Winning Coalition Formation in the U.S. Senate: The Effects of Legislative Decision Rules and Agenda Change

Recent empirical work has brought a renewed attention to the effect congressional rules of procedure have on the size of winning coalitions. Specifically, scholars have posited that legislative success hinges on the support of legislators identified by institutionally defined decision rules. Under these theories, supermajority decision rules in the U.S. Senate lead to larger, more inclusive coalitions on final passage. In this article, I reevaluate these claims by controlling for changes in the legislative agenda and the roll‐call voting record. I find that the aggregate size of winning coalitions is highly responsive to the underlying legislative agenda, the size of the Senate's majority party, and the manner in which researchers treat unrecorded votes. Further, my findings suggest that any connection between changes in the Senate's voting rules and the size of winning coalitions is spurious. Eric Schickler and Gregory J. Wawro have authored a response to this article, and Anthony J. Madonna has authored a rejoinder to this response. Both are available as Supporting Information .     

US Policy and the Nuclear Weapons Ambitions of the “Axis of Evil” Countries*

This article examines US policy as it pertains to the nuclear weapons objectives of what the Bush administration identified as the countries making up the “axis of evil,” pre-war Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Having drawn the same conclusion as that appearing in the 2000 report of the Project for the New American Century, which alleged the involvement of these countries in illicit activities relating to nuclear weapons, the Bush administration initiated an overtly hostile and accusatory policy toward each of these nations after 9/11.Undeterred by the paucity of evidence and the failure to find a nuclear weapons program (or any weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq, the Bush administration has remained relentlessly focused on the nuclear weapons ambitions of North Korea and Iran, all the while ignoring or minimizing diplomatic efforts that are not hegemonic and confrontational. This paper stresses that for the past several years the Bush administration has not hesitated in using questionable and uncertain information relating to the nuclear weapons objectives of the “axis of evil” countries, even though it has demonstrated no interest in eliminating US nuclear weapons as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligates it to do.     

The dominant class and industrial development in Peru

From 1968, a reformist military regime in Peru implemented an industrialising development strategy which was fundamentally at odds with the interests of the traditional ‘oligarchy’ that had dominated the primary export phase of the country's development. In order to understand this new phase of development it is necessary to reject the idea of a monolithic ‘oligarchy’ before 1968, and to see the Peruvian dominant class as already internally differentiated. An important sector of that class was by 1968 committed to the development of industry and of the urban economy generally. Its interests were explicitly at variance with those of the exporting fractions of the Peruvian dominant class.     

Setting the Regulatory Agenda: Statutory Deadlines,Delay, and Responsiveness

Congress imposes statutory deadlines in an attempt to influence agency regulatory agendas, but agencies regularly fail to meet them. What explains agency responsiveness to statutory deadlines? Taking a transaction cost politics approach, the authors develop a theory of responsiveness to deadlines centered on political feasibility to explain how agency managers map rulemaking onto calendar and political time. This theory is tested on all unique rules with statutory deadlines published in the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions between 1995 and 2012. The argument and findings about the timing and ultimate promulgation of rules have implications that reorient the study of the regulatory agenda from legal and political into more managerial terms.     

Violence, schools, and dropping out: racial and ethnic disparities in the educational consequence of student victimization

Without a doubt, exposure to violence and victimization can be profoundly detrimental to the overall well-being and development of all youth. Moreover, violence and victimization that occurs within a school context is particularly alarming because a successful educational process is essential toward establishing socioeconomic success later in life. The educational consequence of exposure to violence and victimization at school is uncertain for racial and ethnic minority students. This study utilizes data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 and incorporates multilevel modeling techniques to examine the impact of violence and victimization at school on dropping out. The results indicate Black/African Americans and Latino American students who are victimized at school are at higher risk of dropping out. The implications of the evident racial and ethnic disparities in the relationship between victimization and dropping out within the U.S. school system are discussed.