Legislatures, Courts, and Statutory Control of the Bureaucracy across the U.S. States∗

How do state legislatures use statutory language to control policy implementation by state agencies? In this paper, I consider the extent to which the decision of how best to control bureaucratic policymaking is strategic in regards to the broader political context in which a legislature finds itself. Specifically, I examine the extent to which legislatures anticipate the likely actions of state courts in crafting their policymaking directives to bureaucrats in a spe-cific policy area and time period. Previous literature (e.g., Huber, Shipan and Pfahler (2001)) has argued that the legislative use of statutory language to control bureaucrats varies with the availability of nonstatutory methods of control, but it does not explicitly consider the role of state courts. My hypotheses are derived from a simple formal model of executive-legislative relations and my expectations are such that the degree of statutory control should increase only when a state legislature’s preferences are sufficiently different from the executive’s and when nonstatutory controls, i.e., the extent to which state supreme courts are likely to overturn agency action, in that state are neither too high nor too low. This counterintuitive expectation is supported when I test hypotheses using the original Huber, Shipan and Pfahler (2001) dat