Agenda Setting in the U. S. House: A Majority-Party Monopoly?

Abstract

How strongly does the majority party control the agenda in the U.S. House of Representatives? In this article, I contrast two spatial models of U.S. House committees-one in which each committee's agenda is set by the full committee, one in which it is set by the committee's majority-party contingent. These two models lead to clearly different predictions about (1) who dissents on final passage votes in committee and (2) who files dissents to committee bill reports. Data from the 84th through the 98th Congresses gibe with the partisan model. Majority-party members with a given ideological location dissent substantially less often than do minorityparty members with comparable ideological locations. And majority-party dissent rates are extremely low on an absolute scale, with over 50% of majority-party members never dissenting. How strongly does the majority party control the agenda in the U.S. House of Representatives? Consider two polar-opposite benchmarks, one in which the majority party has no special advantages whatever in setting the agenda (the null model here), and one in which the majority party has a monopoly on agenda setting. A real-world approximation of the latter pole is the U.K. House of Commons, where virtually every major bill is introduced and brought to the floor by the government, and the opposition is reduced to the choice of opposing or supporting the government's bills. The minority party in the U.K. frequently sees bills put on the agenda that it would never dream of scheduling, were it in control. In Cox and McCubbins's (N.d.) terms, the minority is often rolled: a majority (at least) of the party opposes the placement of a bill on the floor agenda, but loses. The Commons' majority, in contrast, is never rolled. It may not succeed in getting its agenda enacted, but it gets the agenda it wants. The only possible policy changes are those favored by substantial elements in the majority, because only bills effecting such changes are put on the agenda to begin with.