Charles Shipan

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Political Science

When Congress writes and passes statutes, it can include detailed provisions designating how judicial review of agency actions will operate. Yet despite their importance, empirical research has suffered from a lack of a systematic measure or assessment of these review provisions. In this project, we create a new measure of exposure to judicial revi...

Building on a deep theoretical foundation and drawing on numerous examples, we examine how policies spread across the American states. We argue that for good policies to spread while bad policies are pushed aside, states must learn from one another. The three ingredients for this positive outcome are observable experiments, time to learn, and favor...

Presidents' unilateral sway over policy is of global concern to scholars, practitioners and the general public. While pending actions provoke media speculation about how much authority presidents have to change policy without legislatures, scholarship has yet to systematically measure presidential discretion across areas of public policy. This stud...

Delegation is a well-known feature of policymaking in separation of powers systems. Yet despite the importance of this activity, there is little systematic evidence about how many major laws in the United States actually delegate policymaking authority to administrators in federal agencies. Using a database of agency regulatory activity along with...

We developed a maximum likelihood estimator corresponding to the predicted hazard rate that emerges from a continuous time game of incomplete information with a fixed time horizon (i.e., Kreps and Wilson, 1982, Journal of Economic Theory 27 , 253–279). Such games have been widely applied in economics and political science and involve two players en...

We put forward a new approach to studying issue definition within the context of policy diffusion. Most studies of policy diffusion—which is the process by which policymaking in one government affects policymaking in other governments—have focused on policy adoptions. We shift the focus to an important but neglected aspect of this process: the issu...

Previous analyses of legislative turnover have identified two separate sets of explanatory factors: legislative and electoral institutions, and economic conditions. In this paper we draw on insights from formal theory and political psychology to present a new explanation of turnover, one that incorporates voters, political institutions, and economi...

Rulemaking gives agencies significant power to change public policy, but agencies do not exercise this power in a vacuum. The separation of powers system practically guarantees that, at times, agencies will be pushed and pulled in different directions by Congress and the president. We argue that these forces critically affect the volume of rules pr...

Contrary to popular claims, we argue that the filibuster conveys meaningful information about participants’ willingness to fight for an issue. To this end, we present a model of the filibuster as a continuous-time, two-sided game of incomplete information and derive predictions about the frequency and hazards of observed filibusters. We show that i...

Over the past sixty years, the size of the Supreme Court's docket has varied tremendously, growing at some points in time and shrinking at others. What accounts for this variation in the size of the docket? We focus on two key strategic factors—the predictability of outcomes within the Court and whether justices consider the potential actions of ot...

The national government can influence state-level policymaking by adopting laws that specifically direct the states to take certain actions or by providing financial incentives. But can national institutions also influence state-level policy change by drawing attention to an issue and by providing information about it, even when these activities do...

In federal systems, governments have the opportunity to learn from the policy experiments – and the potential successes – of other governments. Whether they seize such opportunities, however, may depend on the expertise or past experiences of policymakers. Based on an analysis of a dataset on state-level adoptions of youth access antismoking adopti...

Legislative enactment is only one step in the life of a law. How a law shapes public life after enactment is frequently the result of whether the judiciary interprets the provisions contained in a law and how courts reconcile provisions within and across laws. But the factors that determine whether the judiciary ends up playing such a role are not...

What factors inhibit or facilitate cross-subfield conversations in political science? This article draws on diffusion scholarship to gain insight into cross-subfield communication. Diffusion scholarship represents a case where such communication might be expected, given that similar diffusion processes are analyzed in American politics, comparative...

Although the selection of Supreme Court nominees is of tremendous importance, the amount of time it takes presidents to select nominees varies dramatically across nominations. We argue that the timing of nominations is a function of the political constraints the president faces, and we focus in particular on partisan or ideological disagreement bet...

Over the past fifty years, top political science journals have published hundreds of articles about policy diffusion. This article reports on network analyses of how the ideas and approaches in these articles have spread both within and across the subfields of American politics, comparative politics and international relations. Then, based on a sur...

Numerous scholars have considered the relationship between gubernatorial power and political outcomes. In fact, gubernatorial power has been used as a key explanatory factor in analyses of topics such as gubernatorial approval, divided government, regulation, and even individual political behavior. The key to these studies is the precision with whi...

The scholarship on policy diffusion in political science and public administration is extensive. This article provides an introduction to that literature for scholars, students, and practitioners. It offers seven lessons derived from that literature, built from numerous empirical studies and applied to contemporary policy debates. Based on these se...

Abstract At times, the American political parties are so close in terms of policy positions that critics denounce the lack of a “dime's worth of difference” between them. At other times, the gap between them on a left-right dimension is huge. How can we explain this variation? We argue that parties can behave rationally as collective units, and tha...

The relationship between Congress and the judiciary is a complex one that is poorly defined or understood. This ambiguity in the relationship is the result of the failure of the Constitution to define what legal doctrines must shape judicial decision-making or whether the judiciary has the authority to strike the acts of Congress. Whereas the relat...

In federal systems, governments can learn from the external policy experiments of other governments or from the internal experiments of lower levels of government. In this paper we explore the degree to which states traded off these two forms of learning in their youth access antismoking adoptions between 1996 and 2005. Using a dyad-year event hist...

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics offers a critical survey of the field of empirical political science through the collection of a set of articles written by forty-seven scholars in the discipline of comparative politics. Part I includes articles surveying the key research methodologies employed in comparative politics (the comparative me...

Local policy adoptions provide an excellent opportunity to test among potential mechanisms of policy diffusion. By examining three types of antismoking policy choices by the 675 largest U.S. cities between 1975 and 2000, we uncover robust patterns of policy diffusion, yielding three key findings. First, we distinguish among and find evidence for fo...

Congress regularly passes significant laws. Some of these laws continue in their initial form, with the original bargain struck by the enacting coalition untouched by any future laws; others are changed—strengthened or weakened—soon after passage. What accounts for this variation in the stability of laws, in the longevity of the original legislativ...

Ideological concerns play a major role in determining whether a senator will vote to confirm or reject a Supreme Court nominee. Much less is understood, however, about the effects of partisanship on confirmation votes. This study investigates two aspects of partisanship: first, whether confirmation voting has become more partisan over time, even wh...

Do separation of powers systems produce lower levels of voter turnout? We analyze this question by taking advantage of institutional variation across U.S. states. In some states, governors and legislatures share power roughly evenly, which creates a sharing of powers that approximates a classic separation of powers system. In other states, power is...

Studies of policy diffusion often focus on the horizontal spread of enactments from one state to another, paying little or no attention to the effects of local laws on state-level adoptions. For example, scholars have not tested whether local policy adoptions make state action more likely (through a snowball effect) or less likely (through a pressu...

Congress regularly passes significant laws. Some of these laws continue in their initial form, with the original bargain struck by the enacting coalition untouched by any future laws; others are changed - strengthened or weakened - soon after passage. What accounts for this variation in the stability of laws, in the longevity of the original legisl...

In recent decades, the use of the filibuster has exploded, leading to charges that it is being used increasingly for trivial purposes. In this paper we investigate whether the use of the filibuster has changed over time, and in particular whether changes making it easier to achieve cloture have increased or decreased the extent to which filibusters...

Although the selection of Supreme Court nominees is of tremendous importance to all presidents, the amount of time it takes presidents to select nominees varies dramatically across nominations. We argue that the timing of nominations is a function of the political constraints the president faces. We examine all Supreme Court nominations since 1882...

It is hard to think of a political system that does not trumpet its commitment to "the rule of law," based on the principle that citizens are better off when the political system establishes rules for all to follow, rather than subjecting citizens either to arbitrary rule or to anarchy1. By entrusting the interpretation and enforcement of laws to l...

Political bureaucracies make the overwhelming majority of public policy decisions in the United States. To examine the extent to which these agency actions are responsive to the preferences of elected officials, in particular, Congress, I develop a spatial model of oversight. The most important insight of this theory is that agencies make policy de...

This study uses recent theoretical work about group decision-making to assess the quality of decision-making by expert consensus panels. We specifically examine (1) when individual members of panels will divulge their private judgments about the decision to the panel, and (2) when the group judgment is superior to the judgment of individual panelis...

Although a large literature on delegation exists, few models have pushed beyond a core set of canonical assumptions. This approach may be justified on grounds of tractability, but the failure to grasp the significance of different assumptions and push beyond specific models has limited our understanding of the incentives for delegation. Consequentl...

Presidents traditionally have had great success when nominating justices to the Supreme Court, with confirmation being the norm and rejection being the rare exception. While the confirmation process usually ends with the nominee taking a seat on the Court, however, there is a great deal of variance in the amount of time it takes the Senate to act....

Presidents traditionally have had great success when nominating justices to the Supreme Court, with confirmation being the norm and rejection being the rare exception. While the confirmation process usually ends with the nominee taking a seat on the Court, however, there is a great deal of variance in the amount of time it takes the Senate to act....

The question of whether parties converge or diverge over time has attracted a great deal of theoretical and empirical attention. In this article we make two contributions to this literature. First, rather than looking at general measures of ideology, we examine a specific policy area-environmental policy to see whether the parties have diverged or...

Keith Krehbiel, Pivotal Politics: A Theory of US Lawmaking, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. - - Volume 2 Issue 1 - Charles R. Shipan

Existing theories of legislative delegation to bureaucracies typically focus on a single legislature, often the U.S. Congress. We argue that this parochial focus has important limitations. If one contends that politicians respond rationally to their political environment when adopting strategies for controlling bureaucrats, then theories of control...

Each year since 1970 the League of Conservation Voters has identified a series of key votes on public health, energy, wilderness, and other environmental issues and used these votes to calculate "ratings" for members of Congress. While these ratings are useful for comparing the level of environmental support by members within a given year and a giv...

Judicial review of agency decisions clearly affects policy outcomes, both because the courts can overrule an agency's decision and because the threat of judicial review can affect the agency's choice of policy. At the same time, however, judicial review does not simply `exist', but rather is a political variable that a legislature can use to affect...

Political scientists have long studied the relationship between legislatures and agencies-in particular, between Congress and the bureaucracy in the United States. In the past two decades, however, there has been a renewed interest in this topic along with a variety of new theoretical contributions and insights. We review these relatively recent co...

When a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court, the president can attempt to use his power of nomination strategically in order to bring the Court in line with his own policy preferences. However, the president faces two constraints when attempting to do so. First, he may be constrained by the presence of continuing justices and the existing Court medi...

Abstract Most studies of legislative control of agencies have focused on national level institutions. In this paper we undertake a comparative study of political control by looking at state legislatures and the control of Medicaid policy. We develop and test a theory about the conditions under which state legislatures should opt to rely on detailed...

Committee membership is valuable to members of Congress for many reasons, not the least of which is the ability to exercise disproportionate influence over policies falling within the committee's jurisdiction. Yet at times these jurisdictions are violated. Given that a member values distinct committee jurisdictions, will he or she be more likely to...

Committee membership is valuable to members of Congress for many reasons, not the least of which is the ability to exercise disproportionate influence over policies falling within the committee's jurisdiction. Yet at times these jurisdictions are violated. Given that a member values distinct committee jurisdictions, will he or she be more likely to...

The nature of jurisdictional boundaries of committees in the House of Representatives has received little scholarly attention. Recently, however, J. C. LaRue and L. S. Rothenberg (1992) focused specifically on this topic and concluded that for some legislators--namely, those involved in a jurisdictional dispute--jurisdictional issues were an import...

This inductive study offers an examination of 23 cases in which informants from firms engaged in large-scale global projects reported unforeseen costs after failing to comprehend cognitive-cultural, normative, and/or regulative institutions in an unfamiliar host societal context. The study builds on the conceptual framework of institutional theory....

This paper examines the decisions of the 675 largest U.S. cities about when and whether to adopt three types of antismoking policies between 1975 and 2000. Placed in the context of horizontal and vertical policy diffusion, cities were more likely to adopt government building and youth access restrictions if their nearest neighbors and other cities...