The Special Committees of Control in the National Congress of Argentina

Abstract

This article approaches the legislative oversight in Argentina at the parliamentary committee level, a research dimension that hasn’t been discovered yet. How do these committees oversee the federal agencies? In response to this issue, a special sample of Oversight Special Committees (OSC) of the Argentine Congress is analyzed from the delegative theory perspective. In this sense, an analytic framework is drawn up to examine, on the one side, the agency relation of the OSC with bureaucracies and the Congress houses, and on the other side, how they exert the ex ante and ex post control. Then, a quantitative measuring of the control power of the OSC is developed on the basis of that analytic framework. Finally, they are analyzed in relation to the party cartel theory in Argentina.