Making Washington Work: Legislative Entrepreneurship and the Personal Vote from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression

Studies of bill sponsorship in the modern Congress highlight the effects of constituency characteristics, seniority, and committee membership. These studies, however, are limited in their ability to assess the effects of institutions. We provide the first systematic study of bill sponsorship in the premodern House of Representatives. In doing so, we take advantage of this period's expansive legislative agenda and variation in electoral system rules. Using matching and event count models, we estimate the effects of institutions, electoral competition, and members’ institutional positions and political experiences on their sponsorship of different types of bills. We find that two reforms—the Australian ballot and nominating primary—increased sponsorship of bills designed to cultivate personal votes, thereby contributing to the growth in private legislation and bills aimed at local constituencies. Our results establish these reforms as a major event shaping lawmaking activity and, with it, the character of contemporary representation.     

Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach

This article proposes a new approach to investigating the substance of lawmaking. Only a very small proportion of bills become law in the U.S. Congress. However, the bills that do become law often serve as vehicles for language originating in other bills. We investigate “text reuse” methods as a means for tracing the progress of policy ideas in legislation. We then show how a focus on policy ideas leads to new insights into the lawmaking process. Although our focus is on relating content found within bills, the same methods can be used to study policy substance across many research domains.     

Cue‐Taking in Congress: Interest Group Signals from Dear Colleague Letters

Why do some pieces of legislation move forward while others languish? We address this fundamental question by examining the role of interest groups in Congress, specifically the effect of their legislative endorsements in Dear Colleague letters. These letters provide insights into the information that members use to both influence and make policy decisions. We demonstrate that endorsements from particularly well‐connected interest groups are a strong cue for members with limited information early in the legislative process and help grow the list of bill cosponsors. As bills progress, such groups have less direct weight, while legislation supported by a larger number of organizations and a larger number of cosponsors is more likely to pass. Thus, we illuminate the usage of Dear Colleague letters in Congress, demonstrate how members use interest groups in the legislative process, and shed new light on the varying impact of groups on public policy.     

Veto Rhetoric and Legislative Riders

Riders to appropriations bills have long been a favorite congressional instrument for forcing presidents to accept unwanted policies. To resist unwanted riders, presidents have increasingly resorted to veto threats. Are such threats credible, and do they influence legislation? To answer these questions, we analyze the legislative histories of hundreds of threatened and unthreatened riders from 1985 through 2008. We find that threats are effective in bringing the final legislation closer to the president's preferences. Threats achieve their success, in large part, by interrupting the textbook legislative process in the Senate—spawning filibusters, prompting leaders to punt bills to conference, and encouraging the use of other “unorthodox” procedures. Unlike conventional models that regard veto threats as minimally effective, the findings presented here depict veto rhetoric as integral to identifying critical riders separating the legislative parties that must be resolved in order to avoid gridlock and pass annual appropriations legislation.     

When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men?

Previous scholarship has demonstrated that female lawmakers differ from their male counterparts by engaging more fully in consensus‐building activities. We argue that this behavioral difference does not serve women equally well in all institutional settings. Contentious and partisan activities of male lawmakers may help them outperform women when in a polarized majority party. However, in the minority party, while men may choose to obstruct and delay, women continue to strive to build coalitions and bring about new policies. We find strong evidence that minority party women in the U.S. House of Representatives are better able to keep their sponsored bills alive through later stages of the legislative process than are minority party men, across the 93^rd–110^th Congresses (1973–2008). The opposite is true for majority party women, however, who counterbalance this lack of later success by introducing more legislation. Moreover, while the legislative style of minority party women has served them well consistently across the past four decades, majority party women have become less effective as Congress has become more polarized.     

The Impact of the Scottish Parliament in Amending Executive Legislation

This paper provides the first systematic attempt to investigate the legislative impact of the Scottish Parliament on Executive legislation, by analysing the fate of all amendments to Executive bills from the Parliament's first session (1999–2003). Initial findings on the success of bill amendments show that the balance of power inclines strongly in favour of ministers. However, when we account for the type of amendment and initial authorship we find evidence that the Parliament (both coalition and opposition MSPs) actually makes more of an impact, particularly in terms of the level of success of substantive amendments to Executive bills. Our findings have implications for much of the current literature that is sceptical of the existence of power sharing between the Executive and the Parliament and within the Parliament.     

Still Supermadres? Gender and the Policy Priorities of Latin American Legislators

This article examines the effect of gender on legislators' attitudes and bill initiation behavior in three Latin American countries—Argentina, Colombia, and Costa Rica. I argue that sex role changes in Latin America over the past 35 years have led to changes in how female legislators perceive their political roles, and consequently, changes in their attitudes and behavior. Specifically, female legislators will place higher priority than male legislators on women's issues and children/family concerns, but their attitudes in other areas, such as education, health, the economy, agriculture, and employment, will be similar. However, I expect that gender dynamics in the legislative arena lead to marginalization of women such that gender differences will emerge for bill initiation behavior where they did not appear for attitudes. I test this using a survey of legislators' issue preferences and archival data on the bills that legislators sponsor and find statistical support for the hypotheses.     

The electoral connection in staggered parliaments: Evidence from Australia,France, Germany and Japan

This article explores whether differential time horizons in legislative chambers that result from staggered membership renewal affect legislative behaviour. The analysis focuses on patterns of bill initiation and the introduction of amendments in the upper chambers of Australia, France, Germany and Japan – all four of which contain two or more classes of members that face re‐election at different times. Drawing on original comparative data, clear evidence is found of over‐time variation in legislative activity levels in the upper chambers. Approaching elections lead to increased activity levels, with increases in the introduction of bills, but also, to a lesser extent, amending activity. Such variation is found not only for those members facing the most proximate election, but for all members of the chamber. Importantly, there are no significant differences in legislative behaviour between those members up for re‐election and those not facing the electorate in the most proximate election. These patterns are interpreted tentatively as evidence of the paramount importance of political parties in parliamentary systems.     

Legislating or rubber-stamping? Assessing parliament's influence on law-making with text reuse

Law-making is a core function of parliaments in democratic systems. Yet, we still know little about the extent to which parliaments influence legislation and the reasons why MPs modify some bills more than others. We analyse the degree of bill amendments operated by parliament, by comparing bills before and after parliamentary deliberations with a text reuse approach. We postulate that MPs attempt to overcome the problem of limited processing capacity by prioritising certain bills over others. To this end, they use considerations related to institutional rules, attention dynamics and partisan politics. Empirically, we apply zero-inflated beta regressions on a dataset covering about 1,700 bills adopted from 1995 to 2015 in the Swiss Parliament. Moreover, we address the problem of observational equivalence affecting analyses of parliament's impact on law-making, by taking into account the government's anticipation strategy. Results highlight a reasonably high amendment activity, but with strong variations across bills. MPs change bills more if they are subject to direct democracy, rank high on the parliamentary agenda or if they attract media attention. The influence of the electoral cycle and coalition politics is not confirmed.     

Horses and hippos: Why Italian government bills change in the legislative arena, 1987–2006

Scholars interested in legislative processes pay relatively little attention to the changes made to bills in parliamentary democracies. On the one hand, comparative research has often described parliamentary institutions as ineffectual vis‐à‐vis cabinets throughout the lawmaking process; on the other hand, for a long time the rational choice literature has focused more on the formal rules regulating amendatory activity than on amendatory activity itself. Hence, very few studies have tried to explain how much government bills are altered in parliament and why. This article investigates the changes made to governmental legislation in Italy. Taking the modifications occurring during the legislative process as the dependent variable, a number of explanatory hypotheses derived from both existing scholarship and original arguments are discussed and tested. This also allows the identification of some usually unobserved aspects of the decision‐making process within the cabinet. The findings can also be relevant for comparative research since Italy has been characterised during the period under scrutiny (1987–2006) by two distinct electoral systems, two extremely different party systems (pivotal and alternational), governments with various ideological orientations and range, and both partisan and technical ministers.     

Using Parallel Strategies to Promote Change: Forest Policymaking under George W. Bush

This study of policy change examines the parallel strategies the administration of President George W. Bush has used to substantially alter the direction of forest policy during his first term. Using the Healthy Forests Initiative as a case study, this analysis explains how, by framing the problem of wildfires and forest health in terms of process and pointing blame at environmental groups misusing appeal procedures, the administration was able to emphasize process, rather than the content of existing forest policy. It also provided a reasonable explanation for the president to take a lead in seeking both legislative as well as regulatory change. We contend that the use of two parallel policymaking paths—legislative and administrative—enabled the president to pursue policy change more rapidly, and, from a strategic standpoint, more effectively, than by relying upon the legislative process alone. We offer that the Bush administration's approach to changing forest policy represents a redirection that is likely to serve as a template for further environmental policy change.     

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 role of common law in environmental policy

This paper discusses the role of common law in environmental policy. It is shown that common law actually tends towards efficiency only under quite restrictive conditions — conditions that are fulfilled only for very few, less important environmental problems. Moreover, in these cases common law need not even be efficient because an efficient solution can be negotiated once the allocation of rights is undisputed. Furthermore, common law neglects important distributional and political questions and is biased towards the status quo. Therefore, dealing with today's environmental problems cannot be left to the common law process but necessitates legislative action.     

An Analysis of Statutory Development: The Correlates of State Activity in Product Liability Legislation

In the last few years legal scholars and politicians have been concerned with what many have referred to as the "liability crisis". While there is certainly no consensus involving precisely how serious the problem indeed, some argue that there is no crisis -there is some evidence that the frequency and size of jury awards in some types of personal injury cases have changed since the 1970s. In response to this evidence virtually every state has considered legislation that would limit the frequency or size of such awards and would modify related judicial processes. Although the final status of many of these "tort reforms" is still uncertain, bills related to punitive damages and other dimensions of tort Iiability have been introduced in and passed by one or more houses in many state legislatures. This paper examines this legislative activity and focus on bills that have passed in one or more state legislative houses in the 1986–88 time period. Using standard multivariate statistical techniques, it examines the relationship between this legislative activity and dimensions of state politics and culture. The research indicates that state legislative activity in the area of tort reform results from a rather complex mix of factors. It is a function of political and social-economic attributes, as well as features of the states' legal and judicial systems.     

The decision process of a professionalized legislature: A cognitive anthropology approach

Political science research indicates that some state legislatures have become more professionalized, i.e., taken on many of the characteristics of Congress such as yearround sessions, professional staffs, and formalized bill processes. But is professionalization a factor in legislators' decision making? Triangulated analysis—consensus, cluster, and multidimensional scaling—of two paired comparisons that were administered to a stratified random sample of a professionalized legislature suggests that some of the professionalized characteristics do affect legislators' perception of their decision making on one area of policy, the regulation of and resource allocation to public universities. The analysis also shows that influences on legislators' decision process fluctuate according to issue.     

Change, Continuity, and the Evolution of the Law

Congress regularly passes significant laws. Some of these laws continue in their initial form, with the original bargain struck by the enacting coalition untouched by any future laws; others are changed—strengthened or weakened—soon after passage. What accounts for this variation in the stability of laws, in the longevity of the original legislative agreement? We contend that political conditions at the time of enactment—in particular, the existence of divided government and the level of ideological disagreement between the House and Senate—influence the likelihood that a law will be amended. We demonstrate that laws originally crafted by diverse political coalitions are less durable than those crafted by strong, unified coalitions, which are in a position to entrench their preferred policies and protect them from future change. Furthermore, we show that the probability of a law being amended is affected by future political conditions, the actions of the judiciary, and factors specific to the law.     

论中国行政立法程序的蜕变

自2004年《立法法》颁布以来,我国的行政立法程序有了一个比较大的变迁。行政立法从规划本位转变到立项本位,起草从内部协调为主到法治、民主和效能的综合考量,草案审查的法治化和行政法规规章解释制度的改革等都体现了我国行政立法程序已经进入一个新的历史阶段。     

Gubernatorial Use of the Item Veto for Narrative Deletion

Legislative use of narrative, such as conditions and riders, in appropriations bills has become common and has had negative consequences for the executive budget and veto, as well as for the legislative process. Some governors have used the item veto as a remedy. While they have not necessarily diminished the amount of narrative, they have achieved some protection of the executive budget and veto power. Their success depends greatly on the type of legal authority embodied in this constitutional power.     

The OMB Budget Examiner and The Congressional Budget Process

This is the second of a two-part retrospective on the evolving role of the OMB budget examiner. The examiner has become more active in negotiations with the legislative branch and tracking the legislative status of various fiscal measures. A new central budget management system was created to monitor appropriation bills. The OMB budget examiner has also been increasingly used to provide information for advocacy purposes before Congress and the public. The institutional effect on OMB of these changing roles is examined and suggestions for organizational reform are made.