10. Mathew D. McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms,” American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984): 165–179.

11. See, in particular, Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping a Watchful Eye (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1990).

12. Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. McCubbins, “Learning from Oversight: Fire Alarms and Police Patrols Reconstructed,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 10 (1994): 96–125.

13. Barry R. Weingast and Mark Moran, “Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Control?” Regulatory Policymaking by the FTC,” Journal of Political Economy 91 (1983): 765–800.

14. Terry M. Moe, “Control and Feedback in Economic Regulation: The Case of the NLRB,” American Political Science Review 79 (1985): 1094–1116; B. Dan Wood and Richard W. Waterman, “The Dynamics of Political Control of the Bureaucracy,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 801–828.

15. John D. Huber and Charles R. Shipan, two theorists in the ex-ante control tradition, concede as much. As they note in a recent review essay, “No one has yet been able to solve the very difficult problem of assessing empirical relationships between the preferences of bureaucrats and politicians on the one hand and policy outcomes on the other.” See their “Politics, Delegation, and Bureaucracy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, ed. Barry R. Weingast and Donald A. Wittman, 261 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

16. By enforcement actions, I mean routine agency activities designed to implement a broader law or regulation. Examples include the issuing of permits and licenses, tickets and fines, and the filing of lawsuits. For a discussion of this deficiency in the literature, see David B. Spence, “Agency Policymaking and Political Control: Modeling Away the Delegation Problem,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 7 (1997): 212–213.

17. A good example is the work of Ferejohn and Shipan. In their studies of Congressional influence on FCC telephone regulation, they prefer the term “influence” to “control.” In the case studies they examined, Congress held numerous hearings and threatened legislative action, but ultimately succeeded in obtaining only minor alterations in regulations. See John A. Ferejohn and Charles R. Shipan,