Congress as Principal: Exploring Bicameral Differences in Agent Oversight

Previous theoretical and empirical work suggests differences in the way the congressional chambers approach the responsibility of agent control. The Senate should, the literature hypothesizes, exercise greater and qualitatively more systematic, substantive, and preemptive oversight of agents than does the House. Yet little research on congressional oversight has focused upon bicameral differences in principal behavior. This paper begins to fill the void by examining House and Senate oversight of the Federal Reserve. Specifically, I look at three types of oversight activity: monitoring of, and signaling to, the agent, and the principal's alteration of its contract with the agent. Utilizing original data and a variety of statistical methods, I show that there exist few, if any, quantitative and qualitative differences in House and Senate behavior. I then discuss theoretical reasons for my unexpected findings.