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home pageKeith
T. Poole
and Howard Rosenthal
D-NOMINATE
after 10 Years: A Comparative Update to Congress: A
Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting
Legislative Studies Quarterly
XXVI:5-29
This paper updates the findings in Congress: A
Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting and compares them to findings
for both European legislatures and the United Nations General Assembly. Congress
argues that important episodes in American political and economic history can be
better understood by supplementing or reinterpreting more traditional analyses
with the basic space theory of ideology. In Congress, we measured
ideology with D-NOMINATE
scores. Here we summarize new estimations that are complete through the 105th
Congress. We find that the trend to polarization and unidimensionality
identified in Congress has continued unabated. The shift to Republican
control after the 1994 elections is part of this trend and does not represent a
sharp break in roll-call-voting behavior. Comparison of
nominate results for the United States to those for other legislatures both further
indicates the ideological character of roll-call voting in Congress and suggests
that low-dimensional spatial models apply as well to multiparty systems as to
two-party systems.
Charles
S. Bullock III, Ronald Keith Gaddie,
and Anders Ferrington
When Experience Fails: The
Experience Factor in Congressional Runoffs
Legislative Studies Quarterly
XXVI:31-43
Ambition theory identifies political experience as a major correlate
of holding higher office. We explore the possibility that under certain
conditions, political experience may do little to promote election.
Specifically, in runoff primaries experience may not promote a candidate’s
prospects for nomination. When an experienced candidate, such as a former state
legislator, fails to win a majority in the initial primary, it may indicate that
any advantages derived from experience have been discounted by the electorate.
The relationship between experience and runoff election success is explored
using 87 U.S. House elections from 1982 through 1994. The evidence shows that in
runoffs experienced candidates who led their primaries have no advantage, while
the greater the experience of the primary runner-up, the more likely it is that
the front-runner will be nominated.
Michael
Bailey
Quiet Influence: The
Representation of Diffuse Interests
on Trade Policy,
1983–94
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:45-80
A core tenet of many approaches to American trade politics is that
diffuse interests exert little or no influence on the process. This paper
argues, however, that there are theoretical and empirical reasons to believe
that diffuse interests can and do influence congressional trade politics.
Members of Congress respond to these interests in order to preempt their
mobilization by political rivals, interest groups, the president, and the
media. This mechanism does not preclude interest group influence but rather
points our attention to an additional influence on congressional trade voting.
Evidence for this view comes from statistical analyses of ten years of House
and Senate trade voting in the eighties and nineties. The results indicate that
skilled labor--an interest that receives diffuse benefits from trade but lacks
direct organization--has been a statistically significant, consistent, and
substantial influence on congressional trade voting.
Daniel
Lipinski
The Effect of Messages
Communicated by Members of Congress: The Impact of Publicizing Votes
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:81-100
Although much of the literature examining congressional behavior
presumes that representatives can influence how their constituents view them,
there is little evidence supporting this belief. Focusing on members’ attempts
to convey their positions on two high-profile votes--the 1991 Persian Gulf War
Use of Force Resolution and the 1993 Budget Reconciliation Conference Report--I
show that these efforts can indeed be successful. Members’ messages to
constituents are proxied by the content of official newsletters. Employing
National Election Study survey data, I demonstrate that respondents whose
representatives put forth the effort to publicize these votes were significantly
better able to state correctly their representatives’ positions on these
issues.
Jonathan
S. Morris
Reexamining the Politics of Talk: Partisan
Rhetoric in the 104th House
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:101-21
Drawing off the work of Maltzman and Sigelman (1996), this paper
looks at the propensity of members to speak on the House floor during one minute
speeches in the 104th Congress. I used a negative binomial event count model to
predict not only who will participate in “one minutes” in general, but also
who will engage in partisan rhetoric, which was such an important aspect of the
volatile 104th Congress. The model finds that, while general participation can
be predicted, we can also use a number of explanatory variables, such as tenure,
electoral insecurity, ideological intensity, party rank, constituency time zone,
and party identification to understand why some members engage in partisan
rhetoric during one minutes and why others do not. The findings have
implications both for understanding partisan behavior in the 104th Congress and
for understanding and predicting one minute speaking practices in the future.
E.
Lee Bernick
Anchoring Legislative Careers
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:123-43
A general theory developed in industrial psychology, career
anchor theory, can be used to aid in understanding legislators’
orientations toward their careers. To determine if legislative anchors exist, I
used data from a survey conducted in 1995 of North Carolina legislators. I
employed factor analysis of thirteen closed-ended items previously associated
with career anchors and the results showed that three legislative anchors do
exist: power, service, and specialization. I then assigned factor scores to
legislators. A cluster analysis uncovered five groups of legislators, each with
a different pattern of association toward the three anchors. Legislative career
orientation was associated with attainment of a leadership position, political
ambition, and acceptance of legislative norms.
herbert
dÖRing
Parliamentary Agenda Control
and Legislative Outcomes in Western Europe
Legislative Studies
Quarterly XXVI:145-65
This article gives a comprehensive account of the rules
and practices of agenda setting that were typically in force in the lower or
single Houses of Western European (national) parliaments during the 1980s. From
this account, comparative indices for control of both the budgetary agenda and
the lawmaking agenda are developed. These indices are then used to check the
empirical validity of hypotheses that expect, as legislative outcomes from
agenda control, a reduction of budget deficits and legislative inflation.
Finally, possible trade-offs between parliamentary agenda control and control by
other decision-making structures outside parliament are explored.
gary
w. cox
Agenda Setting in
the U.S. House: A Majority-Party Monopoly?
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:185-210
How strongly does the majority party control the agenda in the U.S. House of
Representatives? In this article, I contrast two spatial models of U.S. House
committees--one in which each committee’s agenda is set by the full committee,
one in which it is set by the committee’s majority-party contingent. These two
models lead to clearly different predictions about (1) who dissents on final
passage votes in committee and (2) who files dissents to committee bill reports.
Data from the 84th through the 98th Congresses gibe with the partisan model.
Majority-party members with a given ideological location dissent substantially
less often than do minority-party members with comparable ideological locations.
And majority-party dissent rates are extremely low on an absolute scale, with
over 50% of majority-party members never dissenting.
alan
I. Abramowitz
It’s Monica, Stupid:
The Impeachment Controversy and the 1998 Midterm Election
Legislative Studies Quarterly
XXVI:211-26
This
paper tests three competing explanations for the outcome of the 1998 midterm
election: a normal politics explanation, a peace-and-prosperity explanation, and
a scandal backlash explanation. After examining the evidence from the 1998
National Election Study, I conclude that the most important reason for the
Republican party’s poor showing in the 1998 midterm election was a voter
backlash against Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr and congressional Republicans
over their handling of the presidential sex scandal and impeachment inquiry. I
then address the question of why congressional Republicans acted as they did,
and I examine what implications these findings may have for the ability of the
GOP to maintain control of Congress in future elections.
laura
w. arnold
The Distribution
of Senate Committee Positions: Change or More of the Same?
Legislative Studies Quarterly
XXVI:227-48
Recent
work on the United States Senate has focused on its transformation from a
clublike dominance of a few members to one in which individual senators play
significant roles in the policymaking process regardless of seniority (Ripley
1969; Sinclair 1989a). Some argue that part of this transformation was the
democratization of committee assignments (Sinclair 1988). I examine the degree
to which the Senate has democratized its committee assignments and test possible
explanations for this democratization process. I argue that changes in committee
assignment practices that gave junior members improved assignments were the
result of institutional reform rather than membership changes or changes in the
Washington environment alone.
john
b. gilmour
The Powell
Amendment Voting Cycle: An Obituary
The
adoption of the Powell amendment on a bill to provide federal aid to education
in 1956 is the most widely cited instance of a voting cycle in the U.S. House of
Representatives. This article shows, however, that it was not a voting cycle and
that the adoption of the Powell amendment was not responsible for the bill’s
defeat. Using evidence of members’ preferences derived from their votes on
similar measures the next year, I show that the status quo of not passing a bill
would have defeated both the original bill and the amended bill.
Kim quaile hill
Multiple-Method
Measurement of Legislators’ Ideologies
Legislative Studies Quarterly
XXVI:263-74
I
offer empirical evidence on the validity and reliability of measures of
legislator ideology derived from three different methods: survey research,
content analysis of news stories about the legislators from their initial
election campaigns, and inferring individual legislators’ ideologies from that
of a relevant co-partisan elite. The analysis is replicated for independent
samples of U.S. Senators and House members, and indicates that all three methods
produce ideology measures of high validity and reliability.
christine
leveaux-sharpe
Congressional
Responsiveness to Redistricting Induced Constituency Change: An Extension to the
1990s
Legislative Studies Quarterly
XXVI:275-86
According
to Glazer and Robbins (1985), House members were responsive to redistricting
induced changes in the partisan composition of their districts in the 1970s and
1980s. In this paper, I extend the Glazer and Robbins model to the 1990s. It is
possible that the high turnover rates observed in the House in the 1990s reflect
constituency dissatisfaction with House members’ ability or willingness to
modify their roll-call vote behavior after redistricting. Using House members'
nominate scores as the dependent variable, I examine the
effect of changes in the Democratic composition of House districts, on roll-call
conservatism. The findings reveal that when the Democratic composition of
a district decreases due to redistricting, the roll-call vote behavior of the
House member becomes more conservative. Although there is much speculation as to
what caused the high levels of turnover in the 1990s, a lack of responsiveness
on the part of incumbent House members is not the answer. Furthermore, in
contrast to the Glazer and Robbins study, I find that senior members seem to be
less responsive than their junior counterparts, a finding that suggests a
generational effect may be taking place.
SCOTT
W. DESPOSATO
Legislative Politics in Authoritarian Brazil
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:287-317
This
paper provides the first model of legislative behavior in nondemocratic
settings. Many authoritarian regimes have sought to maintain a façade of
democracy by creating “puppet” legislatures. These legislatures should
always support the regime since uncooperative behavior risks career-ending
punishments. But in spite of potentially high costs, legislators do sometimes
rebel against military executives. I show how legislative rebellion can be a
rational strategy--even under authoritarian rule. When applied to data from
Brazil, the model reveals the durable power of the electoral connection and
patronage politics. The methods and model could be easily applied to other cases
of legislative rebellion against nondemocratic executives.
RICHARD
A. CLUCAS
Principal-Agent Theory and the Power of State House Speakers
Legislative Studies Quarterly
XXVI:319-38
This
study examines the power of state House Speakers to test the theory that
legislative leaders act as agents of their followers. To accomplish this task, I
created an index of the Speakers’ institutional powers for all forty-nine
state lower houses. I then examined how these powers are affected by the
competitiveness of the state’s electoral system, the professional character of
the state’s legislature, and the career opportunities offered to legislators.
The data analysis indicates that the distribution of power is shaped
predominantly by the strength of electoral competition and the career
opportunity structure. The paper explains why these findings are consistent with
principal-agent theory.
Keith
Krehbiel and
Alan Wiseman
Joseph
G. Cannon: Majoritarian from Illinois
Legislative
Studies Quarterly
XXVI:357-89
Congressional scholars regularly identify Speaker Joseph G. Cannon as the personification of centralized authority and partisan strength in the United States Congress. This paper assesses the conventional wisdom on Cannonism by employing the Groseclose-Stewart (1998) method for estimating values of committee seats to study variation in member-specific committee portfolio values. The data are useful both for reassessing the historical thesis of Cannon as tyrant and for testing more recent political science hypotheses about the underpinnings of a strong majority party. The findings fail to corroborate the notions of majority party power and Cannon as tyrant, and, if anything, support a new portrait of Cannon as a majoritarian.
Franco
Mattei
Senate
Apportionment and Partisan Advantage: A Second Look
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:391-409
In an earlier paper, Lee and Oppenheimer (1997) found that apportionment has generally functioned as a check on majority rule since the institution of direct Senate elections. Also, according to the authors, apportionment has consistently worked to the advantage of Republicans since 1956. Its influence, however, was more pronounced between 1980 and 1986 than in the 6-year electoral cycle ending in 1994. As a result, the authors surmise that the most recent Republican control of the Senate may outlive that of the 1980s. This analysis reconsiders the impact of apportionment on Senate elections. The findings indicate that apportionment’s check on majority rule occurred less frequently than originally claimed; that apportionment’s pro-Republican bias began at least two decades after its alleged onset in 1956; and that the size of apportionment bias is generally smaller than that estimated by Lee and Oppenheimer. Finally, bias did not vary significantly during the two most recent periods of Republican control of the Senate. Hence, apportionment appears irrelevant to any forecast about the endurance of the current Republican majority.
Richard
L. Fox, Jennifer L. Lawless, and Courtney Feeley
Gender
and the Decision to Run for Office
Legislative
Studies Quarterly
XXVI:411-35
Despite an electoral system that appears to present excellent opportunities for women to win elective office, the number of women candidates remains low. While the initial decision to run for office is critical in understanding women’s continued under-representation in elective office, very little research explores this subject. To examine the manner in which gender affects the decision to seek an elective position, we investigated how men and women in the “pool of eligible candidates” in New York State perceived running for office. Two central findings emerged from our data. First, contrary to findings in previous research, women and men in our sample expressed roughly equal levels of political ambition and viewed the campaign environment similarly. Our second central finding, however, is that important gender differences emerged in the factors that contributed to the decision to run. In other words, women considered many more factors when thinking about running for office, whereas men of all types felt more freedom to launch a candidacy. These findings tend to reinforce the notion that broad patterns of sex-role socialization continue to impede women from full inclusion in the electoral process.
DAVID
L. SCHECTER
and DAVID M. HEDGE
Dancing
with the One Who Brought You:
The Allocation and Impact of Party Giving to State Legislators
Legislative
Studies Quarterly
XXVI:437-56
Like their national counterparts, the state parties play an increasingly significant role in the campaigns of their members. Nowhere is that more evident than in the allocation of direct contributions to party candidates. For the parties, the allocation of party support provides opportunities to both win elections and promote subsequent party unity. Yet, as events in Florida in the 1990s indicate, winning elections in these politically tumultuous times may make the link between party money and party unity problematic. In 1996 and 1998, Democratic and Republican officials were able to target party funds to those house races where they were likely to do the most good--in competitive races in which party members faced well-funded opponents. At the same time, the receipt of party money did not translate into party support in the 1997 and 1999 legislative sessions.
Aubrey
W. Jewett
Partisan
Change in Southern Legislatures, 1946-95
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:457-86
What accounts for partisan change in southern legislatures between 1946 and 1995? I draw my hypotheses from general theories of partisan change and tailor them to the South based on history and previous research to explain the variance in southern Republican legislative strength. I estimate a pooled time series analysis of the eleven former Confederate states to test the path model. The model uses Democratic elite liberalism as an endogenous variable in order to determine the overall effect of several important independent variables including black population, black political influence, urbanization, white northern migration, and wealth. Determinants of state legislative partisan change include the following: secular forces such as wealth, urbanization, and migration; political forces such as presidential midterm losses, party organizational strength, and political scandal; party issue stances on race and general party ideology; changes in national party preferences that precede change at lower levels; and finally, rules governing the structure of political opportunity such as reapportionment and participation.
Rachael
E. Ingall
and Brian F. Crisp
Determinants
of Home Style:
The Many Incentives for Going Home in Colombia
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:487-512
A legislator’s behavior in his or her electoral district, “home style,” reveals much about awareness of constituents’ wishes and the importance attributed to district matters. Legislators who frequently travel home represent their constituents differently than those who do not. In the Latin American country of Colombia, home style is a contentious issue. The country is plagued by violence and corruption, but the national legislature devotes much of its time to “pork barrel politics.” We use data from Colombia, a presidential democracy, to test competing explanations of home style, evaluating several political factors as determinants of variation in legislators’ propensity to go home. We find that higher district magnitudes, spatially concentrated vote patterns, failure to solidify electorally dominated bailiwicks, and electoral invulnerability all contribute to a legislator’s fixation on district concerns. If needed political reforms are to succeed, reform-minded presidents will need allies in the legislature who are relatively less likely to focus on district matters.
STEPHEN
ANSOLABEHERE, JAMES M. SNYDER, JR., AND CHARLES STEWART III
The Effects of
Party and Preferences on Congressional Roll-Call Voting:
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:533-72
We assess the importance of parties in Congress by comparing roll-call voting behavior against the preferences of members of the House as expressed in surveys conducted during the 1996 and 1998 elections. The surveys were conducted by Project Vote Smart. Our findings support two key conclusions. First, both party and preferences mattered in predicting roll-call behavior in the 103d, 104th, and 105th Congresses. Second, the independent effects of party were present in only about 40% of roll calls. The incidence of party effects was highest on close votes, procedural votes, and key “party” issues. It was lowest on matters of conscience, such as abortion, and “off-the-first-dimension” issues, such as affirmative action and gun control.
KIM FRIDKIN KAHN AND PATRICK J. KENNEY
The Importance of Issues in Senate Campaigns: Citizens’ Reception of Issue Messages
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:573-97
In this paper, we examine whether or not representatives are successful at communicating their policy priorities to their constituents. We focus our attention on the campaign period because campaigns serve as the primary mechanism for communication between elected representatives and the represented. We examine 57 campaigns for the U.S. Senate between 1988 and 1992 and determine to what extent voters became aware of the specific messages articulated during the course of the campaigns. We find convincing evidence that when candidates and the news media focus on a particular issue (i.e., the economy, health care, environment, education), citizens are more likely to recognize the issue as a campaign theme.
M.V. HOOD, QUENTIN KIDD, AND IRWIN L. MORRIS
The Key Issue: Constituency Effects and Southern Senators’ Roll-Call Voting on Civil Rights
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:599-621
One
striking manifestation of the twentieth-century transformation of Southern
politics is the liberalization of roll-call voting behavior of Southern
Democrats on civil rights issues. One explanation for this shift focuses on the
leftward pull of an increasingly mobilized black electorate. A second
explanation cites the leftward push of a growing Republican Party. Using data
for Southern senators and states from 1969 to 1996, we implement a time series
cross-sectional analysis to evaluate the competing explanations. We find that
the liberalization of voting patterns was a joint result of the mobilization of
the black electorate and the growth of Southern Republicanism.
KATHERINE TATE
The Political Representation of Blacks in Congress: Does Race Matter?
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:623-38
Congressional scholars generally take the position that members of Congress don’t have to descriptively mirror their constituents in order to be responsive. Yet ample scholarship has shown that legislators work very hard at identifying with their constituents, at conveying the impression that they are alike in interests and opinions. Matching the race of the House member to their constituents’ ratings in the 1996 National Black Election Study, I find that blacks consistently express higher levels of satisfaction with their representation in Washington when that representative is black, even controlling for other characteristics of the legislators, such as political party. This study underscores the value of descriptive representation in the black community and highlights the need for additional empirically based studies of political representation.
SCOTT R. MEINKE AND WILLIAM D.
ANDERSON
Influencing from Impaired Administrations: Presidents, White House Scandals, and Legislative Leadership
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:639-59
Journalists and scholars alike have suggested that scandal has a harmful effect on the effectiveness of the political system. Little systematic evidence exists to validate this claim, but we address the problem by offering theoretical reasons and empirical evidence that White House scandal--independent of other influences such as public approval of the president--has a negative effect on presidential support in Congress. We analyze individual House members’ votes on key legislation during the Watergate, Iran-contra, and Monica Lewinsky scandals, employing as an independent variable an innovative measure of scandal presence and intensity. Our empirical tests show that the usual contextual influences on congressional voting are significant and that scandal has a strong, negative effect on presidential support. After detailing these findings, we conclude with a discussion of implications both for presidential politics and for the presidential leadership literature.
MICHAEL B. BERKMAN
Legislative Professionalism and the Demand for Groups: The Institutional Context of Interest Population Density
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:661-79
Do state interest group systems develop independently of the legislatures they lobby? The Energy-Stability-Area model developed by Gray and Lowery (1996) implicitly suggests they do. I argue that legislative professionalism conditions how group systems respond to environmental factors. As legislatures professionalize, their demand for information from lobbyists decreases. Groups are in this and other ways less effective in professional legislatures and more likely to exit a crowded group system. I model interest density with professionalism as a contextual variable. The results have implications for the number and mix of interests, the impact of lobbying regulations, and the consequences of legislative de-institutionalization.
Published by the Comparative Legislative Research Center,
334 Schaeffer Hall, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1409, U.S.A.