Congressional Preferences Research Articles

Why delegate to the IMF? Congressional preference and blame avoidance

Abstract Why has the United States delegated most of its crisis lending to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in recent years, although it provided large-scale bilateral bailouts to strategically important countries until the mid-1990s? Previous research on the choice of bailout strategy has failed to explain this important change, and a major problem with such research is that it has focused on executive branch preferences, overlooking those of the legislative branch. The legislature can significantly influence the choice of bailout policies, and existing research also implies that the US Congress has steered the recent change. This article hypothesizes that, caught in a dilemma between the need for bailouts and voters’ opposition caused by widening inequality, Congress delegated bailouts to the IMF for blame avoidance. To test this hypothesis, the study conducts a statistical analysis of the IMF’s capital increase votes and case analyses of the Mexican and Asian crises.

Economic Recessions and Congressional Preferences for Redistribution

Abstract We study if U.S. Members of Congress who experienced an economic recession during early adulthood vote differently on redistribution-specific bills. We find that politicians who experienced a recession hold more conservative positions on redistribution, even compared to members of the same party. In light of recent empirical evidence showing that voters become more supportive of redistribution following a recession, our findings suggest that macroeconomic shocks might have a polarizing effect: recessions can create an ideological wedge between voters and their future representatives. We hypothesize and present evidence suggesting that this wedge might be explained by politicians' more privileged background.

Ideology, Unionization, and Personnel Politics in the Federal Budget Process

AbstractThis article studies how administrations seek to shape the federal workforce through the budget process. I develop a theory of personnel politics in which presidents balance ideological and interest group demands in distributing human resources across the federal government. I argue administrations advantage organizations with which they are ideologically aligned and that agencies with higher levels of union penetration see increased budgeted personnel levels, particularly during Democratic presidencies. Using an original dataset of budgeted personnel levels from fiscal years (FY) 1983–2016 and a series of regression analyses, I find strong support for these hypotheses. I also examine the sensitivity of presidential strategy to congressional preferences, agency professionalization, and leadership politicization, providing insights into how this control strategy interacts with the broader environment. Overall, these results have implications for understanding the political dynamics of human capital and capacity in the federal bureaucracy, the administrative presidency, and the politics of performance in federal agencies.

The Preferences of Political Elites and Humanitarian Immigration to the United States

How do the preferences of political elites shape humanitarian immigration to the United States? Focusing on the asylum and refugee systems, we trace the ways that the preferences of political elites affect the number and characteristics of migrants who receive relief. Our findings suggest that presidential preferences remain crucial in determining who is admitted in the U.S. refugee system and that congressional preferences are important in determining the number admitted. The preferences of both appear to matter considerably less on asylum decisions. These results highlight the difficulty of eliminating or reducing the role of the executive branch in American immigration policy, and suggest the importance of the design of the immigration enforcement bureaucracy in limiting the role of elite preferences in determining humanitarian immigration outcomes.

Debunking myths about oil: A case study of oil subsidies

Despite increasing demands for the reform of oil subsidies, the United States government fails to enact substantial reform policies on the issue. The paper visits the biggest unresolved cleavage in the environmental policy literature where there have been no attempts to quantitatively assess the influence of lobbying and mass participation on the policy-making process. It thus attempts to quantify and examine various factors behind legislators’ votes, and the results are hard to square with a pure lobbying model. While the role of lobbying is certainly not ruled out of the explanatory model per se, this paper observed that congressional preferences may instead also be driven by the voter perception towards environmental regulation in each state. The thrust of the argument is that lobbying, while being a decisive factor, may not be the only one influencing legislators’ decisions for the oil subsidy reform bills. This study hypothesizes that the exchange model theory might not fully provide an explanation of why oil subsidies continuously fall through. It suggests that oil politics may instead follow the neo-pluralist model: While lobbying is an important factor in voting results, legislators are mindful of voters’ perspectives in spite of the fact that they are unorganized—and that they might in fact be even more powerful determinants than the lobby variable.

The Political Economy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Business-Cooperative Service

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Business-Cooperative Service (RBS) was established with the goal of fostering rural development through grants and low-interest loans. However, rural revitalization is only effective if funds reach their intended recipients. With congressional oversight of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and geographic concentration of RBS benefits, the RBS may deviate from its stated objectives to satisfy congressional preferences. Using RBS grant and loan data from 2006 to 2014, the author performs a test of the congressional dominance model. The empirical results show that congressional membership on the relevant House and Senate subcommittees is associated with greater RBS funding. Congressional influence is a plausible mechanism through which development funding fails to reach those in the areas of greatest need.

Executive-Legislative Conflict and Regulation Outcomes: The Case of the U.S. FCC

In the context of regulatory decisions, the political conflict between executive and legislative branches has been significant. The relative ideological stances and power resources of federal agencies and Congress determines regulation outcomes. In particular, when agencies earn sufficient political support from policy stakeholders by relying on procedural justice, they are able to secure the regulatory outcomes they desire without congressional intervention. Because legislators are highly concerned about their reelection prospects, policy stakeholders` political support is an important power resource for agencies. Legislators are likely to embrace regulatory decisions made by agencies supported by policy stakeholders even if they disregard congressional preferences. This article provides evidence for this proposition by reviewing media concentration regulation policies of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

Economic Recessions and Congressional Preferences for Redistribution

We analyze the roots of politicians' preferences for redistribution by exploring whether early life experiences have persistent, long-run effects on U.S. Members of Congress' voting records. We study whether having experienced an economic recession during early adulthood affected their positions on redistribution-specific bills during the period 1957-2012. We find that politicians who experienced a recession hold more conservative positions on redistribution, even compared to members of the same party in the same legislature. We rule out alternative accounts and show that experiencing a recession directly affects future politicians' personal preferences. In light of recent empirical evidence showing that voters become more supportive of redistribution following a recession, our findings suggest that macroeconomic shocks have a polarizing effect: recessions can create an ideological wedge between voters and their future representatives.

Southern Politics Revisited: On V. O. Key's “South in the House”

V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation continues to be a central text in political science, the single most important work in understanding the role of the South in American politics. This article returns to, replicates, and seeks to advance Key's analysis of southern politics in Congress, reanalyzing and extending his account of southern strategies and actions in the House of Representatives. Where Key's text was characterized by an episodic attention to issue substance, we focus directly on how southern representation varied across discrete issue areas. We generate temporally fine-grained issue-specific ideal points for members of Congress that allow us to determine how congressional preferences changed across time, generating a more refined portrait of the process by which southern Democratic members diverged from their northern counterparts. We also thicken and extend Key's account along regional and temporal dimensions, assessing how his findings change when we employ a legal-institutional definition of the South, and include the whole period from the beginning of the New Deal to the close of the Truman administration. The article concludes by detailing the significance of our finding to the study of American politics, particularly American political development.

The Influence of Congressional Preferences on Legislative Overrides of Supreme Court Decisions

Studies of Court–Congress relations assume that Congress overrides Court decisions based on legislative preferences, but no empirical evidence supports this claim. Our first goal is to show that Congress is more likely to pass override legislation the further ideologically removed a decision is from pivotal legislative actors. Second, we seek to determine whether Congress rationally anticipates Court rejection of override legislation, avoiding legislation when the current Court is likely to strike it down. Third, most studies argue that Congress only overrides statutory decisions. We contend that Congress has an incentive to override all Court decisions with which it disagrees, regardless of their legal basis. Using data on congressional overrides of Supreme Court decisions between 1946 and 1990, we show that Congress overrides Court decisions with which it ideologically disagrees, is not less likely to override when it anticipates that the Court will reject override legislation, and acts on preferences regardless of the legal basis of a decision. We therefore empirically substantiate a core part of separation-of-powers models of Court–Congress relations, as well as speak to the relative power of Congress and the Court on the ultimate content of policy.

A mere machine: the Supreme Court, Congress, and American democracy

Introductory textbooks on American government tell us that the Supreme Court is independent from the elected branches and that independent courts better protect rights than their more deferential counterparts. But are these facts or myths? In this groundbreaking new work, Anna Harvey reports evidence showing that the Supreme Court is in fact extraordinarily deferential to congressional preferences in its constitutional rulings. Analyzing cross-national evidence, Harvey also finds that the rights protections we enjoy in the United States appear to be largely due to the fact that we do not have an independent Supreme Court. In fact, we would likely have even greater protections for political and economic rights were we to prohibit our federal courts from exercising judicial review altogether. Harvey's findings suggest that constitutional designers would be wise to heed Thomas Jefferson's advice to mercy be the character of the law-giver, but let the judge be a mere machine.

When Do Agencies Have Agency?: Bureaucratic Noncompliance in the EPA

This paper raises a question that is little-discussed yet central to lawmaking and policy implementation in the American separation-of-powers system: Under what institutional conditions do we observe variation in bureaucratic compliance with legislative dictates in contemporary statutory implementation? The paper challenges the assumptions of conventional delegation models and holds that variation in institutional conflict and oversight of agencies fundamentally reshape agencies’ latitude as active policymakers. I answer this question in the context of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1973-2008 using a novel and original dataset on noncompliance. The study provides the first empirical analysis of the extent of, and the conditions underlying bureaucratic noncompliance in policy implementation in the US, providing support for the hypotheses that amid heightened inter-branch ideological conflict, the EPA increasingly deviates from congressional preferences in implementing the delegating statutes.

National Policy Preferences and Judicial Review of State Statutes at the United States Supreme Court

This article explores the determinants of U.S. Supreme Court justices’ voting behavior in cases involving constitutional challenges to state statutes, with a particular focus on the degree to which majoritarian influences—as reflected in state participation and congressional preferences—affect the justices’ votes. We find that the scope of the Court’s decision—in terms of its impact on similar state laws and the expressed interest of states as amicus—strongly affects the justices’ willingness to vote to invalidate a state statute. Moreover, at least in the Burger Court, the justices were constrained by congressional preferences over the ideological direction of the constitutional challenge. Justices on the Rehnquist Court, however, appear to have been more impervious to congressional preferences when evaluating the constitutionality of state legislation.

A Multiple Choice Legislative Certification Procedure: Considering Congressional Preferences in Statutory Interpretation

This is the first proposed procedure that would enable the Court to take account of congressional preferences in a pending statutory interpretation decision, without requiring Congress to go through the resource and time consuming process of amending the ambiguous law. In “hard cases” the Court could certify, through a fast-track procedure, a question presenting Congress with two multiple choices that the Court predetermines to be viable readings of the statute. This procedure avoids constitutional problems because congressional input is voluntary and non-binding for both branches, and judicial constraint enforces rule of law and constitutional values.

Congressional Preferences and the Structure of Delegation: Reassessing the Effect of Divided Government on U.S. Trade Policy

How does the interaction of domestic preferences and political institutions determine the outcome of U.S. trade policy? We revise and extend conventional accounts by paying close attention to partisan constituency trends over time and the structure of delegation under the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act (RTAA). On the level of constituency composition, we demonstrate that the “partisan switch” between Republicans and Democrats has been accompanied by a reversal in party sensitivity to exporter, and to a lesser extent, import-competing interests. In addition, due to the asymmetrical structure of delegation under the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act (RTAA), we assert that the effect of divided government on U.S. trade policy is conditional on congressional preferences. The RTAA allows the president to lower, not raise, tariffs. This implies that a pro-trade party supported by exporters faces incentives to delegate regardless of the party identity of the president, while a protectionist party supported by import-competers will find delegation to the other-party president problematic. Our propositions find broad support in both congressional voting and U.S. tariff rate data.

The Multiple-Stage Process of Judicial Review: Facial and As-Applied Constitutional Challenges to Legislation before the U.S. Supreme Court

AbstractThe Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate a legislative enactment involves both the choice to strike as well as the choice whether to invalidate the statute on its face or as applied. Both choices implicate the possibility of counteraction by the legislature. In this paper, we evaluate the justices’ choices to invalidate a state or federal enactment on its face or as applied and find that the justices are responsive to congressional preferences concerning the substance of the legal challenge at both stages of judicial review. Other factors systematically affect the justices’ decisions as well, including the legal basis for the challenge, the statutory scope of the constitutional challenge, the president (through the solicitor general), and interest groups’ amicus filings. These findings suggest that the Court’s exercise of judicial review is significantly influenced by Congress and by other contextual, legal, and political factors, both as to the choice to strike as well as to the method of const...

Confirmation Bias in the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database

We ask whether the widely used direction of decision and direction of vote variables in the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database (USSCJD) are contaminated by confirmation bias, or have been affected by expectations about the likely effects of judicial preferences on case outcomes. Using a sample of generally comparable cases, we find evidence that the assignment of issue codes to these cases, codes that govern the subsequent assignment of “direction” to the Court's judgments, is conditional on both case disposition and the known preferences of the deciding court, in the direction predicted by the hypothesis of confirmation bias. We also find that the USSCJD direction variables overstate the effect of judicial preferences and understate the effect of congressional preferences on case outcomes, relative to objectively coded measures of the Court's judgments.

Signed but Not Ratified: Limits to U.S. Participation in International Environmental Agreements

AbstractWhy does the United States sign environmental treaties but not ratify them? U.S. presidents have negotiated and signed several environmental treaties that ultimately could not obtain Senate ratification. This article considers two alternative explanations. First, presidents may face divided government and upcoming elections; elections can increase uncertainty regarding ratification, because they upset majorities and change congressional preferences on issues. Such factors may have caused “involuntary” defection from international environmental cooperation. Second, compensation and compromise on enabling legislation could satisfy enough senators and their constituents to allow the legislation's passage. Failure to secure ratification may be a result of the president's overestimating the potential for negotiating a policy package capable of creating sufficient support to obtain Senate ratification. I compare domestic constraints on U.S. participation in three international environmental negotiations—climate change, biodiversity, and chemicals—to assess the alternative explanations. The cases exemplify how domestic institutions affect international environmental cooperation.

Stripped: Congress and Jurisdiction Stripping

Conventional wisdom suggests that jurisdiction stripping is positively correlated with the differences between judicial and congressional political preferences. An alternate school of thought suggests that administrative concerns are more directly related to jurisdiction stripping than ideological concerns. This study analyzes the accuracy of these competing explanations with the benefit of a database of all district court filings naming the United States as a defendant and all administrative appeals between the years 1943 and 2004. Analyses were performed to test for relations between jurisdiction stripping and case filings, political ideology, and economic strength. Findings from this study suggest that Congress’s decision to remove jurisdiction is related to administrative concerns, but not political ideology or economic power.

Dodging Conflict: The Supreme Court Under Threat from Congress

Although many scholars of judicial politics have looked for congressional constraint on the Supreme Court’s decisions, these studies have focused only on the Court’s decisions on the merits. In this paper, I change the terms of the debate from decisions on the merits to earlier decisions, arguing that if congressional constraint exists, it is more likely to be at preliminary stages. In an empirical study using data from the Burger Court, I find evidence that the Court takes congressional preferences into account when making these early decisions. Specifically, I look at the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to address the merits of a case once it has granted cert by examining its decision to rule on mootness, standing, or to dismiss the case entirely. My findings suggest that scholars may be looking in the wrong places for evidence of congressional constraint upon the Supreme Court.