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May 2002 Titles
Comparative
research on stability in parliamentary regimes has usually failed to distinguish
between cabinet and legislative stability, even though tenure in office need not
be the same for each partner in the executive-legislative relationship. For
example, the unusual instability of Italian cabinets and the unusual stability
of Italian legislatures is an accepted but surprisingly unexplored fact.
Riccardo Pelizzo and Joseph Cooper distinguish between the two and examine the
relationship between cabinet and parliamentary stability in Italy for the 53
cabinets and 13 legislatures that have existed since the founding of the Italian
Republic in 1948. They measure parliamentary stability as the number of days
between the first meeting of a parliament and the first meeting of its
successor, and cabinet stability as the duration of cabinets in time and the
frequency with which they change. The authors find that both parliamentary
stability and the number of cabinets are affected by attributes of the party
system but the duration of cabinets is not. They proceed to explore the
resulting complex relationship between legislative stability and both the
duration of cabinets and the frequency with which they change. Each measure of
cabinet stability separately stands in a linear relationship to legislative
stability but together their relationship to legislative stability is
curvilinear. The stability of legislatures is not merely the result of cabinet
stability, it has independent importance. The more governments there are, the
more stable the legislature, until the number of governments exceeds 4 or 5; the
longer the average duration of governments, the less stable the legislature
until that duration reaches three-quarters of a year. The authors’ provocative
conclusion is that the same attributes of the party system that stabilize the
legislature destabilize the governments. Furthermore, cabinet stability and
legislative stability influence each other. In Italy, the stability of the
legislature made changing the government relatively easy. The authors conclude
that the Italian case may be a benchmark from which to explore the relationship
between cabinet and legislative stability in other settings.
The next article deals with relationships within the legislature. It is an
example of the formal analysis of legislatives rules, an enterprise that has
proceeded with increasing momentum in the last two decades and has given us a
series of important intuitions about the legislative process. Keith Krehbiel and
Adam Meirowitz offer a new insight into the influence of procedures governing
the sequence of agenda-setting on the relative power of majorities and
minorities within legislatures. Their analysis focuses on the effect of the
motion to recommit with instructions “to report forthwith,” a frequently
used but not often studied device in the U.S. House of Representatives. This
motion to recommit is usually granted to the minority and permits late-stage
agenda-setting. Krehbiel and Meirowitz develop a model that highlights the
relationship between the procedures that specify the order in which proposals
may be made and the policy preferences of the proposers. They note that the
motion to recommit with instructions is a last-proposer right of the minority
under the procedures of the U.S. House, as distinguished from the well-known
last-proposer right of the bill manager moving the conference committee report,
which is effectively the right of the majority. The authors show that the motion
to recommit gives the minority the ability to construct an amendment that can
attract bipartisan support for a change in the status quo under a number of
conditions, depending on the location of the status quo and the distribution of
the preferences of members. Their analysis demonstrates that the interaction
between formal rules and the distribution of preferences may give greater power
to the minority than is often recognized.
One of the most surprising but persistent findings from a generation of research
on the United States Congress is that it is a very unpopular institution. This
is for many reasons a disturbing and a paradoxical discovery. It is paradoxical,
since constituents tend to view their own representative in Congress favorably.
It has disturbing consequences in that it discourages able men and women from
entering Congress, brings with it disrespect for the policies that Congress
enacts, and in general makes the legislative process difficult. It also disturbs
scholars investigating public support for legislatures in democratizing
countries, who would like to measure support for democracy by support for
central representative institutions. The next two articles in this issue offer
different though complementary explanations for the unpopularity of Congress.
John Hibbing and
Elizabeth Thiess-Morse have previously shown that the unpopularity of Congress
is due to the public’s dislike of the excessive professionalization of
Congress and its cumbersome processes for reaching decisions, as well as the
perception of the excessive influence of interest groups. But how could Congress
be reformed to make it more acceptable to the public? John Hibbing argues that
reforming Congress to give the public more direct influence over governmental
decisions would ironically make it even less popular. Based on a survey of 1266
respondents and discussions in eight focus groups, Hibbing concludes that the
public does not want to be more involved in the decision making process. What it
does want is a Congress composed of members who are empathetic to people’s
concerns and who do not serve special interests. This may be an unrealistic aim,
given the complexity of issues, public indifference to understanding them, and
the need for professional assistance for members. However, this finding makes
questionable the assumption that Congress would be more popular if it were more
open and more accountable.
Are citizen evaluations of Congress influenced not only by their attitudes
toward procedure but by also by substantive considerations? David R. Jones and
Monika L. McDermott investigate the effect of the distance that citizens see
between their own ideological stance and the ideological position of the
majority party in Congress. Using survey data from the American National
Election Studies conducted between 1980 and 1998, they conclude that citizens
use what they regard as the distance between their ideological position and that
of the congressional majority to help form their opinion of how Congress is
doing. Apparently voters in the United States do care about the ideology of
those who control Congress. Taking these two articles together, the conclusion
is that public perceptions of the national legislature are shaped both by the
procedural and the substantive preferences of their constituents.
When we move from public evaluations of Congress to voter evaluations of
individual candidates, we turn from general orientations to the legislative
institution to voting behavior in U.S. legislative elections. Research has
persistently shown that economic conditions influence both presidential
elections and control of Congress in those elections. The explanation is that
voters hold the president accountable for the economy. But what about pure
legislative elections, as measured by mid-term elections to the House of
Representatives? Findings on the impact of economic conditions on mid-term
elections are mixed, with the most recent research indicating no relationship
since 1915. This can be explained by (1) the perception that Congress, unlike
the president, does not influence macroeconomic conditions; (2) by the closeness
of the parties on economic issues; and (3) by the failure of candidates for
Congress to campaign on the economy. But these circumstances may describe the
late 20th century more than politics in the late 19th and early 20th century. G.
Patrick Lynch examines the impact of economic conditions on mid-term House
elections over a 120-year history beginning in 1874. His indicators of economic
conditions are change in real, per capita gross national product and prices. He
tests for the effect of structural shifts in the slope coefficients of the
economic variables on election outcomes. Lynch finds that economic conditions
influenced U.S. House elections more strongly in the late 19th and early 20th
century than they did after 1915 and explains this interesting conclusion by a
shift in public perceptions of Congress’s power over the economy and changes
in the issues on which candidates campaign.
Citizens evaluate not only the legislative institution, and candidates for election, but also the effectiveness of members within the legislature. It is well known that race continues to affect public attitudes toward legislators in the United States. Previous studies have documented the importance of a member’s position within the institution and various indicators of members’ behavior on their reputation for effectiveness. Kerry Haynie extends this line of research by inquiring whether the race of the legislator affects the perceived level of effectiveness. Drawing on a substantial social literature on American race relations, he develops three potentially conflicting expectations. Using a rich database collected by the North Carolina Center for Public Policy, he measures legislators’ effectiveness as perceived by their colleagues, by lobbyists, and by journalists, for the sessions of the North Carolina legislature between 1983 and 1991. In a pooled ordinary least squares model that includes variables measuring relevant institutional positions, individual attributes, and behavioral indicators as controls, Haynie shows that race is significantly related to perceptions of effectiveness and that African-Americans are perceived to be less effective than other legislators. He also demonstrates that while race is an important influence in determining the effectiveness ratings given by colleagues and lobbyists, it is not a significant factor for journalists. Since these findings come from the observation of only one state legislature, they suggest the need for comparative studies across states and across time to examine the impact of variation in the racial diversity of legislatures on the perceived legislative effectiveness of their members.
—Gerhard Loewenberg