Biennial Budgeting by the U.S. Congress

The president's budget is a political document, a prediction and an institution. As a political document, its version of the past and vision of the future are open to criticism. As a prediction, its projections arguable in the light of experience and professional judgment. As an institution, its contribution to the general capacity of government is subject to debate.     

Representation,neighboring districts,and party loyalty in the U.S. Congress

Legislative scholars often assume that legislators are motivated by concerns over re-election. This assumption implies that legislators are forward-looking and are motivated by a concern over what their re-election constituency will look like during their next electoral cycle. In this research, we show how the forward-looking nature of legislators motivates members of the U.S. House of Representatives to represent both their home district and their neighboring districts in their choices regarding when to support their own party. Using survey responses to the 2006, 2008, and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Elections Study to construct measures of Congressional District ideology, empirical analysis is strongly supportive of our claims. Legislators’ choices are strongly influenced both by the ideology of their home district and that of the districts that neighbor their home district. Thus, the electoral connection between citizens and representatives extends beyond a legislator’s own constituents to include the constituents in neighboring districts.     

U.S.-China Space Cooperation: Balancing Act between the U.S. Congress and President

There are a growing number of U.S. space scientists and managers calling for reinitiating cooperation with China in space. It is well-known that investigations of the U.S. Congress into various allegations involving China have resulted in a series of laws curtailing space cooperation between these two countries. By surveying the concurrent political developments within the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, this article attempts to reveal the domestic compulsions that propelled changes in the U.S. space policy towards China. The fundamental impetus is the power struggle and differences between the U.S. president and Congress in their perception of U.S. economic interests and national security in the context of space technology that strained these relations. Recent U.S. presidents who inherited this situation added to the discourse based on their own perceptions about outer space and China. These perceptions either found congruence with the policy of the U.S. Congress or led to finding ways to circumvent its legal restrictions. Based on these developments, it is concluded that the view of the U.S. president has alternated between necessary, desirable, and objectionable on the issue of U.S.-China space cooperation, and the U.S. Congress has thus shifted from supporting to restricting and then legally banning cooperation.     

Sino-U.S. Decoupling: The Roles of U.S. Congress

Journal of Chinese Political Science - The Sino-U.S. relations tumbled during the Trump Administration. The talk of decoupling permeated the decision-making circle in Washington D.C. Many factors...     

Abortion and Partisanship in the 104th U.S. Congress

The new Republican majorities in the 104th Congress conducted a coherent campaign to erode abortion rights. Avoiding a hopeless attempt to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, congressional Republicans pressed numerous anti-abortion initiatives. Analysis of the votes on those initiatives reveals a clear partisan pattern – a large majority of congressional Republicans are hostile to abortion rights while most congressional Democrats usually act to protect and even extend them. Therefore, the liberal versus conservative conflict which characterises the congressional parties on economic issues is also visible in the abortion issue.     

The U.S. Congress Responds to Online Communication Needs

Abstract

The U.S. Congress, after a relatively slow start in the 1990s, is now making some progress in meeting the demands of online communications. Fueled by the growing use of e-mail by constituents and the development of online grassroots efforts, Congress has been inundated with e-mail. By using filtering systems, better software and hardware, and, most of all, better management techniques, many offices are now equipped to handle the great increase in electronic mail. While several steps behind the private sector, through fits and starts, Congress is attempting to catch up and meet the rising demand and volume of electronic communication. In some offices, there has been considerable progress in developing effective, interactive Web sites. These exceptional Web sites should serve as models of dynamic online communications, but for most congressional Web sites, there is a long way to go. Much depends on the attitudes and priorities set by lawmakers and their senior Staff.     

Issues and Institutions: "Winnowing" in the U.S. Congress

“Winnowing” is the pre‐floor process by which Congress determines the small percentage of bills that will receive committee attention. The vast majority of proposals languish in this vital agenda‐setting stage, yet our understanding of winnowing is nascent. Why do some bills move forward while most fail? I examine that question here by developing and testing a theoretical framework of winnowing grounded in bounded rationality, which includes institutional and sponsor cues and also incorporates the unique issue milieu. A heteroskedastic probit model is utilized to analyze the winnowing fate of all bills introduced across five issue areas in the House and Senate from 1991 to 1998. The findings counter much received wisdom and suggest that the process is indeed cue based. The majority party helps structure this critical process in both chambers, though party effects appear stronger in the House. Contrary to recent work on the rise of Senate individualism, the seniority of the sponsor has significant effects in both the Senate and House, but again exhibits a stronger effect in the House. Surprisingly, presidential proposals are no more likely to survive than typical bills. The findings further suggest that the entrepreneurial efforts of bill sponsors breathe life into this process.     

The State of U.S. Federalism, 1999-2000

Federalism has rarely been a key national campaign issue, andthe presidential campaign of 2000 was no exception. Althoughthe candidates talked of a key state-local issue—education—itwas in the context of the popular concern over the quality ofschools, rather than federalism issues of governmental responsibilityfor education. However, one aspect of federalism was evidentin the presidential campaign. The first president of the newmillennium may get a chance to name at least one U.S. SupremeCourt justice. Given the slim 5–4 majorities on most federalismcases, the appointment or appointments could be pivotal. Meanwhile,in the Congress and state Capitols, technology and globalizationissues forced a rethinking of traditional intergovernmentalfiscal and regulatory functions.     

Party Government in Presidential Democracies: Extending Cartel Theory Beyond the U.S. Congress

Cartel Theory (and partisan theory more generally) expertly explains the functioning of the U.S. Congress. However, as a theory originally developed to study a single legislature where the institutional context differs greatly from that found in other presidential democracies, its applicability to these democracies has been questioned. Between one extreme represented by the United States (where legislators control their own political future) and the other represented by centralized party systems (where the national party leadership controls legislators' future) exists an intermediate group of democracies where subparty bosses are the key actors, controlling the future of subsets of a party's legislative delegation. We analyze one of these intermediate democracies, Argentina, and demonstrate the general applicability of Cartel Theory to an institutional context that differs notably from that found in the United States. We highlight how the theory can be adapted to a political system where subparty bosses, not individual legislators, are the most relevant political actors .     

Historical Estimates of Total Taxable Resources for U.S. States, 1981-2000

Analysts have historically relied on slate personal income (SPI)as the benchmark for comparing state spending on public goodsand services and levels of state taxes. This occurs despitethe widely acknowledged shortcomings of using SPI as a measureof fiscal capacity, a state's ability to raise revenues fromits own sources. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has developeda more comprehensive measure of fiscal capacity, Total TaxableResources (TTR). Treasury has generated official estimates ofTTR since 1992 and has used two distinct methodologies to doso. The lack of a time series using a single methodology andcurrent estimates of income and production in the United Statesrepresents a significant barrier to the widespread use of TTRfor analytical purposes. This research note generates a timeseries (1981–2000) using Treasury's current methodologyfor estimating TTR and the latest estimates for income andproductionin the United States.     

Healthtown, U.S.A

The landscape of health care is about to change. Under the Clinton proposal every American will choose one of three basic kinds of health plan--HMO, fee-for-service or a combination. The big questions are how much you will pay and how you will choose your doctors. Lost already? Here's a tour of Healthtown, U.S.A.     

Dimensions of Federalism In U.S. Senate Voting, 1981-1982

The concept of federalism is important in political science;yet it has proven difficult to clarify and to use in empiricalanalyses of American political institutions. This analysis demonstratesthat the congressional federalism scores reported in Publiusare not unidimensional and that a better measure of federalismcan result in improved explanatory power of empirical analysisof the determinants of congressional attitudes toward federalism.A procedure for constructing a better measure of federalismis suggested.     

Legislator Turnout and the Calculus of Voting: The Determinants of Abstention in the U.S. Congress

The belief that turnout and abstention depend on theinteraction of the benefits and costs of voting is oneof the longest held in public choice. The interplaybetween benefits and costs has typically been studiedwithin the context of voter turnout in elections, butthese results are confounded by the fact thatparticipation in such elections is a low-cost, low-benefit activity. Analysis of voting in legislatures,where the potential returns and costs to participantsare greater, is more promising. This paper examines participation on roll calls in theU.S. House of Representatives during the recent 104thCongress (1995–1996). We analyze all contested rollcalls during this two-year period, using a negativebinomial count model that accounts for legislatorheterogeneity, to determine what factors associatedwith such votes induce turnout. Our results suggestthat, while turnout is predictable, its primaryexplanation does not lie with our standard calculationof expected benefits. We find that the ideologicalpolarization of the roll call alternatives is not avery important factor for turnout and, even morestrikingly and contrary to what past analysis hasimplied, the likelihood of any given legislator beingpivotal is completely irrelevant. Rather, what is mostimportant is that a non-trivial number of members ofCongress decide not to vote when contextual factorsforce them to choose between electioneering andlegislating. Consequently, while our results are notsufficient to induce a full-fledged ``paradox ofcongressional voting'' analogous to that of massvoting, they do indicate that participation inCongress depends most heavily on factors beyond adesire to affect the outcome.     

Purchasing power of U.S. Social Security benefits abroad, 1970-82

This article examines whether the small number of Social Security beneficiaries living abroad enjoy a higher standard of living than they would with the same benefits if they lived in the United States. The article addresses this question using two methods. First, absolute comparisons of U.S. dollar purchasing power abroad are made using "purchasing power parities," a method recently developed to allow international comparisons of real standards of living. Second, the effects of changes in Social Security benefit levels, exchange rates, and rates of inflation on the relative value of benefits abroad are measured. Both methods show considerable instability in purchasing power of Social Security benefits in the 1970's. Although beneficiaries in 1970 generally could live better abroad than in the United States, this advantage eroded considerably during the 1970's, followed by some improvement in 1981-82.     

The distribution of annual and long-run U.S. earnings, 1981-2004

Numerous authors have presented evidence of increased dispersion in the distribution of annual earnings in the United States from the late 1970s through 2004 or later. However, the dispersion of long-run earnings measured over many years has received relatively little attention because of the limited availability of appropriate data. This article uses the Social Security Administration's Continuous Work History Sample, which documents the earnings histories of 3.3 million workers, to examine changes in both the annual and the long-run distributions of earnings during 1981-2004 for men and women. For men, the results indicate an increase in long-run earnings inequality of roughly the same magnitude as the trend seen in annual earnings dispersion, but there has been very little increase in the dispersion of long-run earnings among women. If calculations are restricted to a sample of women who work every year of the observation period, a trend of increased earnings dispersion emerges, but much less so than that observed for men.