Information and Confrontation in Congressional Oversight

Committees can use oversight hearings to collect and communicate the information Congress needs to oversee the bureaucracy, but many worry that members instead focus on scoring political points by lambasting witnesses. We leverage the collective judgment of congressional staff to measure how exchanges between legislators and witnesses vary on two separable dimensions: information and confrontation. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that confrontation crowds out information, we show that members of the president’s party that engage in less confrontational oversight reveal no more or less information than their peers.

委员会可借助监督听证会收集并传递国会对行政部门进行监督所需的相关信息，但不少观点认为，议员们往往转而通过抨击听证证人为自身博取政治加分。本研究借助国会工作人员的集体研判，衡量议员与证人之间的互动在两个可分离维度上的差异：信息维度与对抗维度。与“对抗性交流会挤占信息传递”的主流共识相悖，本研究发现，总统所在政党的议员若采取对抗性较弱的监督行为，其披露的信息量与同侪并无显著差异。