The Levin Center seeks to promote research on oversight by legislative bodies with the ultimate goal of fostering high-quality fact-finding and oversight investigations that are not captive to partisan interests. This fellowship program is established to encourage scholars early in their careers, including post-doctoral students and professors, to conduct research and produce papers with useful research results related to oversight by legislators.
Each year, the fellowship offers between $10,000 and $20,000 to support a varying number of one-year, non-resident scholar(s) to conduct research and produce a scholarly paper on issues related to congressional or state-level oversight. Research topics may include issues such as:
- Constitutional and political theories underlying oversight;
- Optimal staffing for oversight committees;
- Measures to gauge the extent and effectiveness of bipartisan oversight;
- Impact of oversight on policy outcomes;
- How legislative fact-finding affects the public’s understanding of issues;
- How legislative oversight interacts with efforts by the media and other actors to hold government accountable;
- Oversight performance measures;
- Oversight decision-making styles;
- Consensus factfinding;
- Examining oversight gaps;
- Developing new oversight databases or committee oversight dashboards;
- History of oversight in a particular subject area or committee;
- History of one or more famous oversight practitioners; and
- Other oversight-related issues on the congressional or state level.
There are no teaching obligations. Funding may be used to compensate the scholars’ work and defray research expenses related to, for example, obtaining research data, engaging in travel, or hiring an assistant. Funds will be paid out in multiple installments over the Fellowship.