Divided We Quarrel: The Politics of Congressional Investigations, 1947–2004

Are congressional committee investigations into alleged executive‐branch wrongdoing more common during periods of divided government? We analyze original data tracking congressional committee investigations into alleged fraud, waste, and abuse by the executive branch between 1947 and 2004. Countering David Mayhew's (1991) empirical finding, we show that divided government generates more and more‐intensive congressional investigations, but this relationship is contingent on partisan and temporal factors. Our findings shed new light on the shifting dynamic between partisan institutional politics and congressional oversight.     

Congressional Vote Options

Numerous accounts reveal that congressional leaders often secure “hip‐pocket votes” or “if you need me” pledges from rank‐and‐file legislators. These are essentially options on votes. Leaders exercise sufficient options—pay legislators to convert to favorable votes—when those options will yield victory. Otherwise, they release the options. A model shows that this optimal strategy for leaders produces many small victories, few small losses, and losses that are, on average, larger than victories. We find precisely these patterns, hence strong evidence for vote options, in Congressional Quarterly key votes from 1975 through 2001 and in non‐key votes from the 106th Congress (1999–2000).     

Congressional Oversight Hearings and Policy Control

Oversight hearings should be an important congressional tool for controlling recalcitrant agencies, but it is not clear that this should always be equally true. The logic of principal‐agent models of legislative policy control implies that oversight might sometimes, but not always, be superfluous to said control. Here, I reintroduce oversight hearings to theories of policy control and argue that congressional committees conduct oversight hearings primarily as a response to the extent to which agencies have different policy preferences from them and as a function of their capacity to conduct hearings cheaply. I test these hypotheses using committee hearings data (Policy Agendas Project) from both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate from 1947 to 2006 and provide support for theoretical arguments about the institutional nature of legislative policymaking strategies and ultimately help clarify the role of oversight in legislative‐executive relations.     

Legislative Self‐Restraint Under Divided Government In Germany, 1976–2002

Using the Vanberg (1998) model of legislative autolimitation from the judicial review literature, we investigated the impact of divided government on the strategic choices of government and opposition. The main prediction of the model is that a strong opposition dominance in the second chamber (Bundesrat) usually does not lead to open party‐political conflict, but rather to a government's legislative self‐restraint. We tested the hypotheses following from the model on a detailed dataset comprising all legislative bills in Germany between 1976 and 2002. The results show that the main effects of divided government are, in fact, indirect and anticipatory. We conclude that when majorities in the Bundestag and Bundesrat diverge, the impact on legislation is substantial.     

Sore Loser Laws and Congressional Polarization

To enhance explanations for party polarization in the U.S. Congress, we focus on an unappreciated legal structure known as the sore loser law. By restricting candidates who lose partisan primaries from subsequently appearing on the general election ballot as independents or as nominees of other parties, these laws give greater control over ballot access to the party bases, thus producing more extreme major party nominees. Using several different measures of candidate and legislator ideology, we find that sore loser laws account for as much as a tenth of the ideological divide between the major parties.     

Latino Representation on Congressional Websites

Do Latino representatives enhance or “enlarge” Latino representation (Walsh 2002)? I examined the content of websites posted by members of the 110th Congress and found that the websites of Latino representatives are not more accessible to Spanish‐speaking users than the websites of non‐Latino representatives, nor are the sites more likely to exhibit pro‐immigrant positions or offer immigration assistance. The websites of Latino representatives are, however, more likely to present Latino perspectives. Latino representatives enhance Latino representation in this forum by enlarging or broadening the presence of a Latino voice in policy discussion.     

Military Base Closures and the 1996 Congressional Elections

This article examines the extent to which changes in distributional benefits influence congressional election outcomes. Although conventional wisdom holds that a direct link exists between distributional benefits and electoral outcomes (Mayhew 1974b), recent evidence suggests that this link only exists under certain circumstances (Stein and Bickers 1994). In this article, I use 1995 military base closures to test the nature of the relationship. Contrary to recent research on the politics of pork barreling, my findings indicate support for a direct relationship between major base realignments and closures and House electoral outcomes. Specifically, major realignments and closures significantly decreased first‐year Democrats' vote margins in the 1996 House elections.     

The Economic Sources of Congressional Approval

Abstract Models of congressional approval have, in both theory and specification, often imitated models of presidential approval. Through their modeling decisions, researchers have implicitly assumed that the economic determinants of presidential and congressional approval are identical. Such assumptions have discouraged other researchers from testing competing hypotheses about the economic determinants of congressional approval. Using aggregate‐level time‐series analysis, this study investigates the question of whether or not the economic determinants of approval vary by the target of political judgment. I find that presidential approval is driven largely by sociotropic prospections, a result consistent with previous research. In contrast, I find the public relies most heavily upon egocentric retrospections when judging the U.S. Congress.     

Issue Voting and Partisan Defections in Congressional Elections

In every election cycle the fate of some candidates is determined by partisans who defect from their usual voting habits to cast a ballot for the candidate of the opposing party. Defections in congressional elections have been attributed to incumbency, presidential approval, partisan strength, and factors related to individual voters. Our systematic assessment of the impact of issues on voter defections shows that party‐owned issues and performance issues associated favorably with one party affect the likelihood of partisan defections. The results suggest that congressional candidates can use issues to draw supporters away from the opposing party and to keep partisan voters loyal.     

Political Bargaining and the Timing of Congressional Appropriations

Although Congress passes spending bills every year, there is great variation in the amount of time it takes. Drawing from rational models of bargaining, we identify factors that systematically affect the duration of legislative bargaining in the appropriations process. Analysis of spending bills for fiscal years 1977 to 2009 shows that delays are shorter when the ideological distance between pairs of key players decreases and distributive content is higher, but they are longer following an election. We find that congressional parties matter but that intraparty conflict matters as well, which suggests that Appropriations Committees retain significant autonomy in Congress.     

Congressional Party Defection in American History

In this paper, we analyze the roll‐call voting behavior of House and Senate members who changed party affiliation during the course of their political careers. We analyze members who switched during the stable periods of the three major two‐party systems in American history: the Federalist‐Jeffersonian Republican system (3d to 12th Congresses), the Democratic‐Whig System (20th to 30th Congresses), and the Democratic‐Republican System (46th to 106th Congresses). Our primary findings are that the biggest changes in the roll‐call voting behavior of party defectors can be observed during periods of high ideological polarization and that party defections during the past 30 years are distinct from switches in other eras because of high polarization and the disappearance of a second dimension of ideological conflict.     

Dynamics of Polarizing Rhetoric in Congressional Tweets

Affective polarization is pervasive in modern US politics, and can be intensified by strategic messaging from members of Congress. But there are gaps in our knowledge of the dynamics of polarizing appeals from elected representatives on social media. We explore the usage of polarizing rhetoric by members of Congress on Twitter using the 4.9 million tweets sent by members of Congress from 2009 to 2020, coded for the presence of polarizing rhetoric via a novel and highly accurate application of supervised machine learning methods. Fitting with our expectations, we find that more ideologically extreme members, those from safer districts, and those who are not in the president’s party are more likely to send polarizing tweets, and that polarizing tweets garner more engagement, increasing campaign funding for more polarizing members.     

Presidential Campaigning in the 2002 Congressional Elections

Theories involving coattails, surge and decline, presidential popularity, and the economy ascribe little importance to presidential efforts to influence congressional elections. Since such efforts do occur, we ask: What happens when a president campaigns for fellow partisans? We examined President George W. Bush's decisions to campaign for certain House candidates in 2002, and we assessed the effect of his visits on Republicans' electoral successes. Both the competitiveness of a race and the president's electoral self‐interest increased the likelihood of a visit on behalf of a candidate. Neither party loyalty nor presidential support in Congress had an effect. We conclude that presidential campaign visits significantly enhance candidates' electoral prospects.     

Global Environment Threats and a Divided Northern Community

The EU, Japan, and the US now share many environmental norms, laws, and institutions and cooperate on international environmental matters through numerous bilateral and multilateral channels. They disagree, however, on how to deal with some of the most serious issues facing the global environment and the quality of human life including wide-scale biodiversity loss, climate change, the use of genetically modified (GM) organisms; the trans-boundary movement of hazardous wastes, and chemical safety. As these are all issues that require the involvement of developing countries if global environmental protection efforts are to be effective, the discord that exists among the Northern states is of tremendous significance. The US has pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol arguing that the treaty is poorly designed and would be detrimental to the US economy. Japan and the EU have had to try to find a way to bring the treaty into force without the participation of the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and to convince participating countries to meet their targets even though this may put them at a competitive disadvantage. In the case of biodiversity loss, although the US initiated international negotiations on biodiversity preservation, it has refused to join the EU and Japan in ratifying the Convention on Biological Diversity. There are also differences between the US, on the one side, and Japan and the EU on the other, regarding the use of GM organisms. This article analyses the reasons for the differences that have emerged among northern states in their international environmental policy positions and what the implications of this northern policy divide are for the effectiveness and legitimacy of international environmental protection efforts.     

Congressional Arts Caucus Legislative Summary 99th Congress

Abstract

The following legislative summary is an unusual choice for the journal to print, but we feel it summarizes a number of disparate and important facts that our readers might value in a single source. Like a previous report of the Institute of Museum Services some issues ago, this summary is more an internal document than an article in the traditional sense. We feel it could use a broader dissemination.

Of particular interest are the changes in legislation for the Arts and Humanities Reauthorization FY 1986–1990 since they reflect policy-related decisions that are perhaps a microcosm of some of the major issues emerging during the twenty-year history of our National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. These changes also reflect problems that practitioners—in particular, arts managers—will be dealing with on a daily basis and in very specific terms over the next half decade. These include access to the arts and humanities for those people in rural areas and in underrepresented groups, greater restrictions for those who sit in judgment on their peers, either on the National Council or as panelists, and a mandate for stronger reporting procedures both before and after grant awards.

The summary of the 1986 Tax Reform Act Provides a quick review of a Subject that is already emotionally chrged, especially since, in the name of “tax simplification,” confusion seems to have increased in the minds of all but a few seers and interpreters. The public laws section and the list of pending legislation will give the reader a broad view of the kinds of advocacy concerns the arts community can rally around. From the National Anthem to copyright to issue of violence on television, the Congressional Arts Caucus has provided us with an important overview of legislation in the field.     

Citizen Participation and Congressional Responsiveness: New Evidence that Participation Matters

This article examines the influence of citizen participation, specifically voter turnout, on congressional policy responsiveness. We argue that higher levels of citizen participation signal to representatives greater surveillance of their actions by their constituents and, thus, a higher probability of sanction. Representatives respond to these signals by deploying resources in ways that provide better intelligence of district needs and preferences. As a consequence, higher citizen participation is rewarded with enhanced policy responsiveness.     

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.     

Congressional Elections in Presidential Years: Presidential Coattails and Strategic Voting

This article analyzes voting for Congress in presidential election years. The national Democratic vote for the House increases with the Democratic vote for president but decreases with the Democrats' perceived chances of winning the presidency (anticipatory balancing). The evidence for coattails and for balancing become visible only when statistically controlling for the other. The aggregate evidence for coattails and balancing in presidential years is reinforced by the analysis of National Election Studies (NES) survey respondents. That analysis shows that politically informed voters are more likely to vote for Congress against the party that they believe will win the presidency.     

方法专利分离式侵权判定研究

方法专利因由一系列步骤组成而更易遭受分离式侵权的侵害.由于分离式侵权的行为主体包含多人、实施地包含多管辖区,不仅难以适用专利法上的“全面覆盖”原则,而且传统的直接侵权和间接侵权理论同样不敷使用.不过,美国BMC案提出的“指示或者控制”标准为方法专利分离式侵权判定提供了借鉴.运用“指示或者控制”标准是当前我国在“互联网+”时代背景下规制方法专利分离式侵权的一个可行选择.