The relationship between congressional spending and tenure with an application to term limits

Whether term limits would increase or decrease federal spending depends on the reason for the causal relationship between tenure and spending. We investigate this subject by empirically studying congressional spending and tenure for all United States House and Senate members who entered Congress between the 94th and 102nd Congresses (1975–1992). As our measure of congressional spending we use the National Taxpayers Union's Congressional Spending Scores. Our study finds that a statistically significant relationship exists between congressional spending and tenure for some groups of congressmen. We then test three hypotheses relating tenure and spending. No single hypothesis is consistent with all of our empirical results. Nevertheless, the small sizes of the empirical effects estimated in this study suggest that term limits would have an inconsequential impact on the level of federal spending – at least via the “moral hazard” mechanisms described in this paper.     

Evaluating congressional reform: Deregulation revisited

An evaluation of the changes in Congress's structure that occurred in the 1970s requires attention to three dimensions of its performance as a policymaking institution: representation of interests, deliberation, and conflict resolution. Considered this way, the changes seem to have enhanced some aspects of congressional capacity (especially the representation of broadly-based interests) but to have diminished others (especially deliberation and conflict resolution on issues that are salient to mass constituencies). The resulting strengths and weaknesses help to explain differences in congressional performance on trucking deregulation and natural gas deregulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. To some degree, they have altered the opportunities, strategic considerations, and central skills for policy analysts who seek to influence congressional decisions.     

Partisan Discourse,Polarization, and the Politics of Military Fatalities in Iraq

Public deliberation on the costs of war is important to democratic decision-making. This article explores congressional rhetoric about military fatalities within the U.S. House of Representatives and in television news media interviews from 2004 to 2006. In the House, the results are consistent with the “ideological opportunism” model of congressional rhetoric, which suggests that politicians–particularly the president’s partisan opponents–will be highly communicative about combat deaths in an effort to express ideological perspectives on war and criticize opponents’ positions. The results also show that as local combat fatalities accumulate, the president’s partisan opponents tend to become increasingly vocal about these deaths. The results do not support the “newsworthiness” model of congressional rhetoric in TV media interviews, which expects opposition party support and presidential party criticism of the president. Politicians on the far ends of the ideological spectrum dominate discussions about the loss of troops in the House, and politicians in both the House and TV news interviews advance largely unwavering partisan positions on the conduct of war. The findings suggest members of Congress reinforce political polarization in debates over the use of force.     

Electoral Incentives and Partisan Conflict in Congress: Evidence from Survey Experiments

Does partisan conflict damage citizens’ perceptions of Congress? If so, why has polarization increased in Congress since the 1970s? To address these questions, we unpack the “electoral connection” by exploring the mass public's attitudes toward partisan conflict via two survey experiments in which we manipulated characteristics of members and Congress. We find that party conflict reduces confidence in Congress among citizens across the partisan spectrum. However, there exists heterogeneity by strength of party identification with respect to evaluations of members. Independents and weak partisans are more supportive of members who espouse a bipartisan image, whereas strong partisans are less supportive. People with strong attachments to a political party disavow conflict in the aggregate but approve of individual members behaving in a partisan manner. This pattern helps us understand why members in safely partisan districts engage in partisan conflict even though partisanship damages the collective reputation of the institution.     

Political influence on historical ESA listings by state: a count data analysis

We use count data analysis to examine the influence that a state’s congressional subcommittee representation (with oversight of the US Fish and Wildlife Service) has on the number of species that are added to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) list in each state each year (1973–2004). Explanatory variables include: (1) ecological—species type, NatureServe’s “at-risk” assessment, federal land area, rainfall, and coastal location; (2) demographic—population density, hunting/fishing participation, and farming area; (3) political—League of Conservation Voters’ environmental scores and party affiliation. “Pro-environment” (“pro-development”) representatives appear to have increased (reduced) ESA listings in their states.     

The Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Wilderness Preservation Policy Network

ABSTRACT

This article surveys an unpublished piece in which Friedrich Engels examined the ecological conditions of Ireland in a chapter entitled the “Natural Conditions” in his unfinished History of Ireland. In interpreting Engels’s findings dialectically we are able to explicate a dialectical framework that gives us a greater insight into how Engels understands the way in which the dialectics of nature enfold in a particular bioregion and how, crucially, those same organic processes of nature provide the necessary ecological conditions for society to engage in agricultural cultivation. The geological system of Ireland and its particular sieve-like structure moderate the climatic condition of excessive rainfall so that cultivation can continue. This investigation by Engels can be seen as a concrete case study into the dynamic metabolising relationships between the diverse organic processes of Nature as they are appropriated by society in agricultural production. The conceptual trajectory of this dialectical analysis is to emphasise the inherent fluidity, mutual interaction and “universal connection” of the forces of nature. This particular work of Engels’s is a significant contribution to our understanding not only of the dialectics of nature but also of the methodology of dialectics as such.     

The Dynamics of Partisan Conflict on Congressional Approval

Partisan divisions in American politics have been increasing since the 1970s following a period where scholars thought parties were in decline. This polarization is observed most frequently within the debates and deliberation across issues within Congress. Given that most studies of public opinion place the behavior of elites at the center of public attitudes, surprisingly little research examines the effect of partisan conflict on the mass public. This research examines quarterly congressional approval data from 1974 to 2000 to determine the consequences, if any, of party conflict on the dynamics of congressional approval. The findings indicate that over-time changes in partisan conflict within Congress have a direct and lasting effect on how citizens think about Congress.     

“Your Wilderness:” The White Possession of Detroit in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive*

After a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit (re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for (re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized (re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a “landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie working class. More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a renewed frontier mythology. I read the film’s central characters, the vampires Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit’s lost civilization heralds in its renewed form.     

Recipes for Pork and Other Delicious Offerings for the New Administration

Is pork produced by feeble budgetary processes? By fixing weak budgetary procedures, can wasteful spending and opportunities for corruption be reduced? This essay looks at three varieties of pork: earmarked, ad hoc, and presidential. What can be done to curb the excesses of each one? By examining the problem of congressional earmarking, this timely article proposes a new process for controlling “earmarked” pork by supporting a new (constitutional) presidential line‐item veto/reprogramming. “Ad hoc pork,” generated by emergency or stimulus bills, is also analyzed. Its downsides can be fixed, according to the essay, by creating a preapproved roadmap for the appropriations process, thereby enhancing the quality of spending oversight. Finally, “presidential pork” derives from chief executives rewarding congressional allies and from government agencies allocating program resources so as to engender support from congressional members. This third variety of pork can be controlled if agencies improve their operational transparency plus strengthen their procedures for selecting projects. What happens when you put good people in a bad place, good apples in a bad barrel? Do the apples change the barrel, or does the barrel change the apples? —Philip Zimbardo, 2008     

From corporatism to lawyocracy? On liberalization and juridification

In 1997 Robert Kagan questioned whether European countries had to fear the coming of American style adversarial legalism. He answered this question with a qualified “no.” Today we are no longer so sure the answer is “no,” even in a country that Kagan considered the antipole of US adversarial legalism, the Netherlands, traditionally characterized by informal and consensual conflict resolution. In the present article we chart a trend of increasing juridification and legalism, that is, more formal and legal conflict resolution, in the Netherlands between 1970 and 2008. The trend is related to major changes in economic governance institutions, which generated a shift from corporatism toward lawyocracy; from power of the associations of civil society toward power of courts, lawyers, and judges. Yet the newly dominant system of governance is modified and merged with elements of the old system, producing a specific Dutch version, which one could call “corporatist lawyocracy.” We identify two types of liberalization as major driving forces: social liberalization in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by economic liberalization in the subsequent decades. If one considers economic liberalization a product of neoliberal “Reaganomics,” the legal changes are in a way an “American export product,” although a different one than the lawyering styles of large international American law firms mentioned by Kelemen and Sibbitt in 2004.     

Ideology in Policy Debates: Congress and the S&Ls in the 1980s

Is a national value such as free enterprise relevant to congressional debates of important economic policy bills? This question was examined using debates of three reform bills that dealt with savings and loan industry problems in the 1980s. To employ free enterprise concepts in justifying policy stands challenged legislators because industry problems contrasted sharply in the early 1980s (overregulation) and later (excesses under deregulation). Research demonstrated, however, that free enterprise concepts dominated the earlier discussions and, intriguingly, were at the center of the 1989 debate about bailing out the industry and reforming it. The conclusion elaborates free enterprise's role and speculates about the influence of another national value on the S & L discussions. Enactment of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery Enforcement Act of 1989¹ capped a decade of congressional struggle with the question of how to treat the problems of federal savings and loan institutions. Popularly known as “thrifts” or “S & Ls,” their status became a matter of increasing concern to Congress as the 1980s unfolded and public indignation over a prospective government bailout of unprecedented proportions mounted. This article focuses on an aspect of this struggle that has a larger significance, namely, the place of national values2 in the genesis of important economic policy statutes. Given the predilections of American society, the value that tends to loom largest in major economic policy debates is popularly know as “free enterprise” or “the market economy.” One may reasonably object that U.S. capitalism operates under a “mixed economy” whose features include enterprises owned or sponsored by the federal government as well as government subsidies and regulation of private businesses. The short answer to this objection is that the term free enterprise is used here in a mythic sense and “myths are an essential starting place for insights into how values shape policy…” (de Neufville and Barton, 1987). In essence, this article examines the following questions: (1) Did congressional debates on proposed statutes relate provisions of the 1980, 1982, and 1989 bills to free enterprise concepts? (2) If so, what adjustments were made in these concepts for the sharply contrasting circumstances encountered by S & Ls in the course of the decade? and (3) How was the peculiar relationship of government deposit insurance of S & L accounts to free enterprise treated in the bills? Two background sections introduce the discussion.     

Policy Stalemate and Policy Change in Israel's Water Sector 1970–2010: Advocacy Coalitions and Policy Narratives

This paper seeks to explain policy stalemates that persist despite recognition of their risks and damages, as well as the factors and processes that enable a breakthrough and lead to policy change. The paper seeks to fill a gap in the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) theory by supplementing it with Narrative Analysis (NA). We claim that NA provides a link missing in the ACF that is required for the transformation of “necessary” conditions—like external and internal shocks to the system—into “sufficient” conditions for policy persistence or change. We use the ACF to delineate coalition members and their belief systems and policy positions, as well as external, internal, and structural shocks to the system. We rely on NA to analyze the narratives employed in the public arena, which turn conditions necessary both for hurting stalemates and for policy change into sufficient conditions. We illustrate the benefits of combining the two approaches through a study of Israel's water policy during four decades (1970s–2000s) based on government records and on information from interviews with key players.     

Barriers to competition and the effect on political shirking: 1953–1992

Economists and political scientists have offered a variety of explanations for why legislators might rationally choose to ignore the preferences of their constituents, political parties, and presidents. The broad conclusion of this literature is that there is an element of “shirking” in congressional voting. The objective of this paper is to suggest that the effects of shirking in congressional voting may have increased over time, largely in response to the raising of barriers to competition in congressional elections, thereby enabling legislators to vote their own preferences without fear of losing reelection. We use a quasi-experimental design that controls for the effects of party, region, electoral safety, presidential control of the White House, and constituency factors, in isolating the causal effects of barriers to entry on a continuous series of roll-calls regarding the raising of the debt limit between 1953 and 1992. We find that “shirking” in legislative voting on debt limit legislation is a post-1970s phenomenon.     

地利分配秩序中的农民维权及政府回应研究——以珠三角地区征地农民上访为例

进入新世纪以来,珠三角地区因征地历史遗留问题而导致的农民集体维权事件处于高发态势。尽管不少征地案件存在程序不规范等问题,但支撑农民的集体维权行动的根本动力,实际上是他们对地权增值的再分配主张。在维权过程中,农民以宗族为动员基础,以重新分配地利为主要目标,并采取了“挟”“闹”“诉”和“谋”等行动策略。地方政府则采用了“开口子”“给票子”“定调子”和“补漏子”等回应性治理策略。农民和村集体与地方政府之间的矛盾原本属于利益博弈的问题,但是农民通过维权方式将利益博弈问题转化为民生问题和权利话语。村庄微观政治通过信访渠道进入宏观政治领域。     

Congressional dysfunction: An information processing perspective

The public's approval of Congress is at an all time low. The parties seem to have taken the legislative process hostage for their own electoral gain. Whereas traditional arguments about congressional dysfunction focus on polarized voting coalitions or outputs – particularly legislation – in this article we highlight congressional information processing and how it has changed in this highly partisan era. By coding congressional hearings according to the kind of information on which they focus, we find that members of Congress are receiving one‐sided information to a greater degree and are spending less time learning about potential solutions. We use these results to make numerous recommendations for improving how Congress gathers its information.     

“Sexual Assault” and Other Buzz Phrases that Need to Die

Academics nowadays have invented many phrases for which they demand widespread acceptance that do not accurately represent reality, or which make no sense when we consider them closely. Prime among these is the concept of “sexual assault,” which has made its way into state laws and the UCMJ since its coinage in the 1960s and 1970s and is now a mainstay of training on college campuses. This concept is flawed because it includes all sexual actions under the rubric of the noun “assault,” as if we spoke of “driving aggression” rather than “aggressive driving,” to color all driving with the possibility of aggression. It is simply not true that sexuality is nothing but one more form aggression, and that all sex is potentially aggression if it is perceived by one partner as such. Another false coinage we are asked to accept is the notion that men “objectivize” women. In fact few men want to sleep with or get an erotic charge from objects; if anything the issue seems to be focus on physical details. Then there is the widely repeated assertion that “gender is assigned at birth.” Rather than debating whether or not this is so we should ask whether the concept itself makes sense. Assigned? By what entity? Just at birth? These are examples of linguistic over-reach, the attempt to change the world with words rather than letting a change in the way we see the world (Kuhn’s paradigm shift) produce corresponding words in a more gradual way that most of us can accept. Just because we hear these phrases all the time from professional wordsmith academics with axes to grind, we need not feel constrained to accept them if they are not accurate representations of the world.     

Making Civilian Casualties Count: Approaches to Documenting the Human Cost of War

Our understanding of civilian casualties is not based solely on what is reported but also who reports these human rights abuses. Competing interests at the data collection stage have impeded the development of a more thorough understanding of civilian victimization during conflict. We find that current definitions of “casualty” neglect nonphysical forms of victimization and that group-based definitions of “civilian” can obscure the role of different individuals in conflict. We contend that the dominant definition of “civilian casualty” should be expanded to include the full array of harm inflicted on individuals, including psychological harm and what we refer to as multiple casualties of conflict. Expanding our definition of civilian casualties to include different degrees and kinds of wartime victimization would improve both documentation and analysis. We propose several areas for improvement in terms of the documentation of civilian casualties as well as potential solutions to the problems we identify.     

Mama Grizzlies Compete for Office

In the 2010 general elections, a record number of Republican women ran for, and won congressional seats. Many were also endorsed by the Tea Party and/or heralded by Sarah Palin as being “Mama Grizzlies.” This election provides a unique opportunity to examine if ideological and partisan differences among women matter in terms of how they campaign for office. Did they behave any differently than their more liberal counterparts? Did they boast being endorsed by Palin and/or other Tea Party organizations? Did they invoke their gendered or “Mama Grizzly” status to appeal to voters? This study uses data gathered from ninety-two websites of women who ran for Congress in 2010. Overall, it is found that Republican women did not reference the Tea Party, nor embrace being “Mama Grizzlies.” In addition, these candidates shied away from discussing their gendered identities and supporting “women's issues.” Finally, there were few differences between Democratic and Republican women with regard to how they presented themselves via their websites. I conclude by discussing the implications of the claims they make (or not) about gender role norms, motherhood, and their fitness for office.     

Cardinals or Clerics? Congressional Committees and the Distribution of Pork

Journalistic and academic accounts of Congress suggest that important committee positions allow members to procure more federal funds for their constituents, but existing evidence on this topic is limited in scope and has failed to distinguish the effects of committee membership from selection onto committees. We bring together decades of data on federal outlays and congressional committee and subcommittee assignments to provide a comprehensive analysis of committee positions and distributive politics across all policy domains. Using a within‐member research design, we find that seats on key committees produce little additional spending. The chairs of the Appropriations subcommittees—the so called “cardinals” of Congress—are an exception to the rule. These leadership positions do generate more funding for constituents, but only from programs under the jurisdiction of their subcommittee. Our results paint a new picture of distributive politics and call for a reexamination of its canonical theories.     

Playing the Wrong PART: The Program Assessment Rating Tool and the Functions of the President's Budget

The extensive literature about the George W. Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) has not emphasized an issue that appears quite clearly in interviews with senior Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and congressional staff. Budget analysis can pursue efficiency in two ways. One, the object of traditional analysis, involves assessing programs to understand the ratio of inputs to outputs within an agency, and thus the effects of more or less funding. Another approach, termed “budgeting for results,” measures program performance so as to allocate funding among programs in a way that increases total welfare. The second approach is much more difficult because it necessitates comparison of measures of unlike phenomena, requires expertise that often does not exist, and is more easily contested as invoking values rather than facts. Both congressional and OMB sources report concerns that PART weakened budget analysis by diverting resources from traditional analysis. If one goal of reformers is for the OMB to provide analysis that will influence Congress, the focus should be on strengthening the capacity to do traditional budget analysis.