Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy

Elise J. Bean Oversight Fellowship

The Elise J. Bean Oversight Fellowship is a non-resident fellowship program launched in 2021 by the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy to promote and advance research efforts in legislative oversight. The fellowship encourages scholarly research on oversight investigations conducted by Congress or the 50 state legislatures and related topics. The program seeks to foster high-quality fact-finding and oversight investigations that are not captive to partisan interests by supporting early career scholars, including post-doctoral students and professors, to conduct research and produce papers with useful research results related to oversight by legislators. Research topics may include 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, oversight performance measures, consensus factfinding, examining oversight gaps, developing new oversight databases, history of oversight in particular subject areas or committees, and other oversight-related issues on the congressional or state level. Fellows must present their research paper at a Levin Center-sponsored event, and the paper will be promoted through academic channels. The fellowship was renamed in 2025 in honor of Elise Bean, a former colleague of the center.