherence to procedure. But in many domains, policy and party-motivated citizens’ preferences over procedure are dominated by ideological goals. We investigate when and how federal agencies accrue legitimacy among the targets and beneficiaries of regulation by recontacting and surveying over 1,500 individuals who submitted comments on proposed rules between 2017 and 2024. In two embedded experiments, we find that perceived agency thoroughness does not increase legitimacy, and the effect is dominated by commenters’ preferences over policy outcomes. Showing commenters evidence of agency thoroughness in reviewing comments failed to significantly increase perceptions of legitimacy. In contrast, learning the rule’s outcome polarized respondents: commenters whose preferred outcome was congruent with the agency’s action increased their perceptions of legitimacy by 6.4%, while those who were incongruent decreased by 4.5%. These findings cast doubt on a major benefit of an otherwise costly administrative practice.
Alexander Love is a Democratic Innovations postdoctoral associate at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies American political institutions, particularly the bureaucracy.
Kim Moxley: “Reconsidering Contemporary Legislative Processes in the U.S. Senate”
Abstract: Scholarship on contemporary Senate lawmaking focuses primarily on high-stakes, leadership-centered “unorthodox” processes, leaving lawmaking via unanimous consent (UC) largely unexamined. This paper addresses that gap by analyzing the Senate’s UC process, known within the chamber as “the hotline”. The paper describes how hotline lawmaking operates in practice and considers its implications for theories of institutional change under contemporary political conditions like increasing polarization and party competition. By bringing UC lawmaking into view, the project 1) complements and expands upon existing accounts of modern Congressional legislative processes, 2) offers new theoretical insight into how contemporary lawmaking operates, and 3) speaks to broader debates about unanimity and transparency under conditions of partisan political bargaining.
Kim Moxley is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Political Science at Yale University. Her research focuses on procedure and lawmaking in the U.S. Congress, with particular attention to how legislative institutions operate and adapt under contemporary political pressures.
This workshop is open to members of the Yale community only.