John
D. Huber AND
Charles R. Shipan
The Costs of Control: Legislators, Agencies, and Transaction
Costs
Legislative
Studies Quarterly XXV:25-52
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 contributions and
examine how transaction cost and principal-agent approaches have provided many
of them with a theoretical underpinning. Specifically, we examine a series of
basic concepts from these literatures and discuss how these concepts can be used
both to provide theoretical advances and to suggest empirical tests about the
relationship between legislatures and agencies.
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