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.     

The Electoral Consequences of Party Switching by Incumbent Members of Congress, 1947–2000

What are the electoral consequences of switching parties for incumbent members of Congress? Do incumbents who switch fare better or worse after their switch? Aldrich (1995) and Aldrich and Bianco (1992) present a model of party affiliation for all candidates. We empirically extend this model for incumbent legislators who have switched parties. Specifically, we look at the universe of incumbent representatives who have run for Congress under more than one party label since World War II. We find that the primary and general election vote shares for party switchers are not as high after the switch as before. Additionally, we learn that party switching causes the primaries in the switcher's party and in the the opposing party (the switcher's “old” party) to become more competitive in the short run. Over the long run, however, primaries in the switcher's new party are less competitive than those in the old party before the switch.     

Slavery,Partisanship, and Procedure in the U.S. House: The Gag Rule, 1836–1845

From the 24th through the 28th Congresses, the House of Representatives operated under versions of a “gag rule” that blocked petitions dealing with abolition and related matters. This article presents the gag rule as not only a historically important window into slavery deliberations in Congress but also a case study in majority party restrictions of minority rights—and in the boundaries that constituency politics can place on majority power. Through analysis of vote choices and voting changes over time, I demonstrate that the gag rule's partisan origins gave way as northern members voted against party and with specific constituency pressures as well as general sectional sentiment. The gag rule shows the power of electoral considerations and constituency in the early U.S. House, and it also illustrates the force that constituency can have over majority procedural maneuvering.     

Legislative Institutions as a Source of Party Leaders' Influence

Legislators' actions are influenced by party, constituency, and their own views, each weighted differently. Our survey of state legislators finds that legislator's own views are the strongest influence. We also find that institutions are an important source of party leaders' influence. Legislators in states where members rely more on party leaders—states without term limits, with less professional legislatures, and where the majority party controls the agenda—put more weight on leaders' preferences. Beyond direct party influence, the views of party leaders are preemptively incorporated into legislators' preferences when the rules of the legislature make party leaders more powerful.     

Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions

We investigate why the Supreme Court grants a smaller percentage of cases at the first conference of each term compared to other conferences. According to received wisdom, Supreme Court law clerks are overly cautious at the beginning of their tenure because they receive only a brief amount of training. Reputational concerns motivate clerks to provide fewer recommendations to grant review in cert. pool memos written over the summer months. Using a random sample of petitions from the Blackmun Archives, we code case characteristics, clerk recommendation, and the Court's decision on cert. Nearest neighbor matching suggests clerks are 36 percent less likely to recommend grants in their early cert. pool memos. Because of this temporal discrepancy, petitions arriving over the summer have a 16 percent worse chance of being granted by the Court. This seasonal variation in access to the Court's docket imposes a legally irrelevant burden on litigants who have little control over the timing of their appeal.     

Party Caucuses and Coordination: Assessing Caucus Activity and Party Effects

Party caucuses are increasingly important to members' allocation of time. This article reports findings from new data on the minutes, frequency, timing, and attendance of House party caucus meetings. I argue that the party caucuses increasingly affect political and policy information flows to members. This growing party coordination has resulted in a greater bonding and shared strategic information among rank‐and‐file copartisans. This research also contributes to the party effects literature. Earlier research on congressional partisanship has used roll‐call data to measure both member preferences and party effects. I investigate whether or not members' attendance at party caucus meetings immediately prior to key congressional votes imposes partisan cohesion beyond members' preferences. The results indicate that party coordination contributes to greater congressional party unity on key floor votes at both the bill and member level controlling for members' ideological preferences. This party coordination effect occurs even during a period of high intraparty preference homogeneity.     

Do Ideological Preferences Explain Parliamentary Behaviour? Evidence from Great Britain and Canada

Are parliamentary parties cohesive because leaders successfully impose discipline on their MPs or because MPs prefer - hence support - the same policies as their leaders do? If the latter is correct, and party cohesion is produced largely by members' concordant preferences, then models that explain cohesion as a function of the disciplinary mechanisms available to parties once the MP is in Parliament (for example, the distribution of patronage or the threat of de-selection) are not useful. This article uses British and Canadian MPs' responses to candidate surveys to estimate MPs' positions on a variety of ideological dimensions and then shows that MPs' preferences on these ideological dimensions only partially explain how often they vote against their parties. Indeed, even after one controls for an MP's ideological preferences, party affiliation remains a powerful predictor of the MP's loyalty or dissent - suggesting that party discipline does, in fact, contribute to cohesion. Additional tests indicate that these results are not spurious.     

How Strong Should Our Party Be? Party Member Preferences Over Party Cohesion

In this article, we seek to explain when and why political parties pressure their members to vote with the party. We model party cohesion as an endogenous choice of preference alignment by party members. Couched in Krehbiel's (1996, 1998) pivotal politics model, the formal theory advanced here shows party cohesion to be related to the initial preference alignment of party members, the divergence in preferences between parties, the cohesion of the opposing party, the party's size, and the party's majority or minority status. We solved the model analytically for generalized‐partial equilibrium results and further analyzed it through computer simulations. We tested the model's predictions in the U.S. Senate using Rice party cohesion scores from the 46th through 104th Congresses. The data analyses show strong support for this theory of endogenous choice of party pressure.     

Women's Substantive Representation: Defending Feminist Interests or Women's Electoral Preferences?

To what extent does the inclusion of marginalised groups in policymaking institutions influence policy outcomes? This article examines whether and under which conditions female legislators are more likely to represent women's interests compared with male legislators. Building on the literature on women's substantive representation, it is argued that the advocacy of women's interests by female representatives depends on a number of factors, namely party affiliation, contact with women's organisations, electoral district, and seniority. This argument is evaluated using vote-level fixed-effect models based on a unique data set from a direct democratic context that combines representatives' voting behaviour, women's voting preferences, and recommendations from feminist groups. The findings show that female legislators defend feminist interests more than their male colleagues but that they only marginally respond to women's electoral preferences. Moreover, gender has its most visible effect within the populist party.     

Is Personal Vote‐Seeking Behavior Effective?

Does representatives' legislative activity have any effect on their electoral performance? A broad theoretical literature suggests so, but real‐world evidence is scarce as empirically, personal and party votes are hard to separate. In this article, we examine whether bill initiation actually helps MPs to attract preference votes under flexible list electoral systems. In these systems, voters can accept the party‐provided rank order or vote for specific candidates, which allows a clear distinction between personal and party votes. The empirical analysis uses data on bill initiation by Belgian MPs in the period 2003–2007 to explain their personal vote in the 2007 elections. We find that particularly single‐authored proposals initiated shortly before the upcoming elections are associated with a larger personal vote.     

Personal Jurisdiction in Online Expression Cases: Rejecting Minimum Contacts in Favor of Affirmative Acts

When a speaker injures a party through online communication, the initial inquiry becomes how and where the injured party may recover damages from the internet speaker within the constitutional limits established by the 'Due Process Clause' of the constitution on the places where a plaintiff may choose to sue a defendant. The due process limits were created to prevent a plaintiff from suing a non-resident defendant in a resident's court system unless the defendant had enough contact with the state to reasonably anticipate being sued there. As cyberspace renders moot much of the geographical principles upon which jurisdictions rely, the issue of personal jurisdiction-the involuntary imposition of a forum state's legal power-emerges as a threshold issue in the law of online expression. The following paper addresses the jurisprudence of American courts in the area of personal jurisdiction, illustrating the need for clarity in this critical area of the law.     

The Contribution of Comparative Research to Measuring the Policy Preferences of Legislators

Comparative legislative research has contributed to an examination of the validity of roll‐call votes as measures of legislators' policy preferences. It has prompted an awareness of the influence of legislative structure on the composition of the voting record. Comparative research on members' ideal points has confronted the problems of selection effects, abstentions, the influence of the agenda setter, and the effect of party strategy. It has encouraged the search for alternate measures of members' preferences, including members' speech, cosponsorship, survey responses, and party manifestos. In the non‐American setting, ideal points have been regarded as group‐level, as well as individual‐level, variables. The game‐theoretic approach to the study of legislatures has led to the formulation of hypotheses relating legislative structure to members' ideal points.     

House Party Switchers and Committee Assignments: Who Gets “What,When, How?”

What are the political consequences for members of Congress who switch parties? Roll‐call and electoral consequences of congressional party switching have been studied, but other implications of party defections have yet to be systematically explored. In this article, I examine the committee assignments of House party switchers and argue that party leaders seek to reward members of the opposing party who join their ranks. Using committee assignment data from the 94th House (1975–76) through the 107th House (2001–02), I show that party switchers are more likely than nonswitchers to be the beneficiaries of violations of the seniority norm. The findings from this article are of interest to students of political parties and legislative institutions, and fill a gap in the literature on party switching. When you joined the Republican Conference on August 6, 1995, the elected leadership …determined that your accumulated seniority in the Congress would be credited when you joined the Republican Conference…. Therefore, the Republican Steering Committee's Seniority List ranks you nineteenth in overall conference seniority and designates May 22, 1980, as the beginning of your tenure in the House for purposes of Republican seniority. Letter from Speaker Dennis Hastert to party switcher Billy Tauzin, April 4, 2000.¹     

The Effect of Practitioner Recommendations on the Tax Judgments of Small Business Owners and Managers*

This study addresses conflicting results between prior research documenting a client demand for aggressive practitioner-prepared returns and research establishing taxpayer preferences for accurate returns and cautious reporting behavior. Rather than rely on practitioner reports of client aggressiveness, the tax reporting preferences of clients are examined in afield experiment mailed to small businesses across the country. After subjects had indicated ex ante beliefs about the likelihood of independent contractor status, they significantly altered their behavioral intentions in the direction of a preparer's recommendation. This implies that prior results with practitioner samples may have been biased by the practitioners' personal views. Nonetheless, some aggressive subjects were not as willing to follow the preparer's advice as were the conservative subjects. Evidence is presented on variables that correlate with aggressive tax decision making.     

Urban Drug Problems, Policymakers and the General Public

The main focus of this paper is: how strong are people's opinions and policy preferences on the issue of drugs and drug users influenced by their own exposure to drug problems? From a general population survey conducted in eleven European cities, it is concluded that opinions and policy preferences are influenced only to a limited degree by exposure. The people who are not exposed to drug problems in their neighbourhood are more strongly inclined towards a repressive approach than the people who are affected by drug nuisance. Personal experiences with illicit drugs play an important part in the viewpoints. People who have tried drugs themselves lean far more strongly towards a health approach. That tendency is even stronger among those who are exposed to drug-related nuisance.     

Family Law and Social Change: Judicial Views of Joint Custody, 1998–2011

Rapid changes in family life over the last forty years have led to substantial alterations in family law policy; specifically, most states now endorse joint custody arrangements for divorcing families. However, we know little about how lower court judges have embraced or resisted this change. We conducted in‐depth interviews with judges in twenty‐five Indiana jurisdictions in 1998 and 2011. Our findings suggest that judges' views of joint custody dramatically changed. Judges in Wave II indicated a strong preference for joint custody—a theme that was relatively absent in Wave I. The observed change in judicial preferences did not seem to be related to judicial replacement, gender, age, or political party affiliation. Although our conclusions are exploratory, we speculate that shifts in judicial views may be related to changing public mores of parenthood and, relatedly, Indiana's adoption of Parenting Time Guidelines in 2001.     

Presidential Support in the Russian State Duma

Recent comparative research on presidential systems has analyzed the ways in which presidents build majorities for their legislative agendas. Through an analysis of roll‐call votes from the 2000‐03 Russian State Duma on a set of issues reflecting President Putin's legislative agenda, I examine the impact of parliamentary party affiliation, policy preferences, issue type, and electoral mandate type on structuring floor support for the president. I also assess the implications of a mixed electoral system for building legislative coalitions in multiparty legislatures. Further, my findings shed light on Putin's recent reforms of the Duma's rules and procedures and the country's electoral system.     

Friends You Can Trust: A Signaling Theory of Interest Group Litigation Before the U.S. Supreme Court

How do interest groups influence U.S. Supreme Court justices to vote in favor of their preferred outcomes? Following prior research on the influence of the Solicitor General, we develop and expand on the signaling theory of interest group influence via amicus curie briefs. We argue that an interest group's ideological reputation and the nature of the ideological signal it sends in its brief both function as powerful heuristics that convey information to the justices depending on the justices' own ideological preferences. When an organization files an amicus brief advocating for an outcome seemingly contrary to its traditional preferences (i.e., an unexpected signal), this signal should be more noticeable and credible than a signal in accordance with a group's conventional views (i.e., an expected signal). However, unexpected signals should have greater influence on justices who share the brief filer's preferences. We test our signaling theory on the terms from 1991 through 2002. We find that unexpected signals (but not expected signals) are associated with Supreme Court voting, and the influence of unexpected signals appears to be particularly strong among justices who share the ideological preferences of the brief filer.     

Lawyers,Justices, and Issue Salience: When and How Do Legal Arguments Affect the U.S. Supreme Court?

A good deal of scholarly evidence suggests that the decisionmaking of the U.S. Supreme Court is affected by legal argument. At the same time, it seems clear that in a great many cases the justices have enduring, strongly held views. In such cases, they should be impervious to the effects of advocacy. When are the justices apt to be influenced by the Court's legal community, and when will lawyers be less relevant? The answer, we think, has to do with the salience of the issue before the Court. We suspect that in nonsalient cases the justices have less‐intense preferences and therefore are open to the persuasion of lawyers. In salient cases, by contrast, the content of legal policy matters much more to the justices. As a result, they are less amenable to legal argument and adhere more strictly to their personal policy preferences. Our empirical tests support this orientation.     

Congressional Performance,Incumbent Behavior,and Voting in Senate Elections

Conventional wisdom suggests that individual members of Congress have no real incentive to act in ways that might improve public evaluations of their collective body. In particular, the literature provides no clear evidence that public evaluations of Congress affect individual races for Congress, and little reason to expect that voters would hold specific individuals responsible for the institution's performance. We suggest that this conventional wisdom is incorrect. Using multiple state‐level exit polls of Senate voting conducted by Voter News Service in 1996 and 1998, we arrive at two key findings. First, we find that evaluations of Congress do have a significant effect on voting within individual U.S. Senate races across a wide variety of electoral contexts. Second, we find that punishments or rewards for congressional performance are not distributed equally across all members, or even across members of a particular party. Instead, we find that the degree to which citizens hold a senator accountable for congressional performance is significantly influenced by that senator's actual level of support for the majority party in Congress, as demonstrated on party votes.