AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP
Gabe Batista: “Evading Constraint? White House Adaptations to Congressional Control”
Abstract: Can the presidency be controlled? It is a question that has attracted much scholarly attention and debate, but I argue that the existing research relies too heavily on inferred constraints and does not adequately differentiate between competing hypotheses where institutional behavior is governed by different logics. The explicit motivations for each branch and the institutional tools that they use to build their case are not empirically verified even though they would provide insight into each branch’s reactions to constraint efforts. I present a research plan that combines the use of qualitative archival work and text as data to investigate how Congress and the president respond to the other’s assertion of power over the process of governing in the post-Nixon era. I will use process tracing to tease out the motivations behind different moments where either Congress or the president asserted itself and the institutional responses that the opposing branch pursued. I focus on three areas of government operations that are most central to policy creation and implementation: budgeting, information availability, and reorganization of the executive branch. The process of government precedes any policy outcomes, and the design of government has significant impacts on the kinds of policies that are implemented, making these cases where each branch has the most to gain from expansion and the most to lose from encroachment.
Gabe Batista is a 3rd year Ph.D. student studying American Politics. His research interests include American political development, institution building, executive politics, and the bureaucracy.
Fiona Kniaz: “Designing Fragmentation: Business Interests and Federal-State Welfare Programs”
Abstract: The American welfare state is frequently characterized as an “institutional laggard” that is unique in comparative context. While scholars of US social policy tend to focus on the causes and implications of the American welfare state’s distinctively privatized structure, the country’s federal system, under which many redistributive programs are administered by states or through federal-state partnerships, also plays a consequential role in shaping social outcomes. Fragmented administration can obscure policy design, dampen public engagement, and exacerbate inequality both across and within states. Yet despite the clear distributive and political consequences of fragmentation, existing theories provide only limited insight into the political and institutional conditions that determine the level of discretion afforded to states over the financing and administration of new federal social programs.
The theory I develop argues that business interests greatly impact the programmatic structure of social policy programs at their inception, especially with respect to cross-state uniformity and the level of state discretion over funding, eligibility, and benefit levels. Business actors tend to resist subsidizing individuals who could potentially participate in the labor force, seeking to maintain downward pressure on wage floors. When the expansion of social protections becomes politically inevitable, however, these actors shift their strategy toward shaping programmatic design in ways that best serve their interests, either by promoting the uniformity of benefits to their workers or by advocating for decentralized control over programs targeting working-age dependent populations. These initial design choices are highly consequential. While reforms enacted in different ideological eras may tweak specific features of programs, large-scale expansions or contractions of state discretion are rare once programs are established.
Fiona Kniaz is a third-year Ph.D. student in Political Science at Yale University. Her research focuses on social policy, inequality, and organized interests.
This workshop is open to current members of the Yale community only.