Ideology influences how Congress chooses whether to give grant aid to state governments or to run programs federally

When implementing policy, Congress can choose to allocate grants to state governments as grant aid, or for the funds to be administered by agencies at a federal level. In new research Stuart Kasdin and Federica Iorio look at how the dominant ideology of Congressional institutions affects the design of such programs. They find that when Congress and a federal administration share the same partisan orientation, the program is more likely to be administered by the central government than as grant aid to the states, and vice versa. They also write that when an agency has a history of grant making to the states, Congress is more likely to propose grants than central provision.