108th Congress Research Articles

Unraveling the Thought Probes of US Legislators on Trade Negotiations: Sentiment Analysis of the 108th and 112th US Congressional Speeches*

A plethora of literature has investigated the voting behavior of US legislators on trade bills to reveal a possible causal mechanism. Relying on dichotomous roll‐call voting data, however, has certain limitations on revealing the comprehensive thought probes of lawmakers on a complex diplomatic issue such as making an FTA deal. In this paper, we provide new insight to fill such a gap by analyzing congressional speech data during FTA ratification procedures. Using an automated web scraper, we collected the entire speech data (N = 5,372) of Senators and House Representatives in the 108th and 112th US Congress regarding AUSFTA and KORUS FTA, respectively. The speech sentiment analysis results show background and context (i.e., attitude‐behavior inconsistency) in the process of trade negotiations and agreements. Additionally, the results help identify important factors (i.e., ideology, constituency stimuli) that influence whether members of Congress stand for and against the FTA implementations.

American Women Making Breakthrough in the Arenas of Politics and Government

The deep-rooted protectionism tendency towards the American women prevented women from occupying high posts in the legislative branch.However, women’s prominent movements ingendered several outstanding women in elected positions starting from the first half of the XXth century.By the mid-1990s there were more women in Congress in Capitol Hill. Janet Reno was appointed as the first woman U.S. attorney general in theAmerican History, Madeline Albright, the first woman secretary, Condoleezza Rice as the first woman national security adviser for President Bush,Nancy Pelosi was the first woman, the new minority leader of the House of the 108th Congress in 2003 and others, Kamala Harris is the first highestrankingfemale, the first African American and first Asian Vice President of the United States.The question is – whether elected women can make a crucial difference in political institutions and public policy that is still dominated by masculinistinterests?Keywords: Accomplishment, election, participation

Colouring representation: staff racial employment patterns in US congressional offices

ABSTRACT Members of the United States House of Representatives disproportionately hire Black and Hispanic staffers into constituent service focussed roles as compared to policy development positions. Minority staffers are also underrepresented in the highest paid (arguably the most influential) positions in Congressional offices. I demonstrate these racial employment patterns using a Dirichlet-multinomial likelihood model to investigate a novel dataset that includes information on all of the staffers employed in the offices of 211 US House Members in the 108th Congress. This research compares the patterns of both Black and Hispanic staffers and draws from a more comprehensive sample than previous studies on staff race. The racial asymmetries found in staffers’ roles and responsibilities are cause for concern regarding the voice minorities have in Congressional policymaking.

Lobbyists' Personal Contributions and Member's Legislative Effectiveness in the U.S House

Will a legislator with higher legislative performance receive a higher amount of contributions from lobbyists’ personal funds? The existing theory mostly regards lobbying as an access-maintaining activity, and to keep this long term relationship, lobbyists will not change their campaign contribution patterns. However, lobbyists are motivated to affect policy, I hypothesize that lobbyists will allocate their personal contributions across their existing ties based upon a congressperson’s legislative performance. Using campaign contribution and legislative effectiveness data, I establish an original data set of over 3,300 observations, including all members of the House, who seek reelection from the 108th Congress to the 115th Congress. I find that legislators with higher legislative effectiveness receive more contributions from lobbyists. This finding shows the dynamic relationship between lobbyists and legislators, highlighting lobbyists' strategic use of contributions to advance their preferred policies.

Examining Legislative Cue‐Taking in the US Senate

We examine congressional cue‐taking theory to determine its extent, conditionality, and various forms in the US Senate. Using a novel data‐collection technique (timed C‐SPAN footage), we focus on temporal dynamics via event history analysis. Examining the effects of senator characteristics across 16 votes from the 108th Congress, we find that committee leadership and seniority generally predict cue‐giving, while other types of characteristics predict cue‐giving on certain types of votes. Our results underscore the importance of considering the order and timing of voting when studying congressional behavior.

Presidential Signing Statements and the Durability of the Law

Prior literature suggests that presidents use signing statements to unilaterally move policy closer to their own ideal point after Congress has already voted on and passed a particular bill. Congress, however, retains the ability to revisit and amend the law by passing another bill. A presidential signing statement may thus make a law less durable and more likely to be amended in the future. To investigate this relationship, we examine all laws passed from the 95th through the 108th Congresses in order to demonstrate the specific influence of presidential signing statements on future congressional amendment activity. The results of our analysis lend support to the theory that laws receiving presidential signing statements are in fact more likely to be revisited and revised by Congress. These findings add to the literature both on presidential signing statements as well as the evolution of laws.

Special Suicide and Suicide Prevention Section of the Journal of American College Health

On July 8, 2004, the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act was introduced to the 108th Congress of the United States by Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT). The bill amended the Public Health Service Act to, ...

The Constituency Motivations of Caucus Membership

The popularity of congressional caucuses is puzzling, given the dominance of political parties and rules that specifically limit caucuses’ resources. Yet modern caucuses offer legislators the unique advantage of complete discretion over their membership decisions, which allows legislators to tailor their memberships to their district. As a result, caucus membership is an important means of constituency representation. Using original data from the 108th Congress, this article examines the House caucus system and legislators’ membership in all 441caucuses. There is strong evidence that legislators’ decisions about caucus membership reflect their constituents even when controlling for party, committee, electoral security, and seniority. Legislators from heterogeneous districts belong to numerous caucuses, which allows them to represent the multiple interests in their constituency. In addition, legislators are more likely to belong to caucuses that address specific issues relevant to constituents.

The Impact of Presidential Campaigning for Congress on Presidential Support in the U.S. House of Representatives

Presidential influence is partly a function of the partisan, economic, and international context within which the president governs. Presidents are, however, more than bystanders relying on the political milieu for policy opportunities. Recent scholarship demonstrates that presidents consciously influence this milieu and build political capital by campaigning for congressional candidates. We contribute to this literature by assessing the effects of presidential campaigning on legislative support for two presidents who governed under extremely dissimilar circumstances: Bill Clinton in the 106th Congress and George W. Bush in the 108th Congress. We find evidence of campaign effects on congressional policymaking during both administrations.

Campaign Contributions and U.S. Foreign Policy Outcomes: An Analysis of Cuban American Interests

To what extent are ethnic minority interest groups able to influence U.S. foreign policy? Current case study research has identified several factors that may condition the ability of diasporic groups to influence foreign policy toward ancestral “homelands.” To this point, existing studies have been unable to isolate the impact of campaign contributions from other factors that may influence U.S. foreign policy decision making. The current study uses a combination of conditional and standard logistic regression to examine the impact of Cuban American interest group and individual campaign contributions on a series of votes on key amendments in the 108th and 109th Congresses. Results from the study support the idea that the Cuban diasporic community in the United States has had an impact on U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba. However, there are significant limits to this influence conditioned in part by issue salience.

The Institutional Mobility of Minority Members of Congress

This article examines the extent to which race and ethnicity affect mobility to leadership positions within Congress. The authors utilize survival analysis to examine the rate at which legislators attained committee leadership positions between the 101st and 108th Congresses. The results show that black legislators attain leadership positions faster than white legislators. This may be because of the tendency for black members of Congress (MCs) to sit on less prestigious committees than white MCs, which creates greater opportunity for institutional promotion. Ethnicity, on the other hand, does not matter to mobility as Latinos acquire leadership positions at the same rate as non-Latino legislators.

Redistricting, Responsiveness, and Issue Attention

We explored the extent to which legislators respond to redistricting‐induced demographic shifts in their constituencies. Our analyses focused on the behavior of members of the House of Representatives who served in the terms preceding and following the redistricting that took place in the early 2000s (namely, the 107th and 108th Congresses). We investigated how demographic shifts relate to the content of legislators' subsequent agendas (the legislation that members introduce and cosponsor) and the nature of members' voting patterns (their interest group voting scores). Our results indicate that responsiveness is widespread, but important variation exists in the patterns for agenda activities and roll‐call voting.

Restructuring Religion in Our Nation's Capital? The Political Priorities of Washington Offices

Prior to World War II, religion in America was characterized by a tripartite system of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish groups. More recently, Robert Wuthnow (1988), James Davison Hunter (1991), and others have argued that religion in America has been “restructured” into a two-party system, consisting of liberals within these religions on one side and conservatives on the other. Most empirical research examining the restructuring of religion in America focuses on the two-party division within Protestant religious advocacy groups, noting how some Protestant groups are politically more similar to Catholics than to other Protestants. Little work has examined the extent to which this phenomenon applies to Washington offices, which are formally tied to parent religious bodies, particularly Jewish groups. By conducting interviews with Washington office leaders and examining office materials and websites during the 108th Congress, this study seeks to answer the question: How does the thesis of the restructuring of religion in America apply to 15 Washington offices? Results suggest the thesis applies to both Protestant and Jewish Washington offices. The priorities of liberal offices, such as social welfare and economic justice issues, differ from those of conservative offices that focus on life and morality concerns.

Criminology's third war

Criminology's third war

Faces in the Office: Racial Employment Segregation among Congressional Staff

Does racial employment segregation exist among staff in the U.S. House of Representatives? To investigate, I use a Dirichlet-multinomial likelihood analysis on a novel dataset that includes data on every staff member employed in the offices of over 200 U.S. representatives during the 108th Congress. I find that members of Congress disproportionately employ black and Hispanic staffers in district offices and constituent service positions rather than in the Washington D.C. office and policy advisory positions. Minority staffers also hold fewer high level office positions which suggests that they have less influence with their members of Congress. These disparities in staff responsibility raise questions about the extent to which minorities can impact the legislative decision making process of members of Congress.

¿Amigo de la Raza? Reexamining Determinants of Latino Support in the U.S. Congress*

Objectives. This study updates and extends research on substantive Latino representation in the U.S. Congress. An improved method of measuring “Latino interests” is proposed.Methods. Using a scorecard from the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda as the dependent variable, standard OLS regression is employed to determine the variables that best predict how members of the 108th Congress vote on issues that are salient to the Latino community.Results. The findings indicate that Latinos are substantively represented overwhelmingly by Democrats and those from majority‐Democratic districts or states, while religion and level of constituency poverty also play a notable role.Conclusion. This study adds strong support to the “party as a substantive representative” model of minority representation. It also shows that Latinos are not more likely to be substantively represented by fellow Latinos, nor do larger Latino constituencies affect a lawmaker's propensity to vote in favor of Latino interests.

The Almanac of the unelected, 2007: staff of the U.S. Congress

The Almanac contains in-depth profiles of senior congressional committee staffers. Entries provide detailed contact, political, and professional information for each staffer, enabling users to gauge that individual's possible impact on the legislative agenda of the first session of the 108th Congress. Entries are categorized by House, Senate, and joint committees.

Do Restrictive Rules Produce Nonmedian Outcomes? A Theory with Evidence from the 101st−108th Congresses

A fundamental tenet of partisan theories of legislative organization is that the majority party is able to generate outcomes that deviate in their preferred direction from the chamber median. While these biased outcomes may be achieved through arm twisting on final passage votes, there is a more efficient means for achieving this bias: restrictive rules. While scholars have recognized this tactic as an important leadership tool in the House, its effectiveness has been often assumed but never empirically tested. We develop a theoretical model that demonstrates how the majority party can use restrictive rules to offer successful “take-it-or-leave-it” proposals to the floor median. More significantly, we test this model using DW-NOMINATE's estimated cut points of final passage roll calls in the House from the 101st to 108th Congress. Our results support the prediction of our model and suggest that majority party leaders achieve biased policy outcomes through the use of restrictive rules.

Moving in the right direction: Developments in the online availability of full-text Congressional committee hearing transcripts

Abstract A 2003 study revealed a shortage of full-text Congressional committee hearing transcripts for the 105th and 106th Congresses from both GPO Access and Congressional committee Web sites. By using hearings in the LexisNexis Congressional database as the control group, the current study analyzes the availability of full-text hearing transcripts for the 107th and 108th Congresses, and finds that there has been considerable improvement in the number and extent of full-text hearing transcripts offered by GPO Access and Congressional committee Web sites for hearings from the two most recent Congresses. There is, however, one notable exception: Senate hearing transcripts continue to be inadequately represented by both GPO Access and the Senate committees' own Web sites. Possible causes and implications of the findings are explored.

Laity, Institution, Theology, or Politics? Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Washington Offices' Agenda Setting*

I examine the considerations that 15 prominent religious offices in Washington, D.C. take into account when establishing their political agendas. Data come from interviews with office directors, websites, and documents collected during the 108th Congress (2003-2004). I find that the offices do consider their theological traditions and the institutional policies of their sponsoring religious bodies. At the same time, different aspects of faith are called upon across theological camps (liberals/moderates versus conservatives) and faith families (Protestants versus Catholics versus Jews). Beyond the two universal considerations of institutional policy and theology, only liberals and most moderates take into account the external political climate. The laity plays a role in the agenda setting process of very few offices, contributing to overt tension experienced by some of the organizations. Implications for Washington offices' political advocacy, denominational structure, and their representativeness (or lack thereof) are discussed.