Institutional Change,Party Discipline,and the House Democratic Caucus, 1911–19

Abstract The House Democratic Caucus of 1911 to 1919 is a largely understudied institution in the literature on congressional party government, despite the claims of many scholars that the caucus functioned as a significant instrument of party government by binding legislators' floor votes. An analysis of roll‐call votes, new data from the caucus journal, and contemporary accounts from the period indicate that these claims are largely exaggerated, although the caucus did, on occasion, improve floor discipline within the party. I find that intraparty homogeneity on crosscutting issues was related to caucus success. In addition, I argue that the adoption and use of the binding caucus can best be understood from the “multiple goals” viewpoint of congressional politics. These findings have important implications for understanding the development of party‐based institutions in Congress.     

Tarnishing Opponents,Polarizing Congress: The House Minority Party and the Construction of the Roll‐Call Record

Existing research on congressional parties tends to focus almost exclusively on the majority party. I argue that the inattention to the House minority party hampers our understanding of the construction of the roll‐call record and, consequently, our understanding of the sources of polarization in congressional voting. Employing an original data set of House members' requests for recorded votes between 1995 and 2010, I demonstrate that votes demanded by the minority party are disproportionately divisive and partisan and make Congress appear considerably more polarized based on commonly used measures. Moreover, minority‐requested votes make vulnerable members of the majority appear more partisan and ideologically extreme.     

Voting from the Pew: The Effect of Senators' Religious Identities on Partisan Polarization in the U.S. Senate

Partisan polarization in the Senate is in part a product of the increased sorting of evangelical Christians into the Republican caucus. The relationship between senators' religious identities, party affiliation, and ideology has changed since the 1970s. Whereas congressional party caucuses in the past were more diverse in their religious composition, evangelical Christian senators have sorted themselves into the party that most closely resembles the values of their religious identities, leading to greater overall polarization.     

Who Benefits from the Party Organization? Evidence from Republican House Members' Attendance at Caucus Meetings

As the role of US congressional parties in the legislative process has increased, so has the importance of understanding the institutions within these organizations. In this article, we examine the weekly caucus meetings held by Republican House leaders with their rank‐and‐file. We consider how members’ characteristics relate to their decision to attend based on the collective and private benefits that caucus participation affords. Using interviews of members and staffers as well as members’ attendance records at these meetings from 2007 to 2013, we find, among other things, that members who vote less with their party or who have more seniority are less likely to attend while those in leadership positions or who are electorally vulnerable are more likely to do so. Together, these findings provide additional insights on the relationship between party leaders and their members and which members benefit from this central party‐building activity.     

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.     

Redistributing Campaign Funds by U.S. House Members: The Spiraling Costs of the Permanent Campaign

In this article, we document and analyze the increase in the redistribution of campaign funds by U.S. House members during the 1990 through 2000 election cycles. By examining the contribution activity of members' leadership PACs and principal campaign committees, we show that House incumbents substantially increased their contributions to other House candidates and to the congressional campaign committees. The amount of money a member redistributes is a function of that member's institutional position: the greater the position's level of responsibility to the party caucus, the more campaign money the member redistributes, particularly as competition for majority control increases. Also, a member's capacity to raise surplus campaign funds, his or her support for the party's policy positions, and the level of competition for partisan control of the institution all affect the amount the member redistributes.     

Orchestrating Party Talk: A Party‐Based View of One‐Minute Speeches in the House of Representatives

Previous studies of House members' speech‐giving behavior treat the behavior as a product of members' individual goals. By uncovering leadership memoranda soliciting member participation in one‐minute speech giving, I find, first, that parties significantly structure one‐minute speech giving, with party‐orchestrated message campaigns accounting for about one‐third of the speeches given. Second, I find that a party‐based explanation illuminates individual members' speech‐giving behavior. Ideological proximity to the party leadership and party organizational factors strongly influence a member's willingness to be “on message.” These findings have important implications for studies of both party message politics and members' speech‐giving behavior.     

Third Parties,Elections, and Roll‐Call Votes: The Populist Party and the Late Nineteenth‐Century U.S. Congress

What effect do electorally successful third parties have on congressional roll‐call votes? There is widespread belief among scholars that third parties influence the policies of the major parties, but there is little systematic evidence of this influence. I exploit the unique historical context surrounding the Populist Party formation in 1892 to examine the effect of the Populist Party's electoral success on congressional roll‐call votes related to Populist issues. The results are consistent with two claims. First, co‐optation of the Populist Party's issues occurred even before the formation of the party. Second, the co‐optation of Populist policies does not appear to be correlated with the electoral success of the Populist candidates.     

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.     

Party,Policy, and the Ambition to Run for Higher Office

This article examines why some state legislators run for Congress and others do not. Our main argument is that there are differences in the expected value of a state legislative seat and the expected benefits of being a member of Congress. One key component of this value is how closely the candidate fits with her party. We find that the probability of seeking congressional office increases among state legislators who are distant from the state party and proximate to the congressional party and decreases among those who are distant from the congressional party and proximate to the state party.     

Moderate Caucuses in a Polarised US Congress

Despite putting themselves in a thorny relationship with heavy-handed party leaders, some US legislators continue to join moderate coalitions. To understand why, this article derives seven explicit hypotheses concerning electoral, institutional, and strategic dimensions and tests them on two moderate coalitions from the 107th to the 110th Congress (2001–8): the Republican Main Street Partnership and the New Democrat Coalition, along with the Senate's ‘Gang of 14’ during the 109th Congress (2005–6). The article finds that, as expected, a member's ideology and previous affiliation strongly predict who joins these caucuses. What is surprising from the findings is that the constituencies' partisanship does not always predict the legislators' decision to be a moderate caucus member. There is little evidence that more electorally vulnerable members join these caucuses; on the contrary, when it does matter, members from competitive districts appear to stay away from moderate coalitions. Therefore, the findings call into question the prevailing ‘constituency-based’ understanding of moderate coalition membership in a polarised Congress and call for a new examination of electoral connection between moderate members and moderate caucuses.     

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.     

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.     

Long‐Term Change and Stability in House Voting Decisions: The Case of the Minimum Wage

Although members of Congress exhibit considerable stability in their voting decisions on similar, recurring issues, members' long‐term voting histories reveal evidence of systematic instability as well. I argue that members reverse positions in predictable ways when the vote history loses value as a decision cue, and I present empirical evidence for this behavior in the context of the highly salient and regularly repeated House decisions on increasing the federal minimum wage. The empirical findings suggest that reversals of member positions are related to institutional, electoral, and constituency factors. I conclude by discussing the importance of these findings to understanding congressional decision making and representation.     

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.     

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.     

Bicameralism and Minority-Party Influence on Legislative Development: Evidence from House Standing Committee Votes

The ability of the minority party to influence legislation in Congress is debated. Most bills are passed with large bipartisan majorities, yet the House, where most legislation is developed, is seen as a majority-party-dominated institution. I develop a theory of House minority-party influence at the committee markup stage as a result of the Senate’s institutional rules. An original data set of congressional committee votes shows that minority-party support in House committees predicts House and Senate passage. During unified party control of the chambers, an increase in Senate majority-party seats results in lower minority-party support for the legislation in the House committee, while during divided party control of Congress, the House majority passes more extreme bills as the chambers polarize. Even in the majority-party-dominated House, the minority’s preferences are incorporated into legislation, and the Senate’s institutional rules moderate bills to a significant degree.     

Bill Passage Speed in the US House: A Test of a Vote Buying Model of the Legislative Process

This article constitutes a test of central tenets of vote buying theories using data on the number of days it takes to pass important bills in the US House. Survival analyses of a model of bill passage length provide confirmatory evidence of vote buying by presidents and the congressional leadership. Bills that attract buyers of votes to maintain the status quo are shown to pass more quickly than those that do not. Bills on the president's agenda and those that are relatively close to members' ideal points also pass quickly. The analyses furnish some interesting insights into possible efforts to make the legislative process quicker.     

Party Discipline and Universalism: The Case of Budgeting in Berlin

Work on the US Congress has found that when partisan differences are strong, legislation tends to be passed by minimum winning coalitions. When partisanship is weak, Congress and its committees often rely on the norm of universalism or 'giving something to everyone' to pass legislation. Universalism in legislative voting is expected to lead to bloated or inefficient public spending. This article investigates whether these hypotheses about party discipline and universalism hold true outside the United States. A comparison of fiscal decision-making in local legislatures in eastern Berlin, where newly created political parties are weakly disciplined, and in western Berlin, where established party caucuses are highly disciplined, finds this is indeed the case. The article concludes by raising questions for future research on universalism and other post-communist legislatures.