Minority Rights and Majority Power: Conditional Party Government and the Motion to Recommit in the House

Students of legislative politics have struggled to explain and measure party influence on voting and outcomes in Congress. Proponents of strong party effects point to the numerous procedural advantages enjoyed by the majority party as evidence of party effects, yet recent theoretical work by Krehbiel and Meirowitz (2002) argues that House rules guaranteeing the minority a motion to recommit with instructions effectively balances the procedural advantages enjoyed by the majority. This article identifies and tests the empirical implications of the Krehbiel and Meirowitz theory, using roll‐call data from the 61st to 107th Congresses (1909–2002). The results call into question the validity of Krehbiel and Meirowitz's conclusions about party government in the House and provide support for the theory of conditional party government.     

A MULTILEVEL FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING POLICE CULTURE: THE ROLE OF THE WORKGROUP

Relying on a well‐established theoretical paradigm from organizational psychology, the aim of the current inquiry is to apply a multilevel approach to the study of police culture that identifies workgroups as important entities that influence officers’ occupational outlooks. More specifically, we propose that police culture be assessed in a way similar to concepts in criminology, such as collective efficacy and street culture, whereby the shared features of individuals’ environments are considered. Within this framework, we draw on survey data from five municipal police agencies to examine how strongly officers within 187 separate workgroups share culture, as well as the extent to which culture differs across these workgroups. Collectively, the findings suggest that the workgroup serves as a viable context that patterns culture in police organizations. As such, the study provides a way to move beyond conceptualizations of police culture as either a purely monolithic or an individual‐level phenomenon.     

The U.S. Congress and the Institutional Design of Agencies

Theories of agency design maintain that lawmakers impose requirements on how bureaucratic agencies make policy decisions, preventing those agencies from undermining lawmakers' political and policy goals. Empirical support for these theories is limited, however, by the difficulty of measuring critical variables hypothesized to influence the use of this tool of political control. For this study, I employed a methodology particularly well suited, but not previously employed, to study variance in the use of agency‐design provisions: interviews with congressional committee staff. Staffers' responses support several theories, cast doubt on one explanation, and point to nuances in other explanations of agency design.     

The Strategic Use of Prisons in Partisan Gerrymandering

The census data used to redraw legislative districts counts the country's nearly 2 million prisoners in the location of their incarceration, rather than their previous place of residence. By drawing these phantom populations into districts that lean heavily toward the majority party, legislators can free up eligible voters from those districts to be distributed among neighboring marginal ones, thereby increasing that party's likelihood of winning additional seats in the state legislature. An analysis of state senate district finds that prison populations shift systematically from districts controlled by one party to districts controlled by the other following a switch in partisan control.     

The Development of Special Orders and Special Rules in the U.S. House, 1881–1937

The modern Committee on Rules plays a critical role in structuring the agenda of the U.S. House of Representatives. In fact, resolutions from the Committee on Rules are the primary means through which controversial legislation reaches the House floor. But the Committee on Rules did not play a role in shaping the floor agenda until the 1880s and, despite intense scrutiny of episodes such as the institution of the Reed rules and the revolt against Speaker Cannon, our understanding of the role of the Committee on Rules is limited and skewed heavily toward the post‐World War II era. This limitation is unfortunate, because special rules play a starring role in major theories of legislative organization. In this article, I present analysis of the usage and historical development of special rules in the House, and I offer findings from my empirical analysis of the determinants of rule choice from 1881 to 1937. A nuanced interrogation of new data on special rules in this era reveals support for committee specialization and conditional party government as motives for rule choice in this era.