Position Taking and Cosponsorship in the U.S. House

Bill cosponsorship has become an important part of the legislative and electoral process in the modern House of Representatives. Using interviews with congressional members and staff, I explain the role of cosponsorship as a signal to agenda setters and a form of position taking for constituents. Regression analysis confirms that cosponsoring varies with a member's electoral circumstances, institutional position, and state size, but generally members have adapted slowly to the introduction of cosponsorship to the rules and practice of the House.     

Northern Democrats and Party Polarization in the U.S. House

Abstract: Over the last 25 years, there has been a steady increase in party voting in the U.S. House, with much of this increase attributed to changes in the South. We argue that changes in the North are also important. Democrats now win a higher percentage of elections in the North, and a larger percentage of the congressional party comes from the North. Northern Democrats became steadily more liberal in the 1980s and 1990s, which increased the liberal record of the entire party. We examine two factors in the rise in liberal voting in the North. First, Democrats now win more seats in urban, lower‐income, nonwhite districts that tend to generate liberal voting records. Second, there has been an increase in the number of districts that tend to produce liberal‐voting Democrats. Together, these changes have resulted in more liberal Democratic Party voting and greater polarization between the parties.     

Vote Switchers and Party Influence In the U.S. House

Party‐centered theories of Congress often rely on the critical assumption that some majority party members vote against their preferences when granting their leadership procedural powers, such as closed rules. Such an assumption renders these approaches ad hoc, and thus theoretically dubious, unless firm support for the assumption can be found. Firm support is elusive largely because it is difficult to separate party and preference effects. In this article, we produce a simple but critical test of the party persuasion assumption that largely avoids these measurement problems. Specifically, we use a “switcher analysis” (Krehbiel 1998) to compare votes on final passage of the legislation with the votes on the closed rule. Our analysis of all closed rule‐final passage vote pairs for the 104th–108th Congresses reveals vote patterns that cannot exist absent significant party effects.     

Commitment and Consequences: Reneging on Cosponsorship Pledges in the U.S. House

We argue that bill cosponsorship in Congress represents an institutional arrangement that provides credibility to commitments of support. We predict that if cosponsorship fosters legislative deals, MCs will only rarely back out on their pledges to support a bill if it comes up for a floor vote, and when they do, these choices will reflect strategic calculations. Further, legislators who violate their cosponsorship agreements will face punishment from colleagues, compromising their ability to gain support for their own bills. We explore the causes and effects of MCs' choices to renege on a pledge by voting no on a bill for which they were a cosponsor, focusing on all cosponsorship decisions in the 101st–108th Houses. The results reveal that patterns of reneging and its consequences are consistent with the idea that cosponsorship functions as a commitment mechanism.     

Local News Coverage and the Incumbency Advantage in the U.S. House

Much of the incumbency advantage in the U.S. House of Representatives is attributed to incumbents' efforts to address constituents' needs. Yet House members do not win reelection simply by performing well in office, but also by informing constituents of how well they are doing their jobs. I examined the value of local news coverage for legislators seeking to publicize their legislative work on behalf of constituents. I found that incumbents who win more newspaper coverage are viewed as being more in touch with the district and are more likely to win support from constituents during bids for reelection.     

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.     

System Justification, Satisfaction, and Perceptions of Fairness and Typicality at Work: A Cross-System Comparison Involving the U.S. and Hungary

This research addresses system justification tendencies in the United States and Hungary and their potential to shape reactions to equity–equality tradeoffs in the workplace. Participants in both nations were asked to rate the fairness of, their satisfaction with, and the typicality of four hypothetical work situations. These scenarios differed in terms of which distributive justice principle was violated (equity or equality) and whether the violation favored the participant or the co-worker (self or other). While the mean level of system justification was lower in Hungary than in the U.S., multilevel models revealed that in both societal contexts the motivation to justify the system was associated with participants’ perceptions of justice in the workplace. Based on the characteristics of the two social systems, however, these tendencies played out differently. Specifically, for the U.S. participants system justification was associated with more favorable views of work situations that emphasized equity over equality and that rewarded the self over others, whereas for Hungarian participants system justification was associated with more favorable views of work situations that emphasized equality over equity and that rewarded others over the self. Results also revealed that Americans (but not Hungarians) who scored higher on system justification perceived as fairer that which they perceived as more typical of their society. Taken as a whole, the evidence suggests that the psychological transfer of legitimacy from socialism to capitalism in Hungary remains incomplete.     

Will She Stay or Will She Go? Career Ceilings and Women's Retirement from the U.S. Congress

This article offers the first broad‐based, systematic, times‐series assessment of the gender dynamics underlying congressional retirement. We extend the body of work on gender and representation by using the congressional retirement literature to develop an argument that accounts for the gender gap in the average length of congressional service. Our results indicate that women are less willing than men to remain in Congress when their ability to influence the legislative agenda stalls. Because of women's relatively early departures from the House of Representatives, our analysis suggests that prospects for women's representation are less promising than the conventional wisdom suggests.     

Constituency Congruency and Candidate Competition in U.S. House Elections

Research on candidate competition has focused on how much context matters in emergence decisions and election outcomes. If a candidate has previously held elected office, one additional consideration that may influence entry decisions is the relative degree of overlap between the candidate's current constituency and the “new” set of voters she is seeking to represent. Using GIS software, we derive a measure of the challenger's personal vote by focusing on constituency congruency between state legislative and congressional districts. Results suggest state legislators are more likely to run for a seat in the U.S. House if constituency congruency is relatively high.     

Party Size and Constituency Representation: Evidence from the 19th‐Century U.S. House of Representatives

Research on congressional parties assumes, but has not directly shown, that party size affects individual members' calculations. Drawing on a key case from the nineteenth‐century House—the secession‐driven Republican hegemony of 1861—this article explores the hypothesis that party voting not only declines but also becomes more strongly linked to constituency factors as relative party size increases. The analysis reveals that the jump in party size coincides with (1) a decrease in party voting among individual continuing members, (2) a strengthening association between some constituency factors and party voting, and (3) patterns of decline in individual party voting that are explained in part by constituency measures.     

In Search of Killer Amendments In the Modern U.S. House

Numerous studies have examined the incidence of killer amendments in Congress, but most of these studies have been either case specific, focusing on the legislative maneuverings around a single issue or bill, or temporally limited, focusing on strategic activity in only one or two Congresses. In this article, we present the beginning of a comprehensive research agenda for the systematic study of killer amendments. Using roll‐call data from the 83d through the 108th U.S. House (1953–2004), we identified those bills that (a) were successfully amended and (b) subsequently went down to defeat, a necessary condition for the existence of a killer amendment. We then examined these cases in greater detail, using both spatial analyses and case studies. Our analysis uncovered five cases, four of which are new, that appear to have the characteristics of true killer amendments, thus setting the stage for future analyses across time and legislative chambers and bodies.     

Intended Consequences: Jurisdictional Reform and Issue Control In the U.S. House of Representatives

The power of congressional committees rests in large part on their ability to set the legislative agenda in particular issue areas. But how do committees acquire their issue jurisdictions? Existing research points to informal committee turf wars— not collective reforms—as the roots of jurisdictional allocations (King 1994, 1997). Yet the House of Representatives has made nearly 150 formal changes to its committees' jurisdictions since 1973. We investigated the effects of one prominent instance of extensive jurisdictional changes, the Bolling‐Hansen reforms of 1975, and found that this body of reforms advanced collective goals of improved policy coordination and enhanced information sharing.     

The Keys to Legislative Success in the U.S. House of Representatives

Our research addresses how individual member behavior and institutional variables affect legislative success in the U.S. House of Representatives. Using new measures of activity from the 103d Congress (1993–94), a count dependent variable, and negative binomial regression, our analysis assesses member effectiveness. We find that a member's activity level encourages legislative success, but gains are limited when members speak or sponsor too frequently. Our results provide a clearer picture of the role of legislative context and the relevance of institutions in determining a member's legislative successes and failures.     

War for the Floor: Partisan Theory and Agenda Control In the U.S. House of Representatives

This article extends recent research on partisan agenda control in the U.S. House of Representatives to the issue of procedural control of the legislative agenda via special rules. In particular, we draw out a facet of cartel and conditional party government theories that has not been addressed in prior analyses: the simultaneous interrelationship between positive and negative agenda control. Using roll‐call data on two procedural matters—votes to order the previous question on a special rule and votes to adopt a special rule—over the 1953–2002 period, we found that, in the area of procedural control of the floor agenda, the majority party's amount of agenda control depends to a significant degree upon the party's homogeneity and power.     

Special Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives: A General Election Barometer?

Vacancies in the U.S. House of Representatives are filled using special elections. These elections occur off the usual American electoral cycle, and their results are routinely portrayed by the American mass media as indications of what to expect in the next general election. We examined the predictive power of special elections results with respect to the general election outcomes for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1900 to 2008. We found that special elections that yield a change in partisan control do have predictive power regarding general election results.     

Preferences,Partisanship, and Whip Activity in the U.S. House of Representatives

Using Democratic whip counts from the 92d House, we compare representatives' stated intentions to their actual roll‐call votes to detect evidence of party pressure. After arguing that this strategy understates real party influence, we nonetheless point to evidence of member conversion by party leaders. On 16 bills analyzed, two‐thirds of the switches between the count and the vote occur in the direction favored by party leaders. We examine one bill in depth, showing how the efforts of party leaders were consequential to the outcome. The pattern of movement on this bill, along with data from the larger set of bills, provides evidence that leaders act strategically, targeting the members whose persuasion requires the fewest resources.     

Politics and the Adoption of Legislative Television: An Analysis of the U.S. House Vote on C-SPAN

The present study extends the work of Crain and Goff (1988) by examining the political determinants of the earliest decision to adopt legislative television on a permanent basis at the national level in the United States. Data on legislator and district characteristics are used to explain the 1977 vote to adopt C-SPAN coverage of proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives. Logit regression results suggest that length of service and extremity of political views/ideologies had clear and significant effects on politicians' votes concerning the adoption of legislative television. As with Crain and Goff (1988), these measures capture some element of legislator self-interest.     

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.