LSQ Abstracts

Keith 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.

Volume XXVI, Number 2
May 2001

laura w. arnold
The Distribution of Senate Committee Positions: Change or More of the Same?
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:227-48

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.

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
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:249-62
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.

Volume XXVI, Number 3
August 2001

Richard L. Fox , Jennifer L. Lawless , and Courtney Feeley

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.

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. Cr i sp

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.

Volume XXVI, Number 4
November 2001

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.

(Appendices A, B, C)

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.

Volume XXVII, Number 1
February 2002

William R. Lowry and Charles R. Shipan

Gary Reich

Executive Decree Authority in Brazil: How Reactive Legislators Influence Policy

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:5-31

At first glance, wide-ranging presidential decree authority suggests executive branch domination of legislatures. However, decree power may also be a rational delegation of authority by legislators, in accord with their political objectives. Seen in this light, the key issue for legislators is not halting decree authority but reducing the agency losses that result from delegation. This paper shows how decree authority, as practiced in Brazil, constitutes an example of rational delegation by a legislature in which seniority and policy specialization are relatively undervalued. Brazilian legislators prefer to endow presidents with broad decree power and then monitor presidents on an issue-by-issue basis by amending executive decrees. This method of “oversight after delegation” lowers the transaction costs of delegation and speaks to the influence of Brazilian legislators over what is typically seen as an important source of presidential power.

Party Differentiation in Congress

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:33-60

At times, the American political parties are so close in terms of policy positions that critics denounce the lack of a “dime’s worth of difference” between them. At other times, the gap between them on a left-right dimension is huge. How can we explain this variation? We argue that parties can behave rationally as collective units, and that shifts in divergence and convergence can be explained as rational responses to changes within governmental institutions and to shifts in conditions outside. We analyze this argument using adjusted ADA scores (Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder 1999) to compare voting score differences between the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress from 1952 to 1996. We pose specific hypotheses for potentially important factors shaping party behavior and test them with a multivariate model. Our results support the argument that the variation in the behavioral gap between the two parties in Congress can be explained as rational party responses to internal and external stimuli.

Bryan W. Marshall

Explaining the Role of Restrictive Rules in the Postreform House

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:61-85

Four competing explanations have emerged regarding restrictive rules in Congress. Informational theory claims that rules reduce information costs and facilitate committee specialization. The distributional perspective suggests that rules enforce legislative bargains and help members achieve gains-from-trade. Another claim is that rules increase the Rules Committee’s independent influence over policy. Lastly, partisan theory asserts that rules are used to increase the majority party’s influence over policy.

This analysis tests these claims during the 97th, 98th, 104th, and 105th Congresses. The findings demonstrate that theoretical constructs developed in earlier analyses of special rules are not robust over time and across legislative contexts. The results refute majoritarian assertions that rules are used as informational devices. Similarly, little evidence supports the claim that Rules Committee preferences independently affect rule assignment. Instead, a partisan principal-agent framework emerges as the most useful construct to explain procedural choice in the postreform House.

Bernard Grofman, William Koetzle, and Anthony J. McGann

Congressional Leadership 1965–96: A New Look at the Extremism versus Centrality Debate

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:87-105

An examination of the differences between the ideological positions of leaders and other members in the U.S. House of Representatives (1965–96) demonstrates that Republican leaders tend to be significantly to the right of the median Republican member and Democratic leaders tend to be significantly to the left of the median Democratic member. Furthermore, leaders from both parties tend to be ideologically located near the mode of their party’s ideological distribution. These empirical results have implications for issues such as party polarization, conditional party government, and the possibility of separating out party and ideology.

Thad E. Hall

Changes in Legislative Support for the Governor’s Program Over Time

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:107-122

This study examines changes in legislative support for the governor’s legislative agenda in Georgia during the governor’s first term in office (1991–94). I analyze the factors that led legislators to support the governor’s agenda, as well as how the level of support changed between election years and off-years. I use multivariate OLS models of gubernatorial support to determine how support varied (1) between the parties, (2) between factions within parties, and (3) over time. I find that there was wide variation in support among factions in the majority party and that support varied widely between election years and off-years.

Carol S. Weissert and Susan Silberman

Legislative Demands for Bureaucratic Policymaking: The Case of State Medical Boards

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:123-139

While much is known about the relationship between Congress and regulatory agencies, there has been little examination of the role state legislatures play in the activities of state regulatory bodies, particularly those activities related to timely, salient policy issues. This article explores the relationship of state legislatures to medical boards, which are increasingly becoming more policy active. We find that state legislative involvement and influence are the most important determinants of policy-active state medical boards; institutional elements play a secondary role. Major changes in the private health care delivery system affect legislative involvement and play an indirect role in predicting policy activism. We drew our data from a 50-state survey of executive directors of state medical boards.

Volume XXVII, Number 2
May 2002

RICCARDO PELIZZO and JOSEPH COOPER
Stability in Parliamentary Regimes: The Italian Case
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:163-90
In this article, we distinguish legislative stability from government stability and argue that the character of the relationship that exists between them is a complex one in which various combinations are possible. We focus on Italy because of the manner in which it has combined legislative stability with government instability. Our findings indicate that the relationship between legislative and government stability in Italy is best seen as curvilinear, that the analysis of government stability must take the number of governments as well as the duration of governments into account, and that the attributes of the party system that stabilize the legislature destabilize governments. Given these findings, we discuss their implications for explaining stability in parliamentary regimes in terms of events, “strong parties,” and strategic calculation. We conclude that legislative stability should not be treated simply as a secondary or derivative effect of government stability and that Italy can serve as a benchmark for further study of the nature and determinants of the relationship between the two in other parliamentary systems.

Keith Krehbiel and Adam Meirowitz
Minority Rights and Majority Power: Theoretical Consequences of the Motion to Recommit
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:191-217
Motivated by the U.S. Congress’s motion to recommit with instructions to report forthwith, we analyze a simple spatial model to clarify the relationship between early-stage agenda-setting rights of a committee or the majority party, a late-stage minimum parliamentary right of the minority party or a noncommittee member, and the distribution of power over outcomes. The extent to which certain parliamentary rights empower agents is dependent on the relative locations of the exogenous status quo and the preferences of the legislators. We derive comparative statics on the relationship between proposal order and power by considering a model that allows preference heterogeneity and status quo centrality to vary. Finally, we relate the findings to recurring substantive debates on majority party power and committee power.
(Appendix)

John R. Hibbing
How to Make Congress Popular
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:219-44
Conventional wisdom holds that Congress is unpopular because it does not measure up to the people’s populist expectations. Instead of being the “citizen’s legislature” that the people desire, it is an institutionalized legislature with well-paid, longtime members and an elaborate infrastructure of committees, caucuses, parties, and perquisites. The people, it is alleged, desire more of a voice in the decisions made by Congress, they want congressional procedures to be more open so ordinary people know what is going on in the halls of power, and they want more accountability and more representation of the interests of real people. In this paper, I argue that the enactment of this populist reform agenda would actually make Congress substantially less popular with the people. In other words, I contend that the more Congress gives people voice, accountability, representation, and open, visible procedures, the more the people will be dissatisfied with Congress. The real cause of congressional unpopularity is not that people would rather make decisions themselves but that people do not trust members of Congress to make decisions in a non-self-interested fashion.

david R. Jones and Monika L. McDermott
Ideological Distance from the Majority Party and Public Approval of Congress
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:245-64
We analyze whether or not perceived ideological distance from the congressional majority party influences individuals’ approval of the way Congress as a whole handles its job. We argue that, to the extent citizens see the majority party as representing an ideological stance that is distant from their own, they are unlikely to feel that Congress is representing them and therefore will be less supportive toward Congress. In contrast, when members of the public feel that the congressional majority is close to them ideologically, they are likely to feel well represented by and thereby approve of Congress. Using cross-sectional data covering periods of Democratic, Republican, and split party control of Congress (1980–98), this analysis provides strong support for the ideological proximity argument.

G. Patrick Lynch
Midterm Elections and Economic Fluctuations: The Response of Voters Over Time
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:265-94
Recent empirical work (Alesina and Rosenthal 1995; Erikson 1990) has shown that economic conditions may not have influenced House midterm elections since 1915. I argue that economic conditions may have influenced House midterms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Congress dominated economic policy-making, parties offered starker positions on economic issues, and national issues dominated House elections. As the 20th century progressed, congressional power over the economy declined, the parties converged over certain economic policies, and district-level forces grew more important in elections. I test the stability of the relationship between the economy and House midterms over time, using F-tests to show how the impact of macroeconomic conditions has changed in House midterm elections from 1872 to 1994. The results indicate that the gross national product (GNP) influenced House races before 1913 but, as the 20th century continued, the importance of the economy on House midterms declined.
(Appendix of Variable Data)

KERRY L. HAYNIE
The Color of Their Skin or the Content of Their Behavior? Race and Perceptions of African American Legislators
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:295-314
Previous studies have shown that, because of their race, African American candidates for public office are often evaluated less favorably than their colleagues by voters. Does this dynamic continue when black candidates become elected officials? Using data on the North Carolina General Assembly, I address this question by examining the effects of race on perceptions of legislative effectiveness. When the dependent variable is the average effectiveness rating given by three groups--lobbyists, journalists, and other legislators--there is evidence that African American representatives are evaluated negatively because of their race. When the dependent variable is disaggregated into the separate effectiveness ratings given by each of the respondent groups individually, these negative perceptions of blacks on account of race remain on the part of lobbyists and other legislators, but not for journalists. Moreover, the negative perceptions of black representatives are not mitigated by these representatives possessing certain characteristics (e.g., seniority and leadership positions) that previous studies have found to be correlated with positive effectiveness evaluations. The presence of an African American Speaker in one legislative session did, however, seem to attenuate the negative perceptions.

Volume XXVII, Number 3

August 2002

GOLDIE SHABAD and KAZIMIERZ M. SLOMCZYNSKI

The Emergence of Career Politicians in Post-Communist Democracies: Poland and the Czech Republic

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:333-59

Despite party system fluidity and high rates of electoral volatility in the first decade after the transition to democracy in Poland and the Czech Republic, career politicians are emerging. Using data on all parliamentary candidates in the last election before the fall of communism and in all elections since then, we show that, in both countries, parliamentary carryover rates have risen substantially, a growing number of incumbents are seeking reelection, and an increasing proportion of candidates for legislative office have competed in previous parliamentary elections. Moreover, we demonstrate that prior political experience has a persistent and positive effect on winning office. We argue that the rise of career politicians facilitates the consolidation and effectiveness of these new democracies.

Erik S. Herron

Electoral Influences on Legislative Behavior in Mixed-Member Systems: Evidence from Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:361-81

This article addresses how mixed-member systems that combine proportional representation (PR) and single-member districts (SMD) into a single election can influence legislators’ voting behavior. Scholars have generally extended standard expectations of behavior to mixed-member systems by assuming that legislators occupying PR seats in mixed-member parliaments should be more cohesive than those occupying SMD seats. I argue that controlling for seat type alone does not take into account the interaction between PR and SMD in mixed-member systems. Using voting data from Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, I show that controlling for dual candidacy and the “safety” of the deputy’s district or list position increases our understanding of the factors motivating legislative cohesion.

Brian Newman and Charles Ostrom, Jr.

Explaining Seat Changes in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1950–98

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:383-405

Recent U.S. House elections have challenged existing models of congressional elections, raising the question of whether or not processes thought to govern previous elections are still at work. Taking Marra and Ostrom’s (1989) model of congressional elections as representative of extant theoretical perspectives and testing it against recent elections, we find that the model fails. We augment Marra and Ostrom’s model with new insights, constructing a model that explains elections from 1950 to 1998. We find that, although presidential approval ratings and major political events continue to drive congressional elections, the distribution of open seats must also be taken into account.

Martin P. Wattenberg and Craig Leonard Brians

Partisan Turnout Bias in Midterm Legislative Elections

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:407-21

Lower salience elections present greater opportunities for representational bias at the polls than do elections with higher levels of political interest. We hypothesize that turnout bias is most likely to occur during midterm congressional elections in which there are clear short-term forces that exploit the low turnout setting. The effects of these forces are more likely to be observable among registered nonvoters than citizens who are not registered to vote because registrants have access to the polls and are likely to have voted in previous presidential contests. Using midterm National Election Study data from 1978 to 1998, we find that registered nonvoters are frequently more Democratic than midterm election voters, particularly in 1994 and 1998. The historic 1994 congressional election seat losses for Democrats may be partially explained by the finding that voters going to the polls were clearly more conservative than registered nonvoters.

Mark D. Brewer, Mack D. Mariani, and Jeffrey M. Stonecash

Northern Democrats and Party Polarization in the U.S. House

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:423-44

Over the last 25 years, there has been a steady increase in party voting in the U.S. House, with much of this increase attributed to changes in the South. We argue that changes in the North are also important. Democrats now win a higher percentage of elections in the North, and a larger percentage of the congressional party comes from the North. Northern Democrats became steadily more liberal in the 1980s and 1990s, which increased the liberal record of the entire party. We examine two factors in the rise in liberal voting in the North. First, Democrats now win more seats in urban, lower-income, nonwhite districts that tend to generate liberal voting records. Second, there has been an increase in the number of districts that tend to produce liberal-voting Democrats. Together, these changes have resulted in more liberal Democratic Party voting and greater polarization between the parties.

(Appendices)

Samuel H. Fisher III and Rebekah Herrick

Whistle While You Work: Job Satisfaction and Retirement from the U.S. House

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:445-57

The literature analyzing the effects of job satisfaction on congressional retirement has been inconclusive. The problem with this literature is its reliance on indirect measures of job satisfaction. We use a direct measure of job satisfaction to demonstrate that job satisfaction does have a significant independent effect on congressional retirement. The findings imply that the indirect measures of job satisfaction measure frustration as opposed to job dissatisfaction, a conceptually different variable. The fact that members’ job satisfaction affects their career length suggests that a Congress that keeps its members happy will have greater retention and will, presumably, keep its best members.

Robert M. Stein, Martin Johnson, and Stephanie Shirley Post

Public Support for Term Limits: Another Look at Conventional Thinking

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:459-80

Americans are enamored with term limits for elected officials at all levels of government. Explanations of public support for term limits focus on partisanship, group underrepresentation, voter dissatisfaction with specific political institutions, political cynicism, and ideology. We qualify the conventional wisdom that term limits are mostly a Republican issue: Support for term limits is more a function of the incongruence between an individual’s expressed partisanship and the party of their representative than of the individual’s party affiliation. Further, the effect of unsatisfactory representation is strongly related to a voter’s engagement with politics and willingness to monitor political affairs actively.

RORY ALLAN AUSTIN

Seats That May Not Matter: Testing for Racial Polarization in U.S. City Councils

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:481-508

Critics of the Voting Rights Act claim that electoral structures used by city councils lead to racially polarized legislatures in which African American members are consistently outvoted by white majorities. Using council votes from six cities, this study shows that the critics’ claim is exaggerated. In only one city were African American council members generally less likely to be on the winning side of votes because of their race. Polarization is more of a concern for particular issues: members with large black constituencies were less likely to be on the winning side of votes on housing or police affairs in four cities.

Volume XXVII, Number 4

November 2002

Jennifer Wolak, Adam J. Newmark, Todd McNoldy, David Lowery, and Virginia Gray

Much of Politics Is Still Local: Multi-State Lobbying in State Interest Communities

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:527-55

We explore the nationalization of state lobbying communities by examining all lobbying registrations held by organizations in the 50 states in 1997, with special attention given to the frequency of multi-state registrations. Following discussion of the meanings and sources of nationalization among state interest communities, we develop and analyze several measures of the level of localism, examining what factors drive variation in multiple state registrations across group types and states. Finally, we discuss the substantive and measurement implications of the nationalization of state interest communities. Our findings identify an interesting paradox of interest representation before state legislatures: although lobbying responses and techniques may have become more nationalized, the composition of state interest communities remains predominantly local.

Vicky M. Wilkins and garry Young

The Influence of Governors on Veto Override Attempts: A Test of Pivotal Politics

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:557-75

Using the “switcher” analysis developed by Krehbiel (1998), we examine the ability of Missouri governors to sway legislators on veto override attempts. Our initial results closely mirror Krehbiel’s finding that the chief executive successfully achieves influence at and around the veto pivot, but these results change once we take into account the political party of the legislators. Governors are far more likely to influence legislators from their own party, regardless of legislator ideology. Our study provides a rare systematic analysis of gubernatorial influence in the legislative arena, while also contributing to the current debate over preference-based versus partisan-based theories of legislatures.

Thomas J. Rudolph

The Economic Sources of Congressional Approval

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:577-99

Models of congressional approval have, in both theory and specification, often imitated models of presidential approval. Through their modeling decisions, researchers have implicitly assumed that the economic determinants of presidential and congressional approval are identical. Such assumptions have discouraged other researchers from testing competing hypotheses about the economic determinants of congressional approval. Using aggregate-level time-series analysis, this study investigates the question of whether or not the economic determinants of approval vary by the target of political judgment. I find that presidential approval is driven largely by sociotropic prospections, a result consistent with previous research. In contrast, I find the public relies most heavily upon egocentric retrospections when judging the U.S. Congress.

Matthew N. Green

Institutional Change, Party Discipline, and the House Democratic Caucus, 1911–19

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:601-33

The House Democratic Caucus of 1911 to 1919 is a largely understudied institution in the literature on congressional party government, despite the claims of many scholars that the caucus functioned as a significant instrument of party government by binding legislators’ floor votes. An analysis of roll-call votes, new data from the caucus journal, and contemporary accounts from the period indicate that these claims are largely exaggerated, although the caucus did, on occasion, improve floor discipline within the party. I find that intraparty homogeneity on crosscutting issues was related to caucus success. In addition, I argue that the adoption and use of the binding caucus can best be understood from the “multiple goals” viewpoint of congressional politics. These findings have important implications for understanding the development of party-based institutions in Congress.

Olga Shvetsova

Gaining Legislative Control Through Strategic District Nomination: The Case of the Russian Left in 1995

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:635-57

The greater the importance of the legislative goals for a party, the more it will concern itself in the electoral campaign with the parliament’s ultimate composition, rather than simply its own seat gains. While unquestionably the dominant force in the political left, the Communist Party in Russia was also uniquely positioned in the 1995 election to take advantage of the combination of electoral and parliamentary institutions and to devise a nomination strategy that made the rest of the parliament’s left wing fully dependent on the Communists, thus giving the Communists effective control over the legislature despite their minority status.

Hussin Mutalib

Constitutional-Electoral Reforms and Politics in Singapore

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVII:659-72

The existence of a dominant one-party system in Singapore makes legislative passage of constitutional and electoral system reforms easy. Such a system has enabled the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) government to formulate and implement sweeping reforms with little difficulty, however controversial they are. Since 1980, the Singapore government has instituted nonconstituency MPs, nominated MPs, group representation constituencies, and an elected presidency. Although not necessarily intended, one consequence of these reforms has been the consolidation of the government’s power.

Volume XXVIII, Number 1
February 2003

PAUL CHAISTY

Defending the Institutional Status Quo: Communist Leadership of the Second Russian State Duma, 1996–99

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:5-28

The 1995 Russian parliamentary elections returned a State Duma dominated by an alliance of the Communist Party (CPRF) and the Agrarian (APG) and Popular Power (PP) groupings, whose combined number fell just four votes short of an overall majority. Such a powerful voting bloc might have been expected to undo the power-sharing principles on which the First Duma (1994–95) operated. Rather than challenge the status quo, however, the CPRF defended it on several occasions. In this paper, I argue that existing arrangements held benefits for the CPRF and its leftist allies. In the absence of a stable, disciplined majority, the Duma’s rules gave leftist deputies the incentives and flexibility to organize collectively.

Naoko Kada

The Role of Investigative Committees in the Presidential Impeachment Processes in Brazil and Colombia

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:29-54

One of the most important political debates today regards how to design institutions to ensure the accountability of public officials. The impeachment process is one mechanism of accountability check available to legislatures. It is, however, susceptible to misuse. What determines how the impeachment process functions? In this paper, I argue that control of information by congressional investigation committees is a crucial factor in deciding the outcome of the impeachment process. I show how the difference in information control by the investigative committees in Brazil and Colombia contributed to the removal of a president in one country and a president’s acquittal in the other.

Christian R. Grose and Antoine Yoshinaka

The Electoral Consequences of Party Switching by Incumbent Members of Congress, 1947–2000

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:55-75

What are the electoral consequences of switching parties for incumbent members of Congress? Do incumbents who switch fare better or worse after their switch? Aldrich (1995) and Aldrich and Bianco (1992) present a model of party affiliation for all candidates. We empirically extend this model for incumbent legislators who have switched parties. Specifically, we look at the universe of incumbent representatives who have run for Congress under more than one party label since World War II. We find that the primary and general election vote shares for party switchers are not as high after the switch as before. Additionally, we learn that party switching causes the primaries in the switcher’s party and in the the opposing party (the switcher’s “old” party) to become more competitive in the short run. Over the long run, however, primaries in the switcher’s new party are less competitive than those in the old party before the switch.

John Frendreis, Alan R. Gitelson , Shannon Jenkins , and Douglas D. Roscoe

Testing Spatial Models of Elections: The Influence of Voters and Elites on Candidate Issue Positions

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:77-101

This research tests spatial models of electoral competition using survey data on state legislative candidates’ policy positions and ideology in eight U.S. states. Our data support several hypotheses: 1) candidates’ issue positions do not converge; 2) party elites have more extreme positions than do candidates; 3) candidate issue positioning is a function of party-elite issue positions and union involvement in the campaign, as well as constituency characteristics; and 4) when candidates rely heavily on elite resources during their campaign, elites become more important in shaping candidate issue positions.

ROBERT E. HOGAN

Sources of Competition in State Legislative Primary Elections

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:103-26

Primaries are an important but understudied component of American elections. In this article, I examine competition in state legislative primaries across 25 states during the 1994 and 1996 election cycles. My findings indicate that competition varies greatly and is affected by a number of factors on the state and district levels. The presence of an incumbent reduces competition, but strong district support for a party leads to greater competition in that party’s primaries. Population size and social diversity do little to affect competition, but urbanism and unified party control have a positive impact. Further, legislative professionalism is associated with greater competition, particularly in open-seat races. Overall, the results have important implications for theories about the conditions that enhance or inhibit competition across different types of elections.

Volume XXVIII, Number 2
May 2003

Brian F. Schaffner, Wendy J. Schiller, and Patrick J. Sellers

Michael A. Bailey

The Politics of the Difficult: Congress, Public Opinion, and Early Cold War Aid and Trade Policies

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:147-77

Many foreign policies central to American cold war efforts were politically difficult. Understanding the politics behind these policies is important for understanding the capacity of democracies to implement difficult but strategically important policies. I argue that we must recognize the important role of public opinion. When the public is unified, popular preferences permeate and dominate the entire political system. For the case of the early cold war, I present quantitative evidence that public attitudes about national security influenced Senate voting on security aid and trade issues. My tests employ previously unused opinion data and take advantage of methodological advances in the analysis of panel data.

Erika Moreno

Subnational Determinants of National Multipartism in Latin America

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:179-201

Recent research points to the importance of subnational elections as variables shaping the national party system in federal states (Jones 1997b; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997; Samuels 2000). I propose that the effects of subnational elections are not limited to federal states but instead can be seen throughout the region. This paper examines the impacts of gubernatorial elections across eighteen Latin American countries during the most recent democratic period. The analysis suggests that intermediate subnational elections do exert an influence on national party systems, whether the state is federal or not, and particularly influence how many parties are elected to a legislature’s lower house.

Tactical and Contextual Determinants of U.S. Senators’ Approval Ratings

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:203-23

This paper focuses on U.S. senators and their home-state approval ratings from 1981 to 1997. We examine these ratings to assess the relative impacts of tactical factors, such as the senators’ bill sponsorship and media activity, and contextual influences, such as economic performance, state population size, and the evaluations and behavior of other elected officials. We find that the senators’ own tactical behavior affects the approval ratings, but a stronger influence is the context in which the senators operate.

Gregory Koger

Position Taking and Cosponsorship in the U.S. House

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:225-46

Bill cosponsorship has become an important part of the legislative and electoral process in the modern House of Representatives. Using interviews with congressional members and staff, I explain the role of cosponsorship as a signal to agenda setters and a form of position taking for constituents. Regression analysis confirms that cosponsoring varies with a member’s electoral circumstances, institutional position, and state size, but generally members have adapted slowly to the introduction of cosponsorship to the rules and practice of the House.

Mario Bergara, Barak Richman, and Pablo T. Spiller

Modeling Supreme Court Strategic Decision Making: The Congressional Constraint

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:247-80

This paper addresses the contradictory results obtained by Segal (1997) and Spiller and Gely (1992) concerning the impact of institutional constraints on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision making. By adapting the Spiller and Gely maximum likelihood model to the Segal dataset, we find support for the hypothesis that the Court adjusts its decisions to presidential and congressional preferences. Data from 1947 to 1992 indicate that the average probability of the Court being constrained has been approximately one-third. Further, we show that the results obtained by Segal are the product of biases introduced by a misspecified econometric model. We also discuss how our estimation highlights the usefulness of Krehbiel’s model of legislative decision making.

Volume XXVIII, Number 3
August 2003

William D. Anderson, Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, and Valeria Sinclair-Chapman

Eric Schickler, Eric McGhee, and John Sides
Remaking the House and Senate: Personal Power, Ideology, and the 1970s Reforms
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:297-331

Although much has been written on the critical congressional reforms of the 1970s, few studies have analyzed support for reform systematically. In this article, we draw upon previously untapped sources of information that make an individual-level, quantitative analysis possible. We analyze 20 indicators that measure support for a wide variety of reforms in both chambers. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent pattern: in virtually every case, junior members and liberals were more pro-reform than were senior members and conservatives. Also, Republicans were often more likely than Democrats to back reform. Our findings challenge the view that the reform movement was essentially a Democratic party phenomenon; liberals and junior members in both parties—not just Democrats—supported reform.

James S. Coleman Battista

An Ambition-Theoretic Approach to Legislative Organizational Choice

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:333-55

Understanding legislative organization requires that we understand internal institutional choice; we must be able to describe and predict variation in internal structures across legislatures rather than simply explain a given structure. Currently, models that would enable us to do so are largely unavailable. This article offers a more general model, based on a variant of ambition theory, with the explicit purpose of examining variation in internal organization rather than a particular structure. Theoretical results indicate that legislators’ strategic preferences over structures will fall into distinct and opposed types. This finding implies that legislatures themselves should fall into the same types and that structures, rules, and norms should appear in organized, relatively coherent bundles linked to varying legislator types.

(Technical Appendix)

The Keys to Legislative Success in the U.S. House of Representatives

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:357-86

Our research addresses how individual member behavior and institutional variables affect legislative success in the U.S. House of Representatives. Using new measures of activity from the 103d Congress (1993–94), a count dependent variable, and negative binomial regression, our analysis assesses member effectiveness. We find that a member’s activity level encourages legislative success, but gains are limited when members speak or sponsor too frequently. Our results provide a clearer picture of the role of legislative context and the relevance of institutions in determining a member’s legislative successes and failures.

David C. King and Richard J. Zeckhauser

Congressional Vote Options

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:387-411

Numerous accounts reveal that congressional leaders often secure “hip-pocket votes” or “if you need me” pledges from rank-and-file legislators. These are essentially options on votes. Leaders exercise sufficient options—pay legislators to convert to favorable votes—when those options will yield victory. Otherwise, they release the options. A model shows that this optimal strategy for leaders produces many small victories, few small losses, and losses that are, on average, larger than victories. We find precisely these patterns, hence strong evidence for vote options, in Congressional Quarterly key votes from 1975 through 2001 and in non-key votes from the 106th Congress (1999–2000).

Daniel Lipinski, William T. BiancO, and Ryan Work

What Happens When House Members “Run with Congress”? The Electoral Consequences of Institutional Loyalty

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:413-29

This article characterizes the electoral consequences of messages of institutional loyalty and disloyalty sent by incumbent House members to their constituents. We show that, for the contemporary House, there is variation in these messages—not all incumbents in the contemporary House “run for Congress by running against Congress.” Moreover, we show that these messages can, under the right conditions, have significant electoral consequences, even after controlling for party affiliation and district political factors. In addition to demonstrating the electoral relevance of legislators’ presentations, our results show an incumbent-level link between constituents’ trust in government and their voting behavior—a link created by interaction between constituents’ perceptions, legislators’ party affiliations, and the messages that legislators send to their constituents.

Volume XXVIII, Number 4
November 2003

Jeffery A. Jenkins and Charles Stewart III

Octavio Amorim Neto and Fabiano Santos

The Inefficient Secret Revisited: The Legislative Input and Output of Brazilian Deputies

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII: 449-79

Shugart and Carey (1992) posit that presidential democracies in which legislators have a parochial focus of representation are electorally inefficient because voters are not offered highly identifiable choices over national policies. Such systems are driven by an inefficient secret, which is essentially a nonpartisan representation of the policy process. To check the propositions of the inefficient secret model (ISM), this article investigates the aggregation level, effect, and subject of Brazilian deputies’ legislative input and output. Our empirical analysis indicates that, although some ISM-related factors drive legislative output, there is partisanship in deputies’ legislative input. This result means that the ISM underestimates the prospects for programmatic parties (especially in opposition) to emerge within systems where the electoral and constitutional rules encourage particularism.

Out in the Open: The Emergence of Viva Voce Voting in House Speakership Elections

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:481-508

We examine the internal politics that preceded the House adoption in 1839 of viva voce (voice) voting for Speaker and other House officers. First, we find that the struggles over the rule’s adoption actually centered on the election of the House Printer. These struggles were tied to attempts by the two major parties to establish effective newspaper networks to assist in national political campaigns. Democrats generally favored public election of House officers, whereas Whigs generally opposed. In the short term, the change to public voting for Speaker and other House officers had the expected effect of instilling greater partisan regularity among House members. As sectional divisions grew in the nation at large, however, the public election of the Speaker made it increasingly difficult for House leaders to forge the transregional coalitions necessary to organize the House.

James R. Rogers

The Impact of Bicameralism on Legislative Production

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:509-28

It is generally accepted by scholars, as well as by cameral partisans, that adding a second chamber to an otherwise unicameral legislative process will decrease the volume of laws that a legislature enacts. This study challenges the conventional wisdom. First, I offer a simple theoretical argument that shows that when second chambers can originate as well as reject legislation, bicameralism will have an indeterminate impact on legislative production. Second, I provide historical data gathered from the four U.S. states that have experienced cameral transitions. Although very rudimentary, the historical evidence, when coupled with the theoretical argument, raises serious doubt regarding the traditional claim that bicameralism reduces the production of legislation.

Michael S. Rocca

Military Base Closures and the 1996 Congressional Elections

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:529-50

This article examines the extent to which changes in distributional benefits influence congressional election outcomes. Although conventional wisdom holds that a direct link exists between distributional benefits and electoral outcomes (Mayhew 1974b), recent evidence suggests that this link only exists under certain circumstances (Stein and Bickers 1994). In this article, I use 1995 military base closures to test the nature of the relationship. Contrary to recent research on the politics of pork barreling, my findings indicate support for a direct relationship between major base realignments and closures and House electoral outcomes. Specifically, major realignments and closures significantly decreased first-year Democrats’ vote margins in the 1996 House elections.

Marian L. Currinder

Leadership PAC Contribution Strategies and House Member Ambitions

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVIII:551-77

Leadership political action committees (PACs) are committees headed by federal politicians but separate from the politicians’ personal campaign committees. Like other PACs, leadership PACs receive donations from individuals and groups, then make contributions to the political candidates that they support. Previous research indicates that member contribution strategies reflect both party-based and personal goals. Using a range of data from before and after the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” this study fills a void in the existent research by testing whether or not House members with leadership PACs switch contribution strategies once their party status changes. My analysis reveals that a shift in party status tends to produce a subsequent shift in contribution strategy. My findings also suggest that members, while acting within a party-based framework, may target their contributions in ways that also reflect their personal goals.

Volume XXIX, Number 1

February 2004

John M. Carey and Gina Yannitell Reinhardt

Sarah A. Binder and Forrest Maltzman

The Limits of Senatorial Courtesy

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:5-22

Because of senatorial courtesy, scholars typically assume that presidents defer to home state senators from their party when selecting judges for the federal courts. We challenge this view, arguing that presidents face structural incentives that encourage them to consult broadly with senators across the partisan and ideological spectrums in choosing nominees. Using new data on the fate of judicial vacancies on the federal district courts between 1947 and 1998, we show how institutional and political forces increase interested senators’ leverage in choosing federal judges. Senatorial courtesy, we conclude, has its limits, given presidents’ incentives to consult with institutionally empowered senators in selecting nominees.

State-Level Institutional Effects on Legislative Coalition Unity in Brazil

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:23-47

How do subnational factors affect the proclivity of legislators from the same party or coalition to vote together? We estimate the effects of two institutional forces operating at the state level—intralist electoral competition and alliance with governors—on voting unity among coalition cohorts to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Larger cohorts, in which the imperative for legislators to distinguish themselves from the group is stronger, are less unified than smaller cohorts. We find no net effect of alliance with governors on cohort voting unity. Governors are not dominant brokers of legislative coalitions, a result suggesting that the net gubernatorial effect is contingent on factors that shape governors’ influence relative to that of national-level legislative actors.

Tasos Kalandrakis

Bicameral Winning Coalitions and Equilibrium Federal Legislatures

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:49-79

I analyze the legislative interaction between representatives from big and small states in a bicameral legislature that decides on the allocation of a fixed resource among the states. I assume that the two houses are malapportioned and that the big states are underrepresented in the upper house. By studying the effect of this and other institutional features on the relative welfare of big and small states and on equilibrium coalitions, I find that, contrary to common belief, an increase in the representation of small states may reduce those states’ expected payoff, ceteris paribus. Also, contrary to interpretations of minimum-winning-coalition theorems, I demonstrate that excess majorities may occur in one of the two houses. When proposal making tends to be dominated by big (small) states, excess majorities occur in the upper (lower) house. I also find that higher proposal power increases the payoff of a group of states. Changes in the majority requirements in the two houses and expansion to encompass more small (big) states have non-monotonic effects on the relative welfare of the two groups. I conclude my analysis with an empirical application using calibrations results for the 103d U.S. Congress and the legislative institutions of the European Union before and after the Treaty of Nice.

L. Marvin Overby, Thomas A. Kazee, and David W. Prince

Committee Outliers in State Legislatures

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:81-107

In this paper, we extend recent work exploring the prevalence of outlying committees in American state legislatures. Using an expanded sample of 45 states and measures of legislator preferences generated by a single, federated group, we find that most legislative committees are representative of the parent chambers from which their members are selected. Furthermore, we test multivariate models designed to account for theoretically relevant patterns in variations in outlier percentages among control and noncontrol committees. The fact that our models are such poor predictors of nonrepresentative committees speaks to the idiosyncratic nature of the relatively small percentage of outlying committees in the states. This conclusion, in turn, provides further support for the proposition that representative committees are simply rational.

Jocelyn Elise Crowley

When Tokens Matter

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:109-36

Tokens, or low levels of minority or female representatives in state legislatures, have been studied with respect to their perceptions of self-efficacy and political attitudes but not with respect to their actual influence on the passage of public policy. This paper uses state-level data from the child support program between the years 1976–84 to measure the influence of women tokens on the policy process. Using ordered probit models, I explore policy adoption under three configurations: (1) a test of the independent impact of tokens, (2) a dynamic test of the differential impact of tokens and nontokens to analyze potential backlash effects and the potential diffusion of policy preferences, and (3) an interactive test on the potential for tokens to form coalitions. My analysis strongly suggests that tokens make a policy difference independently and to a greater extent than when they are on the cusp of becoming nontokens, but I found less support for the idea that tokens successfully form coalitions to achieve specific policy goals.

Volume XXIX, Number 2

May 2004

Gary C. Jacobson, Samuel Kernell, and JefFrey Lazarus

Assessing the President’s Role as Party Agent in Congressional Elections: The Case of Bill Clinton in 2000

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 159-84

Presidents have become their parties’ chief fund-raisers and thus have the capacity to further their parties’ collective fortunes by imposing a more efficient distribution of campaign resources than might otherwise prevail. In order to succeed, presidents must, first, accurately target their efforts where they will best improve candidates’ prospects for winning seats, and second, either directly or indirectly (through signaling to other donors) generate sufficient new resources to affect the election outcome. Analyses of Bill Clinton’s extensive fund-raising efforts during the 1999–2000 election cycle confirm that presidents can indeed use their unmatched fund-raising ability to help their parties win congressional contests they might otherwise lose. But analysis of the Clinton record also shows that presidential fund-raising activities may be shaped by other purposes that lead to a distribution of effort that is suboptimal for the party.

Frances E. Lee

Bicameralism and Geographic Politics: Allocating Funds in the House and Senate

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 185-213

Because they represent different kinds of constituencies—states versus parts of states—senators and House members have different incentives in constructing federal distributive programs. In order to claim credit for providing particularized benefits, House members need to use policy tools—earmarks and narrow categorical programs—that target funds to their constituencies. Senators, by contrast, are able to claim credit for the large formula grants that distribute the bulk of intergovernmental grant money. Examining House-Senate interactions in one of the largest distributive programs, federal aid to states for surface transportation, I show that the different bases of representation in the House and Senate structure the chambers’ preferences on distributive programs and affect the outcomes of interchamber conflicts.

Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer and Renato Corbetta

Gender Turnover and Roll-Call Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 215-29

A number of studies suggest that the gender of a legislator affects his or her congressional ideology. We argue that these studies may have produced misleading results because of insufficient controls for constituency influences. To better account for constituency effects, we use a longitudinal research design based on electoral turnover, which holds constituency constant while allowing gender and party to vary. We apply ordinary least squares regression to data from the 103d, 104th, and 105th Houses of Representatives and estimate the effect of gender turnover on changes in DW-NOMINATE roll-call voting scores. We find that, when we sufficiently control for both party and constituency influences, gender is not a determinant of the liberalness of a representative’s roll-call voting behavior.

Lisa Baldez

Elected Bodies: The Gender Quota Law for Legislative Candidates in Mexico

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 231-58

In the past decade, 21 countries have adopted gender quota laws that require between 20% and 50% of all legislative candidates to be women. What explains the adoption of these laws? I argue that three factors make politicians more likely to adopt gender quota laws. First, electoral uncertainty creates an opportunity for internal party reform that factions within a party can exploit to their advantage. Second, the courts play an important role because of the centrality of the issue of equal protection under the law to gender quotas. Finally, cross-partisan mobilization among female legislators raises the costs of opposing such legislation by drawing public attention to it. I examine these three claims with regard to Mexico, where the federal congress passed a 30% gender quota law in 2002.

Scott W. Desposato

The Impact of Federalism on National Party Cohesion in Brazil

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 259-85

This article explores the impact of federalism on national party cohesion. Although credited with increasing economic growth and managing conflict in countries with diverse electorates, federal forms of government have also been blamed for weak party systems because national coalitions may be divided by interstate conflicts. This latter notion has been widely asserted, but there is virtually no empirical evidence of the relationship or even an effort to isolate and identify the specific features of federal systems that might weaken parties. In this article, I build and test a model of federal effects in national legislatures. I apply my framework to Brazil, whose weak party system is attributed, in part, to that country’s federal form of government. I find that federalism does significantly reduce party cohesion and that this effect can be tied to multiple state-level interests but that state-level actors’ impact on national party cohesion is surprisingly small.

Michael C. Herron and Brett A. Theodos

Government Redistribution in the Shadow of Legislative Elections: A Study of the Illinois Member Initiative Grants Program

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 287-311

We study an Illinois state government program called “member initiative spending” and examine the extent to which three competing theories can explain the program’s allocations among Illinois’s 118 House districts. We show that member initiative monies distributed before the 2000 general election were disproportionately allocated to districts that were politically competitive, represented by legislative leaders, or represented by moderate legislators. Our analysis supports theories that claim budgetary decisions made by elected officials are tactical, and it shows that the Illinois decision makers who allocated member initiative funds sought to distribute them in a way that would be most beneficial in the sense of vote buying.

Volume XXIX, Number 3

August 2004

Gary F. Moncrief, Richard G. NiemI, and Lynda W. Powell

BRIAN F. CRISP AND FELIPE BOTERO

Multicountry Studies of Latin American Legislatures: A Review Article

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:329-56

Books Reviewed:

Electoral Laws and the Survival of Presidential Democracies. By Mark P. Jones. (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Pp. 246).

Legislative Politics in Latin America. Edited by Scott Morgenstern and Benito Nacif. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 503).

Partidos Políticos de América Latina: Centroamérica, Mexico, y República Dominicana. By Manuel Alcántara Sáez and Flavia Friedenberg. (Salamanca, Spain: Biblioteca de América, 2001. Pp. 776).

Partidos Políticos de América Latina: Cono Sur. By Manuel Alcántara Sáez and Flavia Friedenberg. (Salamanca, Spain: Biblioteca de América, 2001. Pp. 628).

Partidos Políticos de América Latina: Paises Andinos. By Manuel Alcántara Sáez and Flavia Friedenberg. (Salamanca, Spain: Biblioteca de América, 2001. Pp. 680).

Patterns of Legislative Politics: Roll Call Voting in Latin America and the U.S. By Scott Morgenstern. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 224).

Politicians and Economic Reform in New Democracies. By Kent Eaton. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Pp. 351).

Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America. Edited by Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Soberg Shugart. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. 493).

Term Limits and Legislative Representation. By John M. Carey. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 216).

Time, Term Limits, and Turnover: Trends in Membership Stability in U.S. State Legislatures

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 357-81

Increases in legislative professionalization along with the implementation of term limits in about one-third of the American states raise significant questions about the path of state house and senate turnover. We first update turnover figures for all states, by chamber, from the mid-1980s through 2002. We then compare turnover rates in states with and without term limits. We find that turnover rates, overall, continued to decline through the 1980s but that the long downward trend abated in the 1990s as a result of term limits. The effects of term limits vary depending on the length of the term limit and the opportunity structure in the state. There is also a strong relationship between the presence of term limits and interchamber movement. In addition to term limits, professionalization levels, redistricting, the presence of multimember districts, and partisan swings explain differences in turnover rates between states.

Christopher Reenock and Sarah Poggione

Agency Design as an Ongoing Tool of Bureaucratic Influence

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 383-406

Theoretical work assumes that legislators use ex ante design to gain bureaucratic influence, not only at an agency’s appointment stage but also as an ongoing tactic. Yet no empirical work has investigated whether or not legislators prefer to use design to exert influence after an agency’s appointment stage. Using a mail survey of more than 2,500 legislators, we model legislators’ preferences for ex ante design as a function of both institutional factors and individual legislators’ characteristics. Our results suggest that the feasibility of agency design as an ongoing tactic of bureaucratic influence is more limited than theoretical work indicates and that both institutional and individual-level factors explain legislators’ preferences.

RICHARD FORGETTE

Party Caucuses and Coordination: Assessing Caucus Activity and Party Effects

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 407-30

Party caucuses are increasingly important to members’ allocation of time. This article reports findings from new data on the minutes, frequency, timing, and attendance of House party caucus meetings. I argue that the party caucuses increasingly affect political and policy information flows to members. This growing party coordination has resulted in a greater bonding and shared strategic information among rank-and-file copartisans. This research also contributes to the party effects literature. Earlier research on congressional partisanship has used roll-call data to measure both member preferences and party effects. I investigate whether or not members’ attendance at party caucus meetings immediately prior to key congressional votes imposes partisan cohesion beyond members’ preferences. The results indicate that party coordination contributes to greater congressional party unity on key floor votes at both the bill and member level controlling for members’ ideological preferences. This party coordination effect occurs even during a period of high intraparty preference homogeneity.

J. Tobin Grant and Thomas J. Rudolph

The Job of Representation in Congress: Public Expectations and Representative Approval

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 431-45

Few concepts are more central to democratic theory than that of representation. Theories of representation are commonly premised on the belief that citizens’ expectations of their representative are politically consequential, yet we know little about the nature of these expectations and precisely how they matter. Using individual-level data from a recent national survey, we investigate the influence of constituents’ job expectations on their approval of their representative in Congress. We find that citizens’ job expectations condition the effects of members’ legislative activities on their job approval.

Mi Yung Yoon

Explaining Women's Legislative Representation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX: 447-68

This study examines the relative impacts of social, economic, cultural, and political determinants on women’s legislative representation in sub-Saharan Africa by using an ordinary least squares multiple regression model. Under study are sub-Saharan African countries that held democratic legislative elections between January 1990 and June 30, 2001. Only the latest election in each country is included for analysis. My study finds that patriarchal culture, proportional representation systems, and gender quotas are statistically significant. This study, by focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, fills a gap in the extant literature, which has focused on women’s legislative representation in advanced industrialized democracies.

Volume XXIX, Number 4

November 2004

Stephen Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder, Jr.

Using Term Limits to Estimate Incumbency Advantages When Officeholders Retire Strategically Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:487-515

Empirical study of U.S. elections over the last 50 years has documented a strong electoral advantage to incumbency in state and federal elections. Recently, however, critics have argued that traditional estimates of the incumbency advantage may overstate the advantage by as much as 100% because the estimates fail to consider strategic retirements. This article directly examines whether or not strategic retirement biases conventional regression estimates of incumbency advantages. We use term limits in state executive and legislative elections as instrumental variables to correct for strategic retirement. We find that, as an empirical matter, strategic retirement is not substantively important. Estimates of incumbency advantages that take account of strategic retirement actually are marginally larger than estimates that do not.

H.W. Jerome Maddox

Opportunity Costs and Outside Careers in U.S. State Legislatures

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:517-44

Cost-benefit models of career choice predict that potential legislators choose legislative careers when they expect greater utility from legislative service than from other options. In state legislatures, the utility of legislative service includes the monetary value of outside careers. I hypothesize that legislators are more likely to pursue outside careers when financial opportunity costs are higher or when they derive less non-monetary value from legislative service. In particular, I posit that individual characteristics that predict labor market value (such as age, education, race, and sex) and legislative salary predict outside careers. I test this model employing a new dataset of individual outside-career activity derived from financial disclosure reports. The findings strongly support the hypothesis that outside-career behavior is a function of the financial opportunity costs of legislative service. In addition, I find that Republicans are more likely to hold outside careers than are Democrats. This research has important implications for the study of state legislative participation, legislative organization, and the Democratic bias hypothesis.

Timothy P. Nokken and Keith T. Poole

Congressional Party Defection in American History

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:545-68

In this paper, we analyze the roll-call voting behavior of House and Senate members who changed party affiliation during the course of their political careers. We analyze members who switched during the stable periods of the three major two-party systems in American history: the Federalist-Jeffersonian Republican system (3d to 12th Congresses), the Democratic-Whig System (20th to 30th Congresses), and the Democratic-Republican System (46th to 106th Congresses). Our primary findings are that the biggest changes in the roll-call voting behavior of party defectors can be observed during periods of high ideological polarization and that party defections during the past 30 years are distinct from switches in other eras because of high polarization and the disappearance of a second dimension of ideological conflict.

Barry C. Burden and Tammy M. Frisby

Preferences, Partisanship, and Whip Activity in the U.S. House of Representatives

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:569-90

Using Democratic whip counts from the 92d House, we compare representatives’ stated intentions to their actual roll-call votes to detect evidence of party pressure. After arguing that this strategy understates real party influence, we nonetheless point to evidence of member conversion by party leaders. On 16 bills analyzed, two-thirds of the switches between the count and the vote occur in the direction favored by party leaders. We examine one bill in depth, showing how the efforts of party leaders were consequential to the outcome. The pattern of movement on this bill, along with data from the larger set of bills, provides evidence that leaders act strategically, targeting the members whose persuasion requires the fewest resources.

Rorie L. Spill Solberg and Eric S. Heberlig

Communicating to the Courts and Beyond: Why Members of Congress Participate as Amici Curiae

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:591-610

Members of Congress engage in discretionary behaviors, such as making speeches and cosponsoring bills, which are generally motivated by either electoral needs or policy preferences. We examine a discretionary behavior that engages the judicial branch in the conversation: the participation of members of Congress as amici curiae before the Supreme Court. Amicus curiae briefs provide members of Congress with a direct avenue of communication with the judiciary, and this characteristic suggests that cosigning would be a method of creating good public policy. Using data from the 1980–97 terms of the Supreme Court, however, we find that members of Congress cosign onto amicus curiae briefs as a means of “taking stances,” akin to cosponsoring a bill. The action allows the member to speak indirectly to an audience beyond these governmental institutions. Evidence shows that ideological extremism and committee jurisdiction promote participation as amicus curiae.

Tamir Sheafer and Gadi Wolfsfeld

Production Assets, News Opportunities, and Publicity for Legislators: A Study of Israeli Knesset Members

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXIX:611-30

This study proposes a number of theoretical and methodological innovations in an attempt to better understand how legislators compete for media coverage. We make a distinction between those variables that determine the potential newsworthiness of a legislature (production assets) and those that are related to the political and media environment in which the legislators operate (news opportunities). We then put forth five hypotheses and test them by examining the political standing, charismatic communication skills, and radio exposure of 54 members of the Israeli Knesset. The results confirm that political standing and charismatic communication skills are important predictors of media exposure and that the relative importance of these factors changes during different political seasons.

Volume XXX, Number 1

February 2005

virginia a. hettinger and christopher zorn
Explaining the Incidence and Timing of Congressional Responses to the U.S. Supreme Court

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXX:5-28

Sparked by interest in game-theoretic representations of the separation of powers, empirical work examining congressional overrides of Supreme Court statutory decisions has burgeoned in recent years. Much of this work has been hampered, however, by the relative rarity of such events; as has long been noted, congressional attention to the Court is limited, and most Court decisions represent the last word on statutory interpretation. With this fact foremost in our minds, we examine empirically a number of theories regarding such reversals. By adopting an approach that allows us to separate the factors that lead to the event itself (that is, the presence or absence of an override in a particular case) from those that influence the timing of the event, we find that case-specific factors are an important influence in the incidence of overrides, whereas Congress- and Court-specific political influences dominate the timing at which those overrides occur. By separating the incidence and timing of overrides, our study yields a more accurate and nuanced understanding of this aspect of the separation-of-powers system.

james r. rogers
Empirical Determinants of Bicameral Sequence in State Legislatures

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXX:29-42

In a previous article (Rogers 1998), I showed that the bicameral chamber that originates enacted legislation tends to realize policy outcomes closer to the preference of its median legislator than does the chamber that votes second on legislation. All things being equal, this “first-mover advantage” implies that each chamber could be expected to originate roughly half of all enacted legislation. But all other things are not equal in U.S. state bicameral legislatures. Drawing on an expanded dataset, I innovate and test a number of additional hypotheses related to bicameral voting sequence. My results account for the effects of constitutional, institutional, and electoral variables on bicameral sequence.

nathan f. batto
Electoral Strategy, Committee Membership, and Rent Seeking in the Taiwanese Legislature, 1992–2001

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXX:43-62

While the electoral system undoubtedly influences legislative behavior, it does not necessarily have a uniform effect on all legislators. In this article, I argue that the different strategies that candidates choose in the quest for office result in differing incentives once the candidates have been elected. In the Taiwanese context, candidates who adopt a campaign strategy based on organization will tend to engage in more rent-seeking activities once in the legislature, in order to offset the heavy financial burden of this strategy. From 1992 to 2001, Taiwanese legislators whose votes were highly concentrated in a small number of precincts tended to serve significantly more time on committees with the most rent-seeking opportunities than did legislators with far less concentrated support. Legislators whose votes were spread more evenly across the entire electoral district and legislators elected from the party lists tended to serve more time on committees with little rent-seeking potential.

david c. kimball
Priming Partisan Evaluations of Congress

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXX:63-84

Congress has been the scene of increasingly partisan and ideologically polarized conflict in recent years. I examine the extent to which the national political climate mutes or amplifies the effect of partisanship on evaluations of Congress. Using data from the National Election Studies and a content analysis of national media coverage, I find that public evaluations of Congress divide most sharply along party lines when elite-level discourse is most partisan (as during an election season or a highly charged partisan debate in Congress). This finding is consistent with an opinion leadership or priming hypothesis of public opinion. In addition, the most knowledgeable citizens are most likely to be primed by the partisan political climate in Washington . In contrast, less attentive citizens tend to rely on nonpartisan cues when evaluating Congress. I discuss the implications of these findings for public opinion and improving the public standing of Congress in an increasingly partisan climate.

william t. bianco
Last Post for “The Greatest Generation”: The Policy Implications of the Decline of Military Experience in the U.S. Congress

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXX:85-102

This paper characterizes the behavioral and policy implications of the decline in the number of military veterans in the U.S. Congress, from more than 70% of legislators in the early 1970s to less than 30% in the contemporary House and Senate. Many scholars argue that military service shapes information and beliefs, and that this decline has had negative effects on defense policy. The analysis tests these arguments using voting data from the House and Senate in the 1990s and the House in the 1970s, showing that the impact of veteran status on votes is generally small and has a relatively minor effect on legislative outcomes.

scott r. meinke
Long-Term Change and Stability in House Voting Decisions: The Case of the Minimum Wage

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXX:103-126

Although members of Congress exhibit considerable stability in their voting decisions on similar, recurring issues, members’ long-term voting histories reveal evidence of systematic instability as well. I argue that members reverse positions in predictable ways when the vote history loses value as a decision cue, and I present empirical evidence for this behavior in the context of the highly salient and regularly repeated House decisions on increasing the federal minimum wage. The empirical findings suggest that reversals of member positions are related to institutional, electoral, and constituency factors. I conclude by discussing the importance of these findings to understanding congressional decision making and representation.

douglas b. harris
Orchestrating Party Talk: A Party-Based View of One-Minute Speeches in the House of Representatives

Legislative Studies Quarterly XXX:127-141

Previous studies of House members’ speech-giving behavior treat the behavior as a product of members’ individual goals. By uncovering leadership memoranda soliciting member participation in one-minute speech giving, I find, first, that parties significantly structure one-minute speech giving, with party-orchestrated message campaigns accounting for about one-third of the speeches given. Second, I find that a party-based explanation illuminates individual members’ speech-giving behavior. Ideological proximity to the party leadership and party organizational factors strongly influence a member’s willingness to be “on message.” These findings have important implications for studies of both party message politics and members’ speech-giving behavior.

Volume XXX, Number 2

May 2005