Majority Party Leadership Research Articles

The Conditional Lawmaking Benefits of Party Faction Membership in Congress

Does joining a party faction in Congress enhance or undermine a member’s lawmaking effectiveness? Prior research suggests that factions can help members electorally in signaling their distinct ideological positions to potential political supporters. By contrast, we examine the nine largest ideological caucuses over the past quarter century to test three hypotheses about the conditional lawmaking benefits of faction membership: (1) that benefits from faction membership are limited to those in the minority party; (2) that members of ideologically centrist factions gain the greatest benefits; and (3) that sizable factions exploit their pivotal positions to help their members achieve legislative victories. We find support for only the first of these three conjectures, consistent with the argument that factions offer valuable resources to those in the minority party and that majority-party leaders counter the proposals arising from their own party’s factions. The fact that faction membership offers no significant lawmaking benefit to majority-party legislators challenges conventional wisdom.

Majority Party Agenda Setting: Picking Fights or Avoiding Them?

In legislatures such as the U.S. House of Representatives, where the majority party controls the agenda, the frequency of observed partisan disagreement is partially a function of strategic agenda‐setting choices made by that party. Do majority party leaders use their agenda control to privilege bills that accentuate disagreements with the minority party? In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework focused on the costs and benefits associated with floor consideration of partisan legislation. We test hypotheses derived from our theory on a dataset of 15,611 bills considered in House committees during the 104th–114th Congresses (1995–2016). We find that minority party opposition in committee is associated with a decreased likelihood of floor consideration, suggesting that the majority party does not use agenda setting to indiscriminately favor partisan legislation. Our findings focus attention on the costs of partisan agenda setting, and contextualize the partisan disagreement we ultimately observe on the House floor.

Majority Party, Standing Committees, and Evidence for Indirect Control

The majority party leadership has different goals for different committees. As such, they tailor a variety of control mechanisms to match different committees. When a committee is considered “highly important” to the majority party leadership, the leadership employs an intra-party assignment strategy: assigning members who are ideologically similar to the party caucus (per conventional wisdom). This direct control mechanism consequently produces an unconditionally low level of committee bias. For “medium importance” committees, however, the majority party leadership employs an inter-party assignment strategy to exert indirect control: utilizing the presence of minority party members to constrain their own party delegations in a way that serves the party in general. As such, the bias of these committees inevitably depends on the ideological distribution of the minority party committee delegations. This ultimately suggests that the majority party leadership adopts multiple and flexible strategies to deal with committee assignments and committee activities in general.

Leadership power, preference homogeneity, and legislative party conflict

ABSTRACTOver the past few decades, there has been a considerable increase in the level of partisan conflict. What explains the extent of partisan conflict experienced in legislatures? To examine this question, we develop aggregate-level measures of inter-party conflict from roll-call voting data on procedural and final passage votes during the 1999–2000 and 2003–2004 sessions to examine the mechanisms of polarisation in U.S. state legislatures. We systematically model inter-party conflict as a function of institutional rules and preferences. Our results suggest that the level of inter-party conflict (i.e. party polarisation) in legislative voting is largely related to the homogeneity of members’ electorally-induced preferences. However, we also uncover interesting institutional effects. Although minority party rights is the only institutional variable associated with inter-party conflict on final passage votes, majority party leaders’ committee appointment rights, committees’ discretion in reporting bills to the floor, and minority party rights each are strongly associated with inter-party conflict on procedural roll-call votes.

‘Spain is not Greece’: Reflections of the Hellenic crisis in Spanish political discourse

Abstract This article investigates the narratives constructed around the Greek crisis by Spanish elite press, in the period between May 2010, the date of the first international bailout package of Greece, and June 2016, the date of the latest parliamentary elections in Spain, which registered a disappointing result for Podemos’, SYRIZA’s sister party. The victory of SYRIZA in the January 2015 elections in Greece marks a pivotal point in European politics generally and the Spanish political discourse specifically about the Hellenic crisis, as it signalled the voicing of public discontent to austerity not only through parliamentary representation but ultimately through the formation of government. From 2010 to 2015, majority party leaders in Spain insisted that ‘Spain is not Greece’, aiming to dissociate the country from the Greek counterpart on the basis of its politics, claimed to be corrupt, the level of individual responsibility of its citizens, ‘living beyond their means’ and the standing of Spain as an economic power in Europe. From 2015 until the floundering of Podemos in the 2016 elections, the elite discourse circulated the idea that Spain could become like Greece, if ruled by a populist formation similar to SYRIZA. The article critically analyses Spain’s benchmark newspapers coverage, El País and El Mundo of the crisis, and contextualizes the similarities and differences of treatment between the Greek and the Spanish cases. It does so taking into account the emergence of Podemos and the election victory of SYRIZA, both deriving from public disagreement with and dissent to national and Troika policies, which proved to have altered the political landscape and to have fundamentally destabilized the long-standing bipartisan political domination in their respective countries.

When are Majority-Party Leaders Powerful? Legislative Theories Revised.

Foundational theories of the legislature disagree about why, or even whether, legislative leaders are powerful, but issues of measurement and causal inference have prevented empirical work from addressing these debates effectively. To make progress, we offer a new dataset on the identities of legislative leaders in all U.S. state legislatures over the past 20 years. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that, on average, becoming a majority-party leader causes a large increase in contributions from strategic interest groups — an indication that leaders are indeed powerful. Contrary to major theoretical predictions, however, we show that leaders are no more powerful, and possibly less powerful, when legislative polarization increases. Moreover, neither the size of the majority party nor the professionalization of the legislature are associated with how powerful majority-party leaders are. In contrast, we find that majority- party leaders are more powerful in bigger legislatures, which we argue suggests that a key role for leaders is solving issues of complexity and coordination. The paper thus offers new data and evidence that revises and improves our understanding of legislative politics both in the U.S. and in democratic settings more generally.

The Contract with America and Conditional Party Government in State Legislatures

This study tests two theories of legislative leadership by comparing the power of majority-party leaders in states where the Republican Party adopted a state-level version of “The Contract with America” in 1994, with that of leaders in states where no contract was adopted. Using a nationwide survey of legislators to rank power, the study finds that the lower house leaders in contract states were stronger in 1995, as were those from states in which the public was ideologically polarized along partisan lines. The results provide support for conditional party government theory while expanding our knowledge of state legislative politics.

Partisanship, the Electoral Connection, and Lame-Duck Sessions of Congress, 1877–2006

We disentangle constituent and partisan influences in Congress by taking advantage of a largely unexamined institutional setting—lame-duck sessions. Lame-duck sessions of Congress are comprised of exiting members, who are freed from both constituency and party constraints, and returning members, who face a significantly reduced constituency constraint but a still strong party constraint. Comparing exiting and returning House members thus provides meaningful leverage in assessing the constraining influence of party. In the regularly occurring lame-duck sessions between 1877 and 1933, exiting House members exhibited greater movement away from the median party position than did returning members, consistent with expectations regarding party influence. In addition, party leaders’ ability to apply pressure was significantly reduced in lame-duck sessions due to the presence of a large group of exiting members. Finally, majority-party leaders were able to exercise negative agenda control in lame-duck sessions wh...

Evaluating Majority Party Leaders in Congress

Evaluations of majority party leaders come from three main sources: political scientists, media analysts, and members of Congress. Political scientists are the theoreticians. They have defined concepts and developed theories for evaluating leadership style, strategy, and strength. Journalists are the watchdogs. They regularly evaluate leader performance in response to contemporary events. Members of Congress then serve as the judges and juries. They occasionally advise leaders on tactics and strategies, and they ultimately have the ability to sanction or reward leaders.

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.

Party Loyalty and Legislative Success

Majority Party leaders are hypothesized, through their control of the legislative schedule in the House of Representatives, to use legislative success as a selective incentive to encourage majority party members to contribute to the collective goals of the party. Members can demonstrate party loyalty through floor voting and financial contributions to the party's re-election efforts. This article examines legislative success from the 103rd through 107th Congresses. The evidence shows that both demonstrations of party loyalty have a significant effect on legislative success.

Strategic Intercameral Behavior and the Sequence of Congressional Lawmaking

In the vein of some fledgling theoretical work on Congress, I look for evidence of strategic intercameral behavior in the chamber sequence of the passage of 950 bills from 1955 to 2002. Specifically, I construct and test a semiformal model in which communication is assumed to take place between congressional majority party leaders capable of choreographing bill passage using their agenda control powers. These leaders allow the chamber with the majority whose ideal point is furthest from the president's to pass its version of the bill first. The empirical analysis corroborates the model.

The Effects of Term Limits on State Legislatures: A New Survey of the 50 States

Term limits on legislators were adopted in 21 states during the early 1990s. Beginning in 1996, the limits legally barred incumbents from reelection in 11 states, and they will do so in four more by 2010. In 2002, we conducted the only survey of legislators in all 50 states aimed at assessing the impact of term limits on state legislative representation. We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office—whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition—but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a “Burkean shift,” whereby term‐limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons.

House Majority Party Leaders' Uses of Public Opinion Information

Using archival and interview evidence, this article demonstrates that, in the 1980s and 1990s, House Democratic leaders made frequent and sophisticated use of polls to monitor trends in public opinion, to construct party images and "craft talk," and to strategically deploy favorable poll results to aid in legislative coalition building. Comparing this recovered history of Democratic Party leaders' poll use to House Republican leaders' poll use, this article suggests the value of relaxing principal-agent theory to better account for: 1) the multiple contextual factors that explain leadership behavior; and 2) leaders' efforts to shape the institutional contexts within which they act and the conditions that empower them.

Uncovering Evidence of Conditional Party Government: Reassessing Majority Party Influence in Congress and State Legislatures

This paper aims at enriching the debate over the measurement of majority party influence in contemporary American legislatures. Our use of a new analytic technique, a grid-search program for characterizing the uncovered set, enables us to begin with a better model of legislative proceedings that abandons the simple one-dimensional spatial models in favor of the more realistic two-dimensional version. Our conclusions are based on the analysis of real-world data rather than on arguments about the relative merits of different theoretic assumptions. Our analysis confirms that when legislators' preferences are polarized, outcomes will generally be closer to the majority party's wishes, even if the majority-party leadership does nothing to influence the legislative process. This conclusion notwithstanding, our analysis also shows that at the margin of the majority party's natural advantage, agenda setting by the majority party remains a viable and efficacious strategy.

News Coverage of the Postreform House Majority-Party Leadership: An Expanding or a Shrinking Public Image?

Scholars agree that postreform House majority leadership strategies distinguish contemporary leaders from their predecessors. One such strategy is leaders' use of media to fulfill personal and member goals. Commonly presented evidence of this strategy is the increase in the number of times leaders appear in national evening newscasts. Yet most studies do not investigate the kind of media coverage leaders receive over time. Hence they do not show whether leaders have been successful in generating the sort of television attention consistent with the incentives that the literature identifies as driving them to adopt a media-oriented strategy. This article begins to address this gap in our understanding. Conducting a content analysis of network news accounts, we find that while postreform leaders have received more attention than their predecessors, coverage of them declined and leveled off in the 1990s. We also find that despite the drop in levels of attention accorded House majority-party leaders, they have maintained a plateau of higher news visibility relative to their primary competitors in the House, committee chairs, though there have been some recent exceptions to this trend that are highly suggestive.

Majority Party Leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1977–96: Speakers, Committee Assignments, and Institutional Context

Objective. This paper describes and explains the presence of variousstrategies used by party leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives to increase cohesion among members of the majority party. Methods. Logistic regression analysis is performed on assignments to the most prestigious committees from the 95th through the 104th Congresses. Results. Leaders are likely to reward loyal members, to favor no ideological wing of the majority party, and to protect—on occasion—the vulnerable members of the caucus. Conclusions. The implementation of these strategies varies according to short‐term changes in the institutional context of the majority party.

Partisanship and Pre-Floor Behavior: The Equal Rights and School Prayer Amendments

We examine the effect of issue preferences and partisanship on prefloor behavior by explaining cosponsorship and discharge petition activity over two proposed constitutional amendments, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1970 and the School Prayer Amendment (SPA) in 1971. Previous research has largely focused on the ability of the majority party leadership in the post-Reform House to employ party as a solution to the collective action problem inherent to policy making. We extend the conception of the role of party, arguing that non-leadership issue entrepreneurs are also capable of utilizing party to bring about collective policy outcomes even during the less party-centered pre-Reform era. Our results show that when entrepreneurs have access to institutional resources, both issue preferences and partisanship explain discharge petition activity; when they do not, discharge petition behavior is almost exclusively preference-based with inconsistent party effects. This research thus highlights the conditions under which party can be employed to build legislative coalitions.

The Puzzling Decline in House Support for Free Trade: Was Fast Track a Referendum on NAFTA?

In 1993, both houses of Congress passed and President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Just four years later, fast-track legislation stalled short of a vote in the House of Representatives, despite the endorsement of the president and majority-party leaders. Using interest group head counts in lieu of roll-call data, I test the theory that fast track was a referendum on the district-level economic impact of NAFTA. The findings show that economic and political aftershocks from NAFTA, including trade-related job losses in many members' districts, helped to undermine House support for fast track in 1997.

Transformational Leader or Faithful Agent? Principal-Agent Theory and House Majority Party Leadership

Transformational Leader or Faithful Agent? Principal-Agent Theory and House Majority Party Leadership