Who Whips?

Abstract

Little recent research on congressional parties has considered the relationship between the vast extended leadership and shifting partisan dynamics. This article draws on conditional party government theory to argue that elected House leaders use the extended whip networks to achieve somewhat different goals under weaker and stronger party government conditions and that these priorities are reflected in the whip systems' membership. Specifically, the whip system reflects caucus diversity under weaker party government but becomes disproportionately stacked with loyalists as party government conditions grow stronger; this shift reflects heightened leadership focus on agenda coordination and signaling under strong parties. The evidence on whip system composition and selection in the Democratic caucus (95th to 106th Congresses) provides very strong support for this argument. An examination of the Republican conference fails to support the main hypothesis but shows that the 1990s growing GOP majority whip network was unrepresentatively dominated by the cohort of junior members.