CAPS Presents: Professor Sharece Thrower (Vanderbilt University) "Checks in the Balance: Legislative Capacity and the Dynamics of Executive Power"

October 8, 2021 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Checks in the Balance: Legislative Capacity and the Dynamics of Executive Power

The specter of unbridled executive power looms large in the American political imagination. Can Congress and state legislatures check energetic executives in the United States? How so? Although the US system of checks and balances is premised on the idea that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” we argue that ambition is not nearly enough to constrain executive power. Instead, legislatures must also possess the opportunities and the means to do so. With a new understanding of legislative capacity, we develop a theory of separation of powers policymaking that brings this institutional necessity to the fore. Low-capacity legislatures face difficulties in checking the executive through mechanisms such as discretion and oversight. Here, presidents and governors can unilaterally bypass legislative adversaries to impose their will. High-capacity legislatures, however, can effectively stifle their opponents in the executive branch. We evaluate these arguments using new historical datasets on congressional capacity, oversight, discretion, and presidential unilateralism. We also test our argument across the US states, where legislative capacity varies greatly, with a dataset of more than 30,000 gubernatorial executive orders. Our results affirm the centrality of legislatures in tempering executive power, demonstrating when, how, and why they fail. In this way, legislative capacity is the key for understanding whether separated systems operate as intended and when executive power prevails.