The congressional veto: Shifting the balance of administrative control

During the past decade, hundreds of provisions have been enacted by Congress giving that body some form of control over the projects and regulations of federal agencies. Pressures for more far-reaching measures of this sort, including a proposal to vest Congress with a veto of all regulations promulagated by federal agencies, have intensified debate on both the constitutional merits and administrative wisdom of the congressional veto process. These measures are exerting considerable effect, delaying the decisions of the agencies, reshaping the regulatory process, and increasing the direct congressional role in setting administrative agendas and substantive policies. The result is a transfer of administrative power to the more than 200 standing committees and subcommittees of the Congress-and, significantly, to their staffs. This transfer has served to impede the executive chain of command, to diminish the role of independent regulatory agencies as experts in their respective fields, to devalue judicial review of agency action, and to reduce the accountability of the affected agencies.     

Institutional veto players and cabinet formation: The veto control hypothesis reconsidered

Are potential cabinets more likely to form when they control institutional veto players such as symmetric second chambers or minority vetoes? Existing evidence for a causal effect of veto control has been weak. This article presents evidence for this effect on the basis of conditional and mixed logit analyses of government formations in 21 parliamentary and semi‐presidential democracies between 1955 and 2012. It also shows that the size of the effect varies systematically across political‐institutional contexts. The estimated causal effect was greater in countries that eventually abolished the relevant veto institutions. It is suggested that the incidence of constitutional reform is a proxy for context‐specific factors that increased the incentives for veto control and simultaneously provided a stimulus for the weakening of institutional veto power.     

Evaluating congressional reform: Deregulation revisited

An evaluation of the changes in Congress's structure that occurred in the 1970s requires attention to three dimensions of its performance as a policymaking institution: representation of interests, deliberation, and conflict resolution. Considered this way, the changes seem to have enhanced some aspects of congressional capacity (especially the representation of broadly-based interests) but to have diminished others (especially deliberation and conflict resolution on issues that are salient to mass constituencies). The resulting strengths and weaknesses help to explain differences in congressional performance on trucking deregulation and natural gas deregulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. To some degree, they have altered the opportunities, strategic considerations, and central skills for policy analysts who seek to influence congressional decisions.     

Advising congressional decision-makers: Guidelines for economists

Economists have less influence on congressional decision-making than they might because they do not make a sufficient effort to learn how issues look from the politicians' point of view. Politics and economics are inextricably connected in congressional decision-making. For those economists who are willing to try to bridge the gap between economists and Politicians, the article suggests ten guidelines: (1) learn about the history of the issue; (2) find out who will be making the decision, (3) timing is critical; (4) learn everyone's interests and arguments; (5) it's OK to think like an economist, but don't write like one; (6) keep it simple; (7) congressmen care more about distribution than efficiency; (8) take implementation and administration into account; (9) emphasize a few crucial and striking numbers; and (10) read the newspapers.     

Unpacking pivotal politics: exploring the differential effects of the filibuster and veto pivots

Formal models of politics regularly combine assumptions about a variety of actors and institutions to produce equilibrium expectations, which serve as the primary target for empirical testing. Yet the underlying assumptions can vary in their accuracy among actors and across time and context. We focus on the pivotal politics model of lawmaking and argue that a full evaluation of the theory requires a granular analysis of its two primary components: the filibuster and veto “pivots” in Congress. We show that both types of pivots contribute to the success of pivotal politics in explaining postwar lawmaking, but that the relevance of each varies based on institution-specific contexts. Specifically, the filibuster pivot has little explanatory power before the 1970s, when norms of filibuster use were quite restrictive, while the veto pivot’s explanatory power is limited to situations in which the president has sufficient public backing to be a force in the legislative process.     

Looking beyond reelection: Revising assumptions about the factors motivating congressional behavior

This paper challenges the assumption inherent in most models of legislative behavior — namely that congressmen are driven by the desire for reelection. I offer an alternative perspective: incumbents seek to maximize their discretionary investments and the income generated by the job. The only constraint on this behavior is that legislators provide a satisfactory level of constituency service — a product that I suggest entails slight opportunity, and few manufacturing, costs for congressmen, and one that is unlikely to lose its value with increased production. I also demonstrate that increases in salary and discretionary investments have lengthened congressional careers.     

Determinants of congressional minimum wage support: the role of economic education

Much has been made about the lack of economic education among the public at large, yet little has been said about the limited education of Members of Congress. This paper examines the economic education levels of Members of Congress voting on the 2007 increase in the minimum wage. Controlling for a variety of characteristics of members and constituents, this study finds that members who majored in economics as undergraduates were less likely to vote for the minimum wage increase than their colleagues. No other major had a consistent influence. A large number of statistical specifications confirm the robustness of the finding.     

Two-tiered political entrepreneurship and the congressional committee system

Theories of political entrepreneurship usually focus on the construction of coalitions necessary to change policy. We argue that political entrepreneurs who are unable to secure favored policies may redirect their efforts to a “higher tier,” attempting to change the rules of the game to enable the exploitation of future political profit opportunities. We present a taxonomy of three levels of political rules—pre-constitutional, constitutional, and post-constitutional—and identify the salient characteristics of institutional entrepreneurship that targets rules at each level. The development of the congressional committee system is explored as a case study in entrepreneurship over post-constitutional rules.     

The CIA and congressional oversight: learning and forgetting lessons

Organizations both learn lessons and forget lessons. A lesson said to be learned by the CIA as a result of the negative reaction of congressional overseers to its interrogation program was the need to create opportunities to provide information and interact with them. The historical record shows that this was a lesson already learned. Why then the need to relearn it? It is suggested here that organizational forgetfulness may be triggered by the same factors which promote learning: perceived problems with organizational performance, opportunities to act, and people.     

Constitutional courts as veto players: Divorce and decrees in Italy

Abstract. This article argues that constitutional courts in Western European parliamentary systems should be integrated into discussions of how public policies are changed, rather than being viewed as an external veto point. It attempts to bridge a gap between a judicial politics literature that focuses on the micro–level of individual judges' votes and comparative scholarship that operates at the macro–level. A model for viewing constitutional courts as veto players, as a third institutional actor, is proposed and is then illustrated using the cases of legalizing divorce and blocking the executive reissuing decree laws in Italy. The model considers both the indirect and direct influences that constitutional courts can exert on the policy–making process. It also facilitates understanding and explaining the role of courts, as well as legislatures and executives, in conducting the interactions and bargaining that result in policy change.     

Explaining the unpopularity of public funding for congressional elections

This article uses data from the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to explain weak support for public financing of congressional campaigns. Previous studies lack theory to explain variation in support and use a flawed measure of the dependent variable. We argue that low support reflects a failure resulting from a collective action dilemma. Citizens desire a campaign finance system that weans politicians from private donors, but are unwilling to pay a small amount in taxes to support public financing. In contrast to conventional wisdom, we show that support for public financing is highest among those perceived to benefit the most from the current system. Our results suggest that most Americans would rather not pay for politics, and that reform proposals must avoid incurring transparent costs on individual citizens to pay for reform.     

A test of the revealed-preference phenomenon in congressional elections

This study tests for the existence of a revealed-preference phenomenon in recent congressional elections. A revealed-preference analysis predicts that if candidate one defeats incumbent candidate two, then candidate one has been revealed preferred to candidate two, and can expect to secure higher pluralities in subsequent reelection contests than candidate two would have expected. I collect data on incumbents in 1946–1980 congressional elections to examine this prediction. The data provide qualified support for the presence of a revealed-preference phenomenon. The essay closes with a discussion of the possible connection between the revealed-preference phenomenon and the recent electoral experience of congressional incumbents.     

Parties and institutions: empirical evidence on veto players and the growth of government

Does the effective number of veto players in a political system explain the rate of government growth? Panel data analyses are conducted in order to test several measures of veto players against each other, and these results are compared with similar analyses of government fractionalization. The analyses indicate that veto players and especially government fractionalization exert a constraining effect on changes in the size of government, but also that the effect is not consistent over time: neither veto players in general nor fractionalization of government in particular exerted any constraining effect during the decades of rapid government growth due to welfare state creation and expansion in the 1960s and 1970s. The strength of government fractionalization vis-a-vis the veto player measures in explaining changes in the size of government suggest that the constellation of partisan veto players within coalition governments matters, while the effect of institutional veto players remains uncertain.     

Voters and roll call voting: The effect on congressional elections

The subject of this research is whether ideological preferences play a major role in explaining voters' refusal to reelect some members of the U.S. House of Representatives. If ideological control is important, one would expect to find a large difference between the voting record of a rejected incumbent and his or her replacement. In distinction, whenever voters must replace a congressman or congresswoman because that person had died in office or chose to run for higher office, the hypothesis of ideological tracking implies that the newly elected member of Congress will resemble his or her predecessor. The data confirm these hypotheses and show, as well, that ideological control exists within parties and not only between them; that the degree of voters' ideological control is as great over senior congressmen and congresswomen as over junior ones; and that voters' concern about ideology has increased over the last two decades.     

Anticipating future congressional action: Designing a new retirement income system

After federal workers were covered by the social security system for the first time in 1983, the Congressional Research Service began working with congressional committees, particularly the House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, on the design of a new federal retirement system made necessary by this coverage. Over a two-year period, the CRS prepared a study that became, in effect, the analytical framework used by the majority and minority of both houses of Congress as they enacted a new system. The analytical tools created by the CRS in doing this study were used during congressional deliberations to analyze specific options developed by committees and members, and to assist with assessment of the implications of compromises necessary to pass the bill and have it signed by the President.     

The behavior of congressional tenure over time: 1953–1991

This paper studies the behavior of average length of tenure for cohorts of U.S. representatives who entered office from 1953–1989. Using a new methodology, it addresses the following questions. How much longer do representatives stay in office now compared to, say, twenty years ago? If an increase in tenure has occurred, when did it begin? Are reelection outcomes or voluntary departures the primary determinants of changes in congressional tenure over time? The results of this study are then applied to a number of hypotheses concerning possible causes of longer congressional stays.