Partisan Infighting Among House Republicans: Leaders,Factions, and Networks of Interests

Congressional parties are commonly viewed as unified legislative teams, but recent intraparty battles have revealed serious ideological divisions within the House Republican caucus. Using annual ratings from nearly 300 interest groups, we estimate the ideological locations of Republican legislators in order to map their party's factional structure. Based on the distribution of interest‐group support from 2001 to 2012, we detect three Republican factions that we characterize as worker oriented, pro‐business, and ethno‐radical. We find that Republican leaders block bills by legislators in the worker and ethno‐radical subgroups and that they advance bills by members in the corporate faction.     

Legislating Crime Policy from the White House: Presidential Success with Congress in the Passage of Federal Crime Control Policy

Previous research has found that presidents, in general, have the power to influence congress in the passage of federal crime control policy. What has not been fully explored is whether presidential supported bills are more likely to influence congress to pass federal crime control bills. Therefore, this study draws upon the theory that presidents influence congress to test the hypothesis that president supported legislation on crime will achieve greater success in congress than non-supported bills. Analysis of legislative, presidential and congressional data from 1946 through 1996 suggests support for the theory that presidential supported bills are 2.8 times more likely (or 185% more likely) to become law.     

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

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.     

Representation,Competing Principals,and Waffling on Bills in US Legislatures

Legislators are often placed in the position of representing the interests of their constituents against the preferences of their own party leaders. We develop a theoretical framework indicating that these cross‐pressured legislators are more likely to initially support legislation and subsequently change their minds than are legislators whose constituents and leaders share similar preferences. Moreover, we expect this pattern to be most pronounced among members of majority parties than minority‐party members. We test our expectations using data on bill cosponsorship and final passage votes from 46 lower state legislative chambers and the US House, finding considerable support for our theory.     

Agenda Power in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1988–2000

We present strong evidence that governing coalitions in Italy exercise significant negative agenda powers. First, governing parties have a roll rate that is nearly 0, and their roll rate is lower than opposition parties' roll rates, which average about 20% on all final‐passage votes. Second, after one controls for distance from the floor median, opposition parties have higher roll rates than government parties. These results strongly suggest that governing parties in Italy are able to control the legislative agenda to their benefit. We also document significantly higher opposition roll rates on decree‐conversion bills and budget bills than on ordinary bills—results consistent with our theoretical analysis of the differing procedures used in each case.     

Who Wins? Party Effects in Legislative Voting

Political scientists have long attempted to measure and describe the modest and contingent effects of party on the behavior of members of Congress. Recent efforts have extended the debate to the more specific question of whether or not party influences are sufficiently strong to move policy outcomes away from the median position. In this article, we specify four theories of legislative behavior. One is a preference‐based, or partyless, theory of behavior. This theory posits that there are no party effects independent of preferences and that equilibrium outcomes are located at the chamber's median. The other theories rely on different conceptions of the foundations of party effects and yield distinctive predictions about the legislators who will support bills on final passage votes. After testing, our conclusion is that strong party influences can be found in final passage voting in the House: the partyless theory receives little support, but a model based on majority party agenda control works well. Legislative outcomes are routinely on the majority party's side of the chamber median.     

Reelection and Legislative Power: Surprising Results from Brazil

A diverse and growing literature ties legislative professionalization and power to career paths. In particular, higher rates of reelection and longer legislative careers should produce more professional, competent, and high‐quality legislatures. Legislators have more incentives to strengthen their own institution when they intend to remain there for a long career. Using data from the most recent constitutional convention in Brazil, we show that legislators with greater prospects for long careers were actually less likely to support strengthening the legislative branch. We explain this as part of a local equilibrium where career legislators’ short‐term need for pork trumped their long‐term interest in a stronger institution.     

Legislative Knowledge Networks,Status Quo Complexity,and the Approval of Law Initiatives

In this article, we explore the role of legislative knowledge networks (LKN) in the enactment of tax policy in Argentina. Findings show that legislative innovation follows a hierarchical (power law) structure with a few distinct issue areas dominated by key enacted bills. Taxation in Argentina is well described by three main issue areas: the VAT laws, the income tax, and the revenue‐sharing legislation. We provide evidence that complexity in the status quo, as described by a larger number of important precedent laws, reduces the likelihood of final approval. Our research departs from existing models of delegation by considering complexity in the status quo rather than complexity in the proposal. We argue that more complex status quo should be accounted for when trying to assess whether legislators draft more or less detailed law initiatives.     

Informative Committees and Legislative Performance in the American States

The information theory of legislative organization suggests that legislative committees are designed to provide their parent chamber with necessary information to legislate. Despite empirical evidence for various aspects of the theory, we have limited knowledge of committees’ influence on legislative outputs. I argue that informative committees are more than information providers, that they also substantively impact legislative outcomes. With supportive evidence from the US state legislatures, this article shows that the presence of an informative committee system not only lowers the number of bills introduced to the legislature but also enhances the chamber's efficiency in transforming legislative proposals into laws.     

Different Houses: The Distribution of Earmarks in the U.S. House and Senate

Nearly all studies of pork‐barrel politics in the U.S. Congress focus on the House, biasing our conception of how politics influences federal spending and skewing our attention toward factors that are active in the House. This article highlights differences between the Senate and House in how pork is allocated. We identify four important differences between the House and Senate, generate hypotheses regarding how each difference should influence the distribution of pork projects, and test these hypotheses using data from earmarks in the Appropriations bills passed by the two chambers for fiscal year 2008. The results support three of our four hypotheses, suggesting that senators are driven by different motivations than House members. These results imply that theoretical accounts of pork‐barrel spending need to account for these interchamber differences. Our findings also highlight how studies of legislative behavior, more generally, need to account for important differences in legislative structure and organization.     

Recurring bills and the legislative process in the US congress

Recurring bills may be interpreted in two very different ways. First, there is the ‘legislative loser’ perspective, which posits that legislators introduce bills repeatedly for symbolic reasons, not intending or expecting them to go very far. Alternatively, there is the ‘softening up’ perspective, which assumes that legislators introduce bills more than once for policy reasons. They first test the waters, making a second attempt more successful. In this research article, we test these assumptions by examining the legislative impact of recurring bill status at various stages in the US House and Senate: initial committee attention, committee passage, attachment to an omnibus package and enactment. The evidence is mixed for the first stage of the process, while the findings for subsequent stages support the softening up interpretation. We discuss the implications for representation and future research.     

Legislative Self‐Restraint Under Divided Government In Germany, 1976–2002

Using the Vanberg (1998) model of legislative autolimitation from the judicial review literature, we investigated the impact of divided government on the strategic choices of government and opposition. The main prediction of the model is that a strong opposition dominance in the second chamber (Bundesrat) usually does not lead to open party‐political conflict, but rather to a government's legislative self‐restraint. We tested the hypotheses following from the model on a detailed dataset comprising all legislative bills in Germany between 1976 and 2002. The results show that the main effects of divided government are, in fact, indirect and anticipatory. We conclude that when majorities in the Bundestag and Bundesrat diverge, the impact on legislation is substantial.     

Party Effects in State Legislative Committees

Legislative scholars have theorized about the role of committees and whether they are, or are not, tools of the majority party. We look to the states to gain more empirical leverage on this question, using a regression discontinuity approach and novel data from all state committees between 1996 and 2014. We estimate that majority‐party status produces an 8.5 percentage point bonus in committee seats and a substantial ideological shift in the direction of the majority party. Additionally, we leverage a surprisingly frequent, but as if random occurrence in state legislatures—tied chambers—to identify majority‐party effects, finding similar support for partisan committees. We also examine whether the extent of committee partisanship is conditional on party polarization or legislative professionalism, but we find that it is not. Our results demonstrate that parties create nonrepresentative committees across legislatures to pursue their outlying policy preferences.     

A tale of two states: how U.S. state legislatures consider restorative justice policies

This paper explores recent state legislative processes in Colorado and Texas related to bills proposing support for restorative justice as a juvenile diversion tool for criminal courts. It uses two maximum variation case studies to explore issue statements related to theoretically-supported factors likely to influence the adoption of restorative justice legislation, and draws conclusions about the importance of political partisanship, economic strain, and key figures such as policy entrepreneurs, advocacy coalitions, and interest groups in legislative decision-making. Emerging themes suggest that support for restorative justice policies is at least sometimes bipartisan and is unlikely to be motivated by economic interests. Collaborative processes within a traditionally adversarial system distinguished successful restorative justice decision-making in Colorado.     

The Cosponsorship Patterns of Reserved Seat Legislators

This study analyzes the bill cosponsorship behavior of reserved seat legislators in the Pakistan National Assembly, where special legislative seats are reserved for women and religious minorities. It offers a critical case because two theories on reserved seat legislators—the theory of electoral incentives and the theory of institutional weakness—lead to opposite predictions about the extent to which such legislators will engage in bill cosponsorship, with the former (latter) predicting the negative (positive) effect of reserved seats. I find that women and minorities in reserved seats initiate a greater number of bills and cosponsor bills with a larger number of peers than nonreserved male legislators. Using network analysis, I also show that reserved legislators tend to play a role in bridging different partisan blocs of legislators within the cosponsorship network. These empirical patterns provide support to the theory of institutional weakness, rather than to the theory of electoral incentives.     

Lobbying Across Arenas: Interest Group Involvement in the Legislative Process in Denmark

Interest groups may approach political decision makers in two phases of the legislative process: the pre‐parliamentary, administrative phase, in which bills are prepared by bureaucrats; and the parliamentary phase, in which bills are discussed and possibly revised by parliamentary committees. The article investigates the factors that lead groups to engage in these phases based on group proceedings for 225 bills presented to the Danish parliament in the 2009/2010 session. We conclude that resourceful groups are clearly more active in both arenas, but the parliamentary arena is also a venue for voicing discontent and defending gains achieved in the administrative arena.     

Laws That Bit The Bullet: A Review of Legislative Responses to School Shootings

The recent mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut sparked an immediate discourse calling for a review of gun control legislation. However, this discourse was not new; rather, it was one that routinely follows this type of tragedy. In the wake of school shootings such as Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Jonesboro, a similar discourse appeared which prompted policymakers to introduce a number of pieces of legislation aimed at more efficient firearms regulation. While a few of these bills were enacted, many never made it past introduction. The flurry of legislative responses to such incidences warrants further discussion as to whether these bills are effective, or rather simply “feel good legislation.” Further, public opinion is a driving force behind such policy, but how can this change in the wake of school shootings? This paper examines both considerations and proposes directions for continued research in this critical and understudied area.     

Timing and Outcome of Legislation: Brazilian Pension Reform in a Bicameral Perspective

In 1995 and 2003, Brazilian Presidents Cardoso and Lula da Silva submitted almost identical pension reform bills to Congress. However, these bills had very different fates in terms of the outcomes of congressional deliberation and the timing of enactment. What explains timing and outcomes of legislation? Using Brazilian pension reform as a case, this article explains legislative timing and outcomes from bicameral and bargaining perspectives. It examines two hypotheses: (1) bicameral incongruence of policy preferences increases the likelihood of legislative gridlock; and (2) impatience accelerates the timing of legislation. Evidence from archival research and interviews with Brazilian legislators strongly support these hypotheses.     

Black Political Representation: An Examination of Legislative Activity Within U.S. House Committees

How minority legislators influence policy development in Congress remains a relevant question for those interested in race and political representation. This article addresses this question using evidence from participation in committee work—a vantage point that has received minimal attention in scholarship on black political representation. I interpret racial differences in participation in House committees across a range of policy areas, demonstrating that black members participate at higher rates within committees than whites on both black interest and nonracial bills. The results suggest that race has a substantive effect on members' policy priorities and their legislative activity within committees.