Legislative Activity and the 1994 Republican Takeover

Abstract

Is sponsorship and cosponsorship behavior by U.S. House members responsive to which party controls the chamber? The Republican takeover of the U.S. House in 1995 provides an ideal natural experiment to test whether House members are more or less likely to sponsor and cosponsor legislation as a function of their majority or minority party status. We suggest that changes in control of the House created a set of institutional incentives that shifted sponsorship and cosponsorship behavior by House members. Using data on House members serving from the 102nd Congress to the 105th Congress, we consider whether Democrats and Republicans reconfigured their sponsorship and cosponsorship behavior after the shift in partisan control, controlling for the effects of other variables. We find that majority party status matters, withmembers of the majority party consistently exhibiting higher levels of sponsorship activity, though our findings on cosponsorship activity are less definitive.