Majority Party Leadership Research Articles

Taking the Initiative: Leadership Agendas in Congress and the "Contract with America", by John B. Bader

Taking the Initiative shows that majority party leaders in Congress have set and successfully pushed their own policy agendas for decades - revealing the 'Contract With America' as only the most recent, and certainly not the most successful, example of independent policy making. Cutting deeply into the politics and personalities of three decades of party leadership, John B. Bader probes the strategies and evaluates the effectiveness of House and Senate leaders operating in a divided government, when Congress and the presidency are controlled by different political parties. He provides a historical context for analyzing the Contract and shows that aggressive agenda-setting has long been a regular feature of majority party leadership. Bader interviewed more than seventy congressional leaders, staff members, party officials, and political consultants, including speakers Thomas Tip O'Neill and Jim Wright, for this book. He supplemented these interviews with research in largely unexplored archival materials such as press conference transcripts, notes from White House leadership meetings, and staff memoranda on strategy.

Congress and the presidency: institutional politics in a separated system

Part 1 The dynamics of institutional change in Congress: before the Constitution the institutional development of Congress four eras of institutional change. Part 2 Congress' electoral connection: the nature of Congressional elections the formal context of Congressional representation Congressional recruitment incumbents and their constituents. Part 3 Congress as an organization - member enterprises and committees: a week in Congress Congress and the problem of representation House-Senate differences members' personal enterprises legislation and lawmaking the committee system. Part 4 Congressional parties and legislative decision-making: party organizations majority party leadership Congressional decision-making. Part 5 The institutionalization of the Presidency: constitutional and historical roots Presidents, precedents and institutionalization executive government as a source of presidential power executive government as a limitation of presidential power benefits and problems of control devices de-institutionalization. Part 6 The public Presidency: Federal conditions and party divisions the Presidency and the promise of national leadership primary elections as solutions and problems dollar democracy political television and media politics party de-alignment and candidate-based electioneering the public presidency and the permanent election. Part 7 Presidential decision-making: the collective deficiencies of the American Cabinet contraction as a response to the problem of decision making the individual as the normative and empirical foundations of Presidential decision-making the corrective dimension of the political environment. Part 8 Legislating together: the Constitution and the growth of the Presidency-centred tradition the legislative Presidency institutional competition within a separated system Presidential leadership skills Presidential popularity the President and Congressional partisanship the President and legislators' ideologies the strategic environment for legislating legislating together. Part 9 Interpreting the separation of powers: the conceptual, structural and cultural components of separated powers the contemporary significance of the separation of powers the Supreme Court and Presidential restraint the Supreme Court and Congressional constraint the Supreme Court and executive licence the limits of judicial management the politics of separated powers. Part 10 Policy controversies: foreign policy as an executive prerogative the challenge new environments and disrupted orthodoxies administration as an executive function administration as a Congressional interest Congressional controls over the administrative process Congress as co-manager of the executive. Part 11 The Congress, the Presidency and the democratic system.

Why does the Senate ?win? in conference committee?: A stability explanation

This paper develops a bicameral stability model wherein the conference committee serves as a vehicle for mutually advantageous bicameral exchange. The goal is to maintain a single party's bicameral majority. Majority party leaders use the conference committee to attenuate the outlying positions of House standing committees that threaten the bicameral majority. Conference outcomes favor the Senate because it is more vulnerable to party turnover. Statistical results on data from the U.S. Congress, 1949 through 1991, demonstrate that when one party holds a bicameral majority, a relative increase in conference bills preserves at the margin, Senate majority-party seats at the expense of House majority-party seats.

Committee Power, Leadership, and the Median Voter: Evidence from the Smoking Ban

In an intricate sequence of legislative decisions rich with implications for theories of collective choice, the U.S. House of Representatives in 1987 initiated a smoking ban on all domestic airline flights. Two previous studies--by LaRue and Rothenberg in 1992 and Shipan in 1995--analyzed and interpreted the case as supportive of institutional or committee-power theories. This study reanalyzes the case to assess specific instances of committee-power, leadership, and median-voter theories. Overall, the findings undermine Large and Rothenberg's support for gatekeeping-based committee power; they replicate and extend Shipan's refutation of the hypothesis that majority-party leaders are enforcers of pro-committee institutional arrangements; and they corroborate a variation of median-voter theory. The bulk of evidence is consistent with an unconventionally nonpartisan claim: that the House (analytically, its median voter) chooses and uses procedural arrangements such as its Rules Committee to limit the effective exercise of committee and leadership powers. Copyright 1996 by Oxford University Press.

The Partisan Basis of Procedural Choice: Allocating Parliamentary Rights in the House, 1789–1990

Conventional accounts of the institutional development of Congress suggest that expansion of the size and workload of the House led members to distribute parliamentary rights narrowly: Majority party leaders accrued strong procedural powers while minority parties lost many of their parliamentary rights. I offer an alternative, partisan basis of procedural choice. Using an original data set of changes in House rules, I present a statistical model to assess the influence of partisan and nonpartisan factors on changes in minority procedural rights in the House between 1789 and 1990. I find that short-term partisan goals—constrained by inherited rules—shape both the creation and suppression of rights for partisan and political minorities. Collective institutional concerns and longer-term calculations about future parliamentary needs have little impact on changes in minority rights. The findings have important theoretical implications for explaining both the development of Congress and the nature of institutional change more generally.

Legislators, leaders, and lawmaking: the U.S. House of Representatives in the postreform era

Although Congress has never been popular, it has in recent years been the subject of particularly relentless and bitter criticism: gridlock is the central problem plaguing American government, say many, and Congress is to blame. According to Barbara Sinclair, the contemporary political environment has made legislating extraordinarily difficult. Huge deficits and, until 1993, deep policy differences between the president and congressional majorities have complicated already difficult choices. In this context, Sinclair asks, how has House not only performed its legislative functions but also managed to enhance its role in the American political system? In Legislators, Leaders, and Lawmaking Sinclair traces the emergence during the 1980s House majority party leadership that is highly active and deeply involved in multiple aspects of legislative process, but one that leads by means of a participatory and inclusive style. Drawing on extensive interviews with House members, staffs, and informed observers, she describes the changing role of the leadership from the prereform period, through the immediate post reform years, to the present. The reforms of the 1970s, Sinclair argues, combined with the constraints of the 1980s political environment to give effective leadership an importance in the legislative process unprecedented in the modem era. As a result, the book's focus on party leadership provides a vantage point for understanding the legislative process in the House and the major changes that process has undergone in the last several decades.

Majority Party Leadership and Budget Policymaking in the House of Representatives

Budget policy dominated the congressional agenda during the 1980s. During that same period, the Speaker of the House of Representatives became more involved in formulating the priorities of the majority party, a task traditionally left up to committees. This paper traces the development of the Speaker's role in formulating budget priorities by assessing changes in the Speaker's relationship with the House Budget Committee. The paper identifies the conditions under which the Speaker became a more active participant in budget policymaking and the individual qualities that define each Speaker's style. In particular, I compare the leadership styles of Speakers Thomas P. Tip O'Neill, Jr. (D-Mass.) and James Wright (D-Tex.). Both O'Neill and Wright operated under similar conditions that enhanced the Speaker's role in policymaking: divided government, large deficits, and high levels of party unity. But they exercised different leadership styles, and the differences are based partly on two individual factors: p...

The Emergence of Strong Leadership in the 1980s House of Representatives

Through a comparison of four carefully selected congresses, this study demonstrates that the current House majority party leadership, when compared to other post-World War II leaderships, is more involved in and more decisive in organizing the party and the chamber, setting the House agenda, and affecting legislative outcomes. An explanation for the emergence of strong leadership is offered and tested. I argue that, during the period under study, the costs and benefits to majority party members of strong leadership changed significantly. The study shows that the 1970s reforms and the 1980s political environment of split control and conflict between a conservative confrontational president and House Democrats greatly increased the difficulty of enacting legislation Democrats find satisfactory and thus increased Democratic committee contingents' and the Democratic membership's need for leadership help. Declining Democratic ideological heterogeneity and decreased opportunities for free-lance policy entrepreneurship reduced the cost of strong leadership to members. The study finds that, both over time and cross sectionally, the likelihood of leadership involvement is greatest when the members most need help and when the costs of the leadership's providing such help are lowest for majority party members and for the leadership itself and, further, that leadership involvement does increase the probability of legislative success.

Interest-Group and Party Influence Agents in the Legislative Process: A Comparative State Analysis

Rather than focusing on the development and internal dynamics of interests groups, the study reported here examines the involvement and success of interest groups in relation to party-oriented influence agents in the legislative public policy-making process. Party influence agents studied are the governor, legislative majority party leadership, and legislative minority party leadership. Data employed are interest group, gubernatorial, and party leadership positions on a random sample of bills considered by the legislatures of California, Iowa, and Texas, with the ultimate success of each agent based on the legislature's final disposition of measures in which agents were involved and held the same or conflicting positions. This study strongly suggests overall that the two influence agents within government--governor and legislative majority party leadership--can effectively offset the lobbying efforts of interest groups. Of these two-party agents, however, no consistent pattern appears across states as to their relative importance.

The Development of a Party-Orientated Electorate in England, 1832–1918

Modern British government is government by party leaders in Cabinet. It is still the ‘Crown in Parliament’ which formally takes or authorizes every legislative or administrative action, but of the three major components of the Crown in Parliament – the Commons, the Lords, and the Sovereign – the first is now virtually unchecked. The House of Lords can only minimally delay acts of the Commons, and both the Lords and the Monarch have long since lost their ability to veto (much less initiate) legislation. Since those in the Cabinet control the agenda of the House of Commons, since the Cabinet almost invariably consists solely of the leaders of the party with a majority of seats in the Commons, and since the influence of party on voting in Parliament is very strong, the Commons itself has in essence only retained a veto over the legislative proposals of the majority party's leaders who sit in the Cabinet. As a recent essay on legislation in Britain notes, ‘today's conventional wisdom is that … Parliament has relinquished any capacity for legislative initiative it may once have possessed to the executive in its midst’.

Committee Size in the U. S. Congress

Westefield (1974) asserts that powerful congressional leaders expand the number of committee seats to create sources of leverage with rank-and-file members. We challenge his interpretation and provide a more rigorous test of his theory. A committee-specific examination of committee-size decisions corroborates Shepsle's (1978) findings. However, a speaker-by-speaker analysis confirms our expectation that Shepsle's findings obscure significant differences between recent House speakers. We argue that committee-size decisions of majority party leaders are shaped more by the changing political conditions they face than by their efforts to gain compliance from rank-and-file members.

Majority Party Leadership Strategies for Coping with the New U. S. House

Changes in the issues at the center of controversy, changes in rules and norms, and high membership turnover have significantly changed the environment in which the majority party leadership operates in the U.S. House of Representatives. The current leaders work in a much less predictable environment than their predecessors did. This paper describes and evaluates the leadership's attempts to cope with the new House. These attempts have displayed two major thrusts. The majority party leadership has become increasingly oriented toward providing services for members. The second thrust is towards involving as many House Democrats as possible in the coalition building process.

The Speaker's Task Force in the Post-Reform House of Representatives

Because of changes in the issues at the center of controversy, changes in rules and norms and high membership turnover, the current House majority party leaders operate in a much less predictable environment than their predecessors did. In response to the changed environment, Speaker O'Neill has developed the strategy of leadership by inclusion, a central element of which is the Speaker's task force, an ad hoc group appointed by the Speaker and charged with passage of a specific bill. The leaders believe task forces help them perform both of their primary functions—building winning coalitions and “keeping peace in the family.” By increasing the number of people working in an organized way to pass the bill at issue, the task force increases the probability of a bill's success on the floor. Work on a task force satisfies junior members' expectations of participation and fosters cooperative patterns of behavior among party members.

Majority Leadership in the House of Representatives

In 1967 Randall Ripley, in a major work on House leadership, noted changes in this century that had weakened the legislative hold of House leaders on party members, in particular reduced resources, greater committee autonomy, and the growing power of seniority.' Paradoxically, despite major reforms of the House in the 1970s that increased leadership resources in certain ways, reduced committee autonomy in a limited, but important way, and reduced the rights and power of seniority, majority leadership in the House (the Speaker, majority leader, majority whip) has not grown stronger. On balance, the majority-party leadership may well have grown weaker as compared with the 1960s and continues to be quite constrained and limited, even under a relatively strong Speaker like Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill, Jr. Because majorityparty leadership can to some extent counterbalance the tendency in Congress toward policy fragmentation and lack of coordination, parochialism, and the overrepresentation of highly organized groups, and because this leadership not only affects the degree to which the president-especially when he is of the same party as that of the congressional majority-can effect his major legislative goals, but also affects the kind of representation and accountability Americans have, it is necessary to reassess the capacities and limits of the leadership in light of a decade of House reforms. This reassessment will be done in two ways: by reexamining the leadership in terms of categories that previous scholars have used (which allows for con-

Presidential-Congressional Support for Agencies and for Each Other: A Comparative Look

1 Robert Dahl, and Foreign Policy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1950); Randall B. Ripley, Majority Party Leadership in (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 34; Louis Koenig, Chief Executive, (3rd ed.; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Janovich, 1975); James A. Robinson, and Foreign Policy-Making (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1967). 2 John R. Johannes, Policy Innovation in (Morristown, New Jersey: General Learning Press, 1972), 5; James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1968): Ronald C. Moe and Steven C. Teel, Congress as Policy-Maker: A Necessary Reappraisal, Political Science Quarterly, 85 (September 1970), 443-470; Arnold Kanter, Congress and the Defense Budget 1960-70, American Political Science Review, 66 (March 1972), 129-143; Laurence H. Chamberlain, President, and Legislation, Political Science Quarterly, 61 (March 1946), 42-60.

Majority Party Leadership and the Committee System in the House of Representatives

In this paper one party leadership strategy with respect to the committee system of the House is examined. Building on several relatively clear concepts such as compliance, quality of assignment, expectation, scarcity, and exchange, a very elementary, yet explicit, theory is constructed. It is shown that the leaders pursue a strategy of accommodation. The leaders increase the number of positions on those committees prized by the members in order to guarantee a steady supply of resources to gain leverage with the members. But a steady increase in the supply of positions reduces the scarcity of positions and hence their value to the leaders. Thus, a consequence of the strategy is the need periodically to reorganize or make adjustments in the committee system.

Committee Transfers in the United States House of Representatives

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticlesCommittee Transfers in the United States House of RepresentativesCharles S. BullockCharles S. Bullock Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 35, Number 1Feb., 1973 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2129039 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 11Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Periloux C. Peay Incorporation is Not Enough: The Agenda Influence of Black Lawmakers in Congressional Committees, The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 6, no.22 (Oct 2020): 402–438.https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2020.18Martin Ejnar Hansen Understanding Change in Committee Assignments between Elections: Evidence from the Danish Case, The Journal of Legislative Studies 19, no.44 (Dec 2013): 450–466.https://doi.org/10.1080/13572334.2013.812352 Sangjoon Ka, Cho Jin Man, JunYoungChoi, SohnByoungKwon Characteristics of Standing Committees' Operation in the National Assembly with an Analysis of Assembly Records, 21st centry Political Science Review 18, no.11 (May 2008): 47–68.https://doi.org/10.17937/topsr.18.1.200805.47Tracy Sulkin Issue Politics in Congress, 71 (Jan 2010).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511616013K. Kanthak Exclusive Committee Assignments and Party Pressure in the U.S. House of Representatives, Public Choice 121, no.3-43-4 (Dec 2004): 391–412.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-004-1685-zWilliam F. West Oversight Subcommittees in the House of Representatives, Congress & the Presidency 25, no.22 (Sep 1998): 147–160.https://doi.org/10.1080/07343469809507799 Gary W. Copeland Seniority and Committee Transfers: Career Planning in the Contemporary House of Representatives, The Journal of Politics 49, no.22 (Oct 2015): 553–564.https://doi.org/10.2307/2131314HERBERT F. WEISBERG CABINET TRANSFERS AND DEPARTMENTAL PRESTIGE, American Politics Quarterly 15, no.22 (Nov 2016): 238–253.https://doi.org/10.1177/004478087015002003Steven S. Smith, Bruce A. Ray The Impact of Congressional Reform: House Democratic Committee Assignments, Congress & the Presidency 10, no.22 (Mar 2010): 219–240.https://doi.org/10.1080/07343468309508018 Lynette P. Perkins Member Recruitment to a Mixed Goal Committee: the House Judiciary Committee, The Journal of Politics 43, no.22 (Oct 2015): 348–364.https://doi.org/10.2307/2130372Louis P. Westefield Majority Party Leadership and the Committee System in the House of Representatives, American Political Science Review 68, no.44 (Sep 2013): 1593–1604.https://doi.org/10.2307/1959944

Majority Party Leadership in Congress, by Randall B. Ripley

Majority Party Leadership in Congress, <i>by Randall B. Ripley</i>

Majority Party Leadership in Congress. By &lt;italic&gt;Randall B. Ripley&lt;/italic&gt;. [The Study of Congress Series.] (Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1969. Pp. xiii, 194. $5.00.)

Journal Article Majority Party Leadership in Congress. By Randall B. Ripley. [The Study of Congress Series.] (Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1969. Pp. xiii, 194. $5.00.) Get access Majority Party Leadership in Congress. By Ripley Randall B.. [The Study of Congress Series.] (Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1969. Pp. xiii, 194. $5.00.) Jordan A. Schwarz Jordan A. Schwarz Northern Illinois University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 75, Issue 2, December 1969, Pages 604–605, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/75.2.604 Published: 01 December 1969

Majority Party Leadership in Congress

Majority Party Leadership in Congress