Return to May 2005 Titles
The recent controversy in the United States
Senate over the use of the filibuster to block the confirmation of the
President’s judicial nominees is only the latest example of the role of
obstruction in parliamentary bodies. While the efforts of minorities to inhibit
majorities have a venerable history in most legislatures, opportunities for it
are especially prominent in the rules of the U.S. Senate. But relatively little
research has been done on its role in the Senate of the 19th century. Such work
as exists deals with obstruction in the aggregate. Gregory J. Wawro fills the
gap with an analysis of Southern obstruction on issues related to slavery in the
pre-civil war Senate, using individual-level data. With evidence on the use of
dilatory motions by Senators in the antebellum era, Wawro is able to identify
the factors that led Senators to obstruct. He demonstrates that both sectional
and partisan factors were at work and that obstruction became more frequent as
the number of Senators from slave states became an ever smaller minority. His
article supplements party-based theories of the use of obstruction by
minorities, which have been developed by Douglas Dion (Turning the
Legislative Thumbscrew) and Sarah Binder (Minority Rights, Majority Rule).
Two further articles in this issue deal with minority rights in
The continuing controversy about whether party has an independent effect on
voting outcomes in the U.S. Congress is the subject of the article by Jason M.
Roberts. He tests a conclusion reached by Keith Krehbiel and Adam Meirowitz in
an article in this Quarterly (2002). They sought to show that House rules
giving a minority the right to move to recommit a measure with instructions at
the last stage of the legislative process in effect limits majority rule.
Roberts asserts that Krehbiel and Meirowitz do not adequately portray the
recommittal procedure in the House and that their empirical predictions are not
borne out by the facts. With data on all recommittal motions between 1909 and
2003, Roberts shows that outcomes exhibit partisan divisions in which the
majority tends to prevail. He concludes that the conditional party theory of
voting in Congress explains the results of recommittal motions better than does
a theory based on minority rights under the rules.
The final article on Congress in this issue calls into question the conventional
wisdom that members of Congress have no incentive to improve voters’
perceptions of Congress as a whole. That was the basis of Richard F. Fenno’s
explanation for why Americans love their member of Congress so much more than
their Congress. Monika L. McDermott and David R. Jones investigate whether
voters’ evaluations of the performance of Congress as a whole does not after
all affect their vote for a particular member of Congress. The authors use exit
polls on voting in the 1996 and 1998 senatorial elections. They find strong
evidence that voters who approved the performance of Congress were significantly
more likely to vote for the candidate of the majority party. Furthermore, voters
favored members of Congress who exhibited strong support for the majority party.
Previous research on the relationship between support for members and support
for the institution relied on aggregate data. The distinctive contribution of
this article is that it analyzes individual congressional races.
The three remaining articles in this issue of the Quarterly offer comparisons
across legislative systems. The first of these explores the relationship between
members of legislatures and their constituents, a subject long regarded as
interesting only to students of
State legislatures in the United States
are often the training ground for members of Congress, and that career linkage
has been tightened in recent years as national party organizations have sought
to recruit state legislators to be candidates for Congress. Cherie D. Maestas,
L. Sandy Maisel, and Walter J. Stone explore this recruitment pattern on the
basis of a survey of all state legislators whose districts overlapped with a
random sample of 200 congressional districts in the 1998 election. The survey
asked legislators whether they had been contacted about running for a
congressional seat by a national party organization and also asked a variety of
questions about their backgrounds, their districts, and their ambitions. The
authors find that state legislators are more likely to be recruited for Congress
if they belong to professionalized legislatures, less likely to be recruited in
closely balanced legislatures, and more likely to be recruited in districts
where the prospects of winning the impending congressional election are good.
Individual candidate characteristics are important also. National party leaders
look for younger candidates, members of upper-chambers, leaders, and members
with high incomes. To the extent that this recruitment affects the composition
of the U.S. Congress, it provides new insight into how lower-level experience in
a federal system shape political careers and shows that in favoring recruitment
from professionalized state legislatures it reinforces the professionalization
of Congress.
The research note that concludes this issue contributes data on the surprisingly
widespread practice of reserving seats in legislatures for various ethnic,
racial, or religious groups. Once a relatively rare practice, Andrew Reynolds
shows the origins of the practice largely in colonially administered
legislatures that reserved seats for indigenous groups. He explains that this
arrangement was rediscovered in many ethnically divided societies when
independent legislatures proliferated in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Reynolds lists 32 countries that reserve seats for various communal groups and a
handful of others that have special mechanisms favoring defined ethnic
territories. He distinguishes the different mechanisms used to ensure communal
representation. Recognizing the widespread existence of reserved seats raises a
range of interesting research questions about the reasons for and consequences
of this practice for representative assemblies.
—Gerhard Loewenberg