Return to May 2004 Titles
The cost of U.S. political campaigns continues to escalate to a level far beyond
anything existing in other countries. Does the unrivalled capacity of U.S.
presidents to raise campaign funds, exemplified by George W. Bush,
affect—among other things—executive-legislative relations in the United
States? Does it enable presidents to influence the outcome of congressional
elections? Gary C. Jacobson, Samuel Kernell, and Jeffrey Lazarus are interested
in discovering the extent to which presidents use their fund-raising ability to
maximize their parties’ congressional strength. Taking the case of Bill
Clinton in the 2000 House of Representatives election, for which they have
unusually relevant data, they discover that Clinton’s fund-raising did indeed
improve the chances of those of his party’s candidates who were not
incumbents. But they also find that Clinton used his fund-raising influence to
help candidates who had stood by him in his fight against impeachment although
this “wasted” effort on incumbents who did not need help. Admittedly the
election of 2000 was unusual. Clinton was a lame-duck president with unusual
debts to repay. But all presidents may have motives of rewarding friends and
punishing opponents even though this is not an optimal use of their influence if
their only goal is to win or improve their party’s majority in Congress.
Fund-raising may have become a more important presidential influence on
congressional elections than presidential coattails were when congressional
elections were less distinct political events.
There has been a resurgence of interest in bicameralism both in comparative
legislative research and in research on legislatures within the United States.
Frances E. Lee’s analysis of the difference between the preferences of the
U.S. House and Senate in the allocation of federal funds, and of how these
differences are reconciled, provides a new insight into the consequences of
bicameralism. She presents data on the distributional formulas adopted by the
House and Senate between 1956 and 1998 for six surface transportation
authorizations. Lee shows how the differences between the approaches of the two
houses reflect the differences between a house whose members represent whole
states and a house whose members represent districts within states. That much is
not surprising. What is surprising is that in the resulting controversies
between the two houses, which are nominally equal to each other in the
legislative process, the Senate view tended to prevail. The explanation appears
to be that the distribution of funds among states is more controversial than the
distribution among districts within states and that therefore the Senate has
more at stake in reconciling intercameral differences than the House does.
Others forms of allocating funds, such as for special projects and for special
purpose categories, create a somewhat different dynamic.
The effort of women to gain entry into national parliaments, manifest worldwide
over the last generation, has led to research designed to answer two fundamental
questions: whether women legislators have different interests and beliefs than
their male colleagues, and what determines the ability of women to win
legislative seats in the first place. Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer and Renato
Corbetta contribute a new answer to the first question. They dispute the
conclusions of previous research that women members of the U.S. House of
Representatives exhibit a more liberal voting record than men. In reassessing
roll-call voting behavior of men and women in the 1990s, they use a “turnover
model” in which the congressional constituency is the unit of analysis rather
than the individual member. Their assumption is that the ideological composition
of a constituency does not change over limited time periods. This enables them
to test for the effect of gender on voting behavior excluding all other
variables where there is turnover within a district between male and female
representatives. They find that neither a change to a female representative nor
a change to a male representative changes the voting record of the district’s
representative in ideological terms. The authors conclude that gender
differences found in previous research resulted from a failure to control for
other influences. If women representatives have more liberal voting records than
men, that seems to result from women being more likely to win in liberal
constituencies.
The article by Lisa Baldez addresses the second question related to gender, what
factors influence the ability to women to enter the legislature. Baldez notes
that gender quota laws have been widely adopted in the past decade and have
significantly increased women’s representation in legislatures. She is
interested in why legislatures that are dominated by men would enact such laws.
Investigating the case of Mexico, a country noted for a culture of machismo,
Baldez finds that the adoption of a strict quota law in that country in 2002
resulted from the electoral uncertainty that existed as the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) lost its long-term dominance, from the
intervention of its prestigious Supreme Court, and from a cross-party consensus
among female legislators. Her research sheds light on the relatively new
tendency of democratic countries to increase the representation of women through
affirmative action procedures.
The outpouring of significant new research on Latin American legislatures, which
will be the subject of a review article by Brian Crisp and Felipe Botero in the
next issue of this Quarterly, is exemplified in this issue by an analysis
of the effect of federalism on party cohesion in the national legislature of
Brazil. Scott W. Desposato investigates whether the assumed divisive effect of
federalism exists in that country. He describes the distinct interests of the
governors of the 26 states, of state political parties, and of state
electorates, as opposed to the interests of the national parties in the Congress
and of the nation’s president. Desposato goes on to analyze voting behavior in
both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies during two legislative periods
between 1991 and 1998. Comparing average national party cohesion with average
state party cohesion using a “permutation analysis” that offsets the upward
bias of subgroup cohesion, Desposato finds that federalism does reduce national
party cohesion in Brazil, more so in the Senate than in the Chamber and
variously across parties. But although he shows that both state governors and
state political parties affect voting behavior in Congress, Desposato concludes
that their effect is quite small and national political actors explain most of
congressional voting behavior. However, the agenda of Congress and the strategy
of the president may well mask important federal effects. Desposato’s analysis
lends itself to replication in other federal systems. Such comparative research
could test the influence of different political contexts on the mechanisms that
tie state-level politics to national legislatures in federal systems.
The final article in this issue returns to the subject of legislative behavior
in the allocation of resources, using the “member initiative spending”
program in Illinois as a case study. Michael C. Herron and Brett A. Theodos
examine how funds available to the legislature for infrastructure development
grants were distributed across districts in 1999–2000. Under the program,
allocation decisions were effectively in the hands of the leaders of the two
political parties in the Illinois House and Senate. The authors demonstrate that
these four caucus leaders allocated resources not according to any measurable
needs of the districts nor on the basis of district party loyalty but for
tactical partisan purposes and to enhance the standing of legislative party
leaders. Marginal districts received disproportionate shares of the fund, as did
the districts of the legislature’s party leaders. This research shows how
electoral incentives—what the authors call “vote buying”—and the desire
of party leaders for “self enhancement” can distort a government
redistribution program when there are no institutional constraints to stand in
the way.
—Gerhard Loewenberg