Macropolitical conflict among the three branches of the federal government has existed since the ratification of the Constitution. This dissertation examines the competition among the legislative and executive branches of the government to affect public policy in a constitutional system of shared powers. Of specific focus is the legislative veto, originally developed in 1932 as a novel type of congressional oversight empowering either chamber of Congress to veto presidential reorganization initiatives. The implementation of legislative veto oversight provisions increased significantly during the 1970s and has continued to increase in every subsequent decade. Use of the legislative veto as a versatile means of institutional oversight has further proliferated in recent years, despite being declared unconstitutional in INS v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983). Over time, the legislative veto has evolved from an oversight mechanism allowing for independent or collective intervention from the House and Senate regarding the actions of executive officials into an oversight resource that most often empowers the Appropriations committees in each chamber with a broad range of significant veto authorities.

The policy-making prominence of the federal bureaucracy, which has evolved over the course of the twentieth century, has transformed and enlarged the bureaucracy into an important venue for macropolitical conflict. Congress has aggressively continued the practice of including legislative veto provisions in legislation despite the majority ruling in INS v. Chadha. Presidents have resisted this encroachment on executive policy making by using institutional resources such as the presidential veto and signing statement to influence bureaucratic contract design. In order to analyze the dynamics of this macropolitical conflict, a series of hypotheses derived from principal-agent theory, with a special emphasis on the notion of multiple principals, are tested using an original data set of legislative veto provisions from 1932 to 2006. The empirical results suggest that Congress strategically uses the legislative veto to increase its influence on bureaucratic policy making, whereas presidents utilize multiple institutional resources to create countervailing pressures on bureaucratic officials. Results from this study illuminate central questions regarding institutional conflict between the legislative and executive branches.