Individual Members Of Congress Research Articles

Fenno’s Paradox in a Polarized Age: How Polarization Lowers the Mass Public’s Assessments of Congress and Legislators

Fenno (1975) famously posited that the mass public’s assessments of the U.S. Congress are rooted in a paradox, with citizens holding negative evaluations of the collective Congress while holding favorable views of their individual members of Congress. Since the conceptualization of “Fenno’s Paradox,” Congress underwent pronounced changes due to increased ideological polarization between increasingly homogeneous parties comprised of more partisan loyal, ideologically extreme legislators. In this article, we ask whether this partisan polarization shifted the public’s assessments of Congress and their individual representatives over time. Leveraging over 45 years of new data measuring the monthly approval of Congress and legislators with generalized error correction models, we find that greater polarization lowers the approval rating of both over time, suggesting that greater polarization weakens Fenno’s Paradox by considerably lowering legislator approval. We explore the underlying mechanism of this finding at the individual level, finding that co-partisan support for Congress and opposing-partisan support for legislators has collapsed since 1980. Taken together, our results suggest that partisan polarization plays a large role in motivating the historic decline in congressional approval and the ability of legislators to amass a personal incumbency advantage.

Congressional Approval and Responsible Party Government: The Role of Partisanship and Ideology in Citizen Assessments of the Contemporary U.S. Congress

While scholars posit an electoral link between congressional approval and majority party electoral fortunes, it is unclear whether citizens are grounding their assessments of approval on policy or valence grounds, such as retrospective economic evaluations. Whereas it is commonly understood that there is an ideological component to constituents’ job approval of their individual members of Congress, in addition to a strong partisan effect, the ideological basis of institutional approval has not been established. Using cross-sectional and panel survey data, which allow for scaling citizens and the congressional parties in the same ideological space, I demonstrate that, distinct from the partisan basis of congressional approval, citizens’ ideological distance from the majority party has a separate and distinct effect. These results suggest that the link between congressional approval and majority party fortunes is rooted in the collective ideological representation provided by the legislative majority in an increasingly responsible U.S. Congress.

The contested origins of US democracy promotion: the national endowment for democracy and its congressional critics

In 1983, a compromise between the Reagan administration, members of Congress and private groups led to the establishment of the bipartisan democracy promotion organization: the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Tracing congressional efforts to prevent the formation of the NED, this article offers the first comprehensive, archival-based study of the NED’s critics and their arguments and motivations. I find that opposition to the NED consisted of an unlikely and ideologically diverse alliance between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, who took issue with its organizational structure and strategic objectives. Although Congress eventually established the NED with minor concessions to its critics, its origin was considerably more contested than previously acknowledged. The case of the NED also demonstrates the substantial influence of domestic politics and individual members of Congress on US foreign policymaking.

The electoral effects of closing military bases

ABSTRACT Can members of Congress escape blame for bad news in their districts? To maximise their chances of re-election, legislators seek to maintain their electoral connections with voters, defending key district interests. Could actions by successive presidential administrations over the past three decades to close obsolete military bases have undermined such efforts? Although Congress and the president have deployed Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commissions to facilitate such closures and insulate individual members of Congress from directly traceable costs of those decisions, the electoral implications of base closures have yet to be fully probed. Focusing on the House of Representatives, I examine all major BRAC closings, and find that major base closures do not affect the electoral fortunes of incumbents. Rather, voters predominantly and typically punish the president’s party and first-term lawmakers during these elections. I conclude that Congressional fears about the electoral costs of base closings are likely unfounded.

Who Walks the Watchdog? Bureaucratic Oversight and the Government Accountability Office

Created in 1921 and strengthened after Watergate, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is Congress's primary watchdog agency over the administrative state. The GAO investigates, culls, and synthesizes stances on a multitude of policy programs and expenditures on its own initiative, by legislative mandate, and at the request of congressional committees and individual members of Congress. This paper examines how members of Congress use the GAO to advance their own policy preferences and how the GAO makes strategic auditing decisions on its own. From a simple model supplemented by interviews of GAO officials, I generate several testable empirical propositions. First, in periods of divided government, members and committee chairs should request more GAO investigations; in periods of united government, members of the minority party should request more GAO studies. Second, members of Congress may use the GAO to increase their chances of being reelected. In particular, Senators facing reelection sooner should request more studies than Senators facing reelection in a later cycle. Third, if the GAO is concerned about how it is perceived by its sponsors in Congress, it should make fewer recommendations when its work is not congressionally requested. I test these propositions using information from the GAO Documents Database, which I constructed from details on all published GAO reports and testimony to Congress, for 1986-1997. I find some support for the institutional theory of how Congress uses the GAO. House committee chairpersons are more likely to request a GAO investigation when there is divided government. A change from united to divided government corresponds to a 5.68 percent increase in the probability that a House committee chairperson will join a request. House committee ranking minority members are less likely to turn to the GAO when there is divided government. A shift from united to divided government leads to a 2.16 percent decrease in the probability that a House committee ranking minority member will sign onto a request. It also appears that Senators facing the voters in the next election request more studies than other Senators. Finally, the GAO seems to issue recommendations carefully. It makes more recommendations to Congress when a study is requested but makes more recommendations to agencies when a study is self-initiated, perhaps anticipating that Congress will call for agency changes when an investigation is requested.

Rooting Out Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

Scholars have long bemoaned congressional disinterest in oversight. We explain varied congressional attention to oversight by advancing the contingent oversight theory. We show how the structure of congressional committees, partisan majorities, and theories of delegation together explain when, why, and for how long Congress investigated executive branch malfeasance between 1947 and 2004. Divided government, partisan committees, and committees characterized by broad statutory discretion generate more investigations, whereas distributive committees and unified government dampen Congress’ investigatory vigor. The conduct of oversight depends on more than a desire to produce good government or the incentive structures faced by individual members of Congress.

A Tale of Three Variables: Exploring the Impact of Alternative Measures of Presidential Approval On Congressional Voting

This study explores the impact of three distinct measures of public approval on congressional voting. Specifically, we test for the relative impact of a president's national approval, his partisan approval, and his district- (or state-) level approval on congressional support, measured at the level of individual members of Congress. Though we remain consistent with other arguments that hold presidential approval is likely to act as a background variable rather than a determinant of congressional voting, we maintain that theoretically more meaningful relationships between public opinion and congressional voting can be developed. Specifically, we argue that a more relevant test can be made which includes opinion measured closest to where that opinion is likely to matter to members, namely among electoral copartisans and district-level constituencies. We estimate various models (bivariate and integrated multivariate), and find strong support for our hypotheses that, to the extent members of Congress use public approval as a voting cue, they do in fact pay far more attention to partisan and constituency interests than they do to national opinion.

Congressional Performance, Incumbent Behavior, and Voting in Senate Elections

Conventional wisdom suggests that individual members of Congress have no real incentive to act in ways that might improve public evaluations of their collective body. In particular, the literature provides no clear evidence that public evaluations of Congress affect individual races for Congress, and little reason to expect that voters would hold specific individuals responsible for the institution's performance. We suggest that this conventional wisdom is incorrect. Using multiple state-level exit polls of Senate voting conducted by Voter News Service in 1996 and 1998, we arrive at two key findings. First, we find that evaluations of Congress do have a significant effect on voting within individual U.S. Senate races across a wide variety of electoral contexts. Second, we find that punishments or rewards for congressional performance are not distributed equally across all members, or even across members of a particular party. Instead, we find that the degree to which citizens hold a senator accountable for congressional performance is significantly influenced by that senator's actual level of support for the majority party in Congress, as demonstrated on party votes.

Public Presidential Appeals and Congressional Floor Votes: Reassessing the Constitutional Threat

The assertion that public appeals by presidents can create electoral threats to noncompliant members of Congress is central to arguments about the value of "going public" as a legislative strategy. Although recent scholarship suggests a link between popular presidential rhetoric and the likelihood of bill passage, researchers have yet to examine the impact of public presidential appeals on individual legislators. This study examines the logic of electoral threats imposed by going public. We test whether a president's going public with increased intensity leads individual members of Congress to increase their support for presidential preferences on congressional floor votes. We employ several measures to assess the intensity of presidents' public appeals, including domestic speeches, nationally televised addresses, and speeches in legislators' home states. Several logistic regression models are tested to determine whether congressional support for presidential preferences on the floor is influenced by the interaction between members' electoral vulnerability and presidents' use of popular appeals. The findings suggest that presidential speechmaking has very little impact on the likelihood that members of Congress will support the president's position on roll call votes. We argue that this suggests a necessary revision of criticisms of the "rhetorical presidency." Public presidential appeals do not seem to present a considerable threat to a constitutional order that is predicated on congressional autonomy and deliberation.

Congress and the Internet

Information technologies have permeated society and political life. Congress also has been incorporating these new technologies as members have established their own Web sites and acquired e-mail addresses. Using a survey of congressional offices and a content analysis of congressional Web sites, we describe how Congress as an institution uses the Internet to disseminate information to the public and how individual members of Congress use the Internet and e-mail to interact with constituents. We conclude that congressional response to these technologies has been mixed and that, to the extent that members have embraced the new technologies, they have done so not to facilitate interactivity with constituents, but primarily as an extension of their strategies of advertising themselves to constituents.

Structural change in federal spending and deficits: Legislative and cyclical influences

This paper analyzes the behavior of federal expenditures and budget deficits since 1955. It is found that growth in these series is well described by two simple step functions allowing for three discrete increases in the means of the variables. When adjusted for the changes in means, both series are stationary with no significant time trend. It is found that the increases in means are associated with government attempts to implement countercyclical fiscal policy during recessions. Also, the increases in means coincide well with specific legislative acts which increased the budgetary power of individual members of Congress and ended the ability of the president to use impoundment as a substitute for a line-item veto.

Well-healed: inside lobbying for health care reform, Part III.

The Center for Public Integrity conducted a year-long investigation of the decision-making processes of the U.S. government during its work on health care reform. The results suggest that health care reform has become the most heavily lobbied legislative initiative in recent U.S. history. In 1993 and 1994, hundreds of special interests spent over $100 million to influence the outcome of this public policy issue. In Part III, the authors conclude their description of these special interests, including political organizations, the elderly, labor, and public interest groups and foundations. The report concludes with a discussion of how the work of Congress is influenced by political contributions to individual members of Congress and to the Democratic and Republican parties, trips sponsored by the health care industry, and investments held by members of Congress in health care-related industries.

Legal Counsel for Congress: Protecting Institutional Interests

Traditionally, scholars have noted the predominance of lawyers serving in staff support positions and as elected members of the United States Congress. This article explores yet another aspect of the legislative-judicial connection, namely, the roles of the Senate Legal Counsel and the General Counsel in the House of Representatives. Based on interviews, historical documents and court submissions, I examine the development of the offices with particular attention to their work in protecting the interests of both individual members of Congress and the institution in the judicial arena. In conclusion, I argue that the incremental development of the General Counsel's office and the lack of formal rules and procedures governing its activity have given rise to partisan conflict over the office's role as the legal voice for the House of Representatives, a conflict that has not been evidenced in the statutorily-based office of the Senate Legal Counsel.

Restrictive Legislative Procedures in France and the United States

I develop a framework for applying existing formal models of restrictive amendment procedures in Congress to the study of the French government's use of two restrictive legislative procedures, the package vote and the “guillotine”. I test six hypotheses derived from existing formal models and from existing research on the French National Assembly. The analysis shows that the French government invokes the two procedures on the same types of distributive and jurisdictionally complex bills that frequently receive closed rules in Congress. The analysis also shows that the decision to use the restrictive procedures is strongly linked to the majority status of the government, suggesting they are used to preserve agreements between parties in the same way that restrictive amendment procedures are used to preserve agreements between individual members of Congress. Thus, existing formal models of legislative institutions can help us study how procedural structures shape strategic bargaining between political parties in parliamentary systems, especially during coalition and minority government.

Determinants of protectionist attitudes in the united states house of representatives

Constituency pressures are often credited with explaining the votes of individual members of Congress on trade legislation. Such pressures could even lead to the formation of a protectionist coalition among members of Congress as a result of vote trading among the members seeking to represent constituency interests. An analysis of seven votes in the House of Representatives in 1983 and 1984, however, provides little evidence that such constituency pressures were effective and virtually no evidence that any large protectionist coalition was forming at this time. The party affiliation of the members, however, was important to their voting patterns.

Changing Membership Patterns in House Committees

Of the many excellent studies of Congress completed by political scientists in recent years, few, if any, suggest a departure from Woodrow Wilson's apt phrase, “Congressional government is Committee government.” Despite numerous efforts to analyze legislative action in terms of roll call votes, constituency characteristics, state delegations, and/or specialized interest blocs, the committee system remains the central focal point of congressional behavior and organization. Thus, if Wilson's nineteenth century insight is still valid, then it would seem that more intensive studies of the congressional committee system—in the manner employed by Huitt and Fenno, for example—would yield many new relevant facts concerning the complexities of the legislative process.As a case in point, the manner in which individual members of Congress are assigned to various committees has been well covered by Matthews, Clapp, and Masters. The situation in the Senate is such that each member carries at least two, and in many instances three standing committee assignments. In the House, the maximum standing committee work-load is two assignments, although most Representatives have only a single committee responsibility. However, in connection with this latter point, if one examines the standing committee assignments of all House members for the first session of every Congress from the 80th through the 89th, an interesting pattern emerges in which a gradual but steady increase in the number of double committee assignments is clearly evidenced during the past twenty years.

Evaluating the Decline of Southern Internationalism Through Senatorial Roll Call Votes

IN RECENT YEARS many southern members of Congress, long regarded as the bulwark of internationalism, have begun to challenge some of the Administration's foreign policies. This has been evident in the increasing proportion of southern votes cast in Congress against these policies, particularly foreign aid and reciprocal trade. Although it is well recognized that southern attiltudes toward foreign policy are changing, little attention has been given to measuring the extenit and timing of this change or to distinguishing among the attitudes toward various foreign policies. A brief survey of roll calls can supply this information. In explaining the changes in southern views, observers have emphasized in varying degrees the growth of southern industralization, the election of a Republican Administration in 1952, and the success or failure of individual leaders in the Administration or Congress.' The student of Congressional affairs is cautious about accepting any single or simple explanation of a voting trend. The significant motivating factors are numerous and cannot be completely evaluated without a detailed study of roll calls, interviews with members of Congress, and surveys of public opinion and economic conditions in the South. Even with such comprehensive information, it would be a task of staggering proportions to trace the elusive factors underlying the votes of individual members of Congress over an extended period. Nevertheless, roll calls alone may provide important clues to legislative behavior and thought. Properly used and evaluated, roll call statistics constitute a rich source of political intelligence, which deserves the increasing attention it is receiving from political scientists. This study differs in purpose from most recent analyses of roll calls. It does not seek to test the utility of a particular