Modern Congress Research Articles

Redefining “expansion” in congressional communication: Homestyles for a digital constituency

AbstractSelf‐presentation in Congress is more nationalized, with digital constituencies on platforms such as Twitter offering new reputation‐building opportunities. Digital constituencies transform traditional expectations of constituent communication, challenging Richard Fenno's theory that representatives adopt an “expansionist” style with constituents during early, vulnerable phases of their tenure. In a digital era that encourages a more national approach, we question how Fenno's distinction between expansionist and protectionist phases of connecting with constituents applies to reputation‐building with digital constituencies. While electorally vulnerable senators still seek to expand their presentation among geographic constituents, digital platforms, such as Twitter, incentivize them to protect their reputation among a digital constituency. We analyzed senators' Twitter communications from 2013 to 2023. We find the electoral vulnerabilities of Fenno's expansionist local model are associated with a protectionist model of engagement with digital constituencies on Twitter. Our study sheds light on the significance of online reputation management and its implications for representing a media‐influenced, modern Congress.

Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress. By Charles Hunt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 270p. $85.00 cloth.

Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress. By Charles Hunt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 270p. $85.00 cloth.

Always Watchful: Political Context and Congressional Oversight through the Government Accountability Office

Oversight of the executive branch is one of Congress’s most critical functions. It is meant to ensure accountability, consistency, and fairness in the implementation of programs by the federal bureaucracy. Much previous scholarship has argued that oversight is more common when Congress and the White House are controlled by different parties. However, much of this research has focused principally on committee hearings, and other tools of oversight have received less attention. One such tool is the Government Accountability Office (GAO). I test competing theories of GAO usage: one which argues that GAO reports are simply another tool of oversight, like hearings, and tend to follow similar patterns and thus are more common in conditions of divided government. The other theory argues that the GAO, because of its commitment to providing useful, nonpartisan information, is more likely to be used when legislative and presidential priorities are aligned. Leveraging reports from the GAO between 1995 and 2022, I find support for the latter proposition, at least in the modern Congress. There is evidence that Congress changes its methods of oversight in response to political incentives, but oversight continues regardless.

Local Candidate Roots and Electoral Advantages in US State Legislatures

AbstractA growing literature has revealed a notable electoral advantage for congressional and gubernatorial candidates with deep local roots in their home districts or states. However, there is a dearth of research on the presence and impact of local roots in state legislative races. In this paper, we close that gap by demonstrating the consistent and significant electoral impacts that state legislators’ local roots have on their reelection efforts. We use data capturing a representative cross-section of state legislative incumbents (N = ~5,000) and calculate a novel index measuring the depth of their local roots modeled after Hunt’s (2022, Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress) measure for the US House. We present evidence that state legislators with deep local roots in the districts they represent run unopposed in their general elections nearly twice as often as incumbents with no such roots. Of those who do attract challengers in their reelection efforts, deeply rooted incumbents enjoy an average of three extra percentage points of vote share. Our results have important implications for candidate emergence in state legislative elections during a time when so many are uncontested. They also demonstrate the limits of electoral nationalization for understanding state politics.

Blending Powers: Hamilton, FDR, and the Backlash That Shaped Modern Congress

AbstractPresident Franklin Delano Roosevelt shaped the role of the modern president in part with his relentless pursuit of grand policies and his ability to marshal historic legislation through Congress. In this article, I focus on one legislative tactic employed by FDR that has received little attention—the detailing of Executive Branch staff to select Senate committees. This tactic, effectively a blending of legislative powers, was used to implement FDR’s ambitious postwar domestic agenda as detailed in his Second Bill of Rights. I find that the tactic, used late in FDR’s presidency, was moderately effective, served as a substitute for the personal energy FDR applied to the presidency in his first term, and created a backlash that contributed to the adoption of the Legislative Reform Act of 1946. With these findings I conclude that FDR deserves credit as a transitionary figure for the modernity of Congress, as well as the presidency.

Making Washington Work: Legislative Entrepreneurship and the Personal Vote from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression

AbstractStudies of bill sponsorship in the modern Congress highlight the effects of constituency characteristics, seniority, and committee membership. These studies, however, are limited in their ability to assess the effects of institutions. We provide the first systematic study of bill sponsorship in the premodern House of Representatives. In doing so, we take advantage of this period's expansive legislative agenda and variation in electoral system rules. Using matching and event count models, we estimate the effects of institutions, electoral competition, and members’ institutional positions and political experiences on their sponsorship of different types of bills. We find that two reforms—the Australian ballot and nominating primary—increased sponsorship of bills designed to cultivate personal votes, thereby contributing to the growth in private legislation and bills aimed at local constituencies. Our results establish these reforms as a major event shaping lawmaking activity and, with it, the character of contemporary representation.

The two faces of congressional roll-call voting

Most analyses of congressional voting, whether theoretical or empirical, treat all roll-call votes in the same way. We argue that such approaches mask considerable variation in voting behaviour across different types of votes. In examining all roll-call votes in the U.S. House of Representatives from the 93rd to the 110th Congresses (1973–2008), we find that the forces affecting legislators’ voting on procedural and final passage matters have exhibited important changes over time, with differences between these two vote types becoming larger, particularly in recent congresses. These trends have important implications not only on how we study congressional voting behaviour, but also in how we evaluate representation and polarization in the modern Congress.

A Game of Checkers Tribes Can Win: Tribal Authority to Zone Non-member Fee Land Using the First Montana Exception

The modern Congress and executive branch primarily recognized that American Indian tribes retain their inherent sovereign authority over people and property within Indian Country unless Congress acts to limit the authority. However, the Supreme Court incrementally moved away from the recognition of inherent sovereignty by implementing limits on tribal authority over crimes committed by nonmembers and tribal authority to assert civil regulatory and adjudicative jurisdiction over nonmembers. The Supreme Court first applied this theory of implicit divestiture to limit tribal civil regulatory authority in the landmark case Montana v. United States. This limitation of tribal sovereignty continues to severely impact the ability of tribal governments to implement successful zoning and comprehensive land use plans within reservation boundaries. Despite the Supreme Court’s divestiture of tribal authority over nonmember land, this Note offers advice and suggestions for tribes to use the language of these decisions to develop consensual relationships with nonmember fee land owners in the creation of comprehensive zoning plans.

The Electoral Encounter: Legislative Responsiveness to Challenger Campaign Issues in the U.S. House

This paper builds on the research of Tracy Sulkin who first introduced the concept of legislative uptake. When incumbents up their previous challengers themes, they effectively incorporate the priority issues of a non-winning coalition of voters. If uptake behavior is prevalent in the modern Congress it augments the responsiveness of legislators to minority interests. Here, I reexamine the legacy of electoral challengers using new measurement strategies. I take a small sample of House incumbents over several Congresses to determine whether incumbents' attention to challenger issues increases in the legislative session immediately following their reelection. Campaign data is generated using the CQ Special Election Editions and legislative data comes directly from the Library of Congress. An interrupted time-series design with pre-test and post-test measures of issue-attention are used with the campaign challenger as the treatment”. More vulnerable members should engage in higher levels of uptake according to Sulkin since the taking up of challenger issues is motivated by electoral insecurity. Contrary to this intuitive logic, I find that exposure to campaign challengers does not significantly affect the legislative attention of incumbents after they return to Washington.

The Lost Republic? A Review of Lawrence Lessig's Republic, Lost

Lawrence Lessig's book Republic, Lost argues that a new type of corruption has overcome the modern Congress. Unlike the venal corruption of earlier periods, for example the gilded age, the 21st Century Congress has become corrupt in entirely legal ways. The pressures of campaign finance, and of making connections in the influence economy, distract and distort elected officials from serving the public interest. Voters perceive the electoral system to be corrupt, losing trust in government. Lessig proposes reforms remove elected officials from having a role in campaign finance. Through mechanisms such as the democracy voucher, Lessig proposes to spend more in aggregate on elections, but have the composition be much less concentrated. This review critically reviews Lessig's argument by comparison to the received empirical literature in the social sciences. While drawing attention to important yet underappreciated aspects of these problems, Lessig book warrants a strong audience. However, the corruption narrative is not supported by the literature, and the reform proposals like previous reforms can be strategically circumnavigated.

Congress behaving badly: the rise of partisanship and incivility and the death of public trust

About the Author Preface Chapter 1 The Problem of Incivility and Partisanship Chapter 2 The Capitol Hill Junior High School Chapter 3 Changing of the Guard Chapter 4 Whats Behind Partisanship and Uncivil Debate in Congress? Chapter 5 Whither Confidence and Respect in the Modern Congress? Chapter 6 The Impact of Partisanship and Incivility on the Legislative Process Chapter 7 Democracy is a Conversation Index

The Contemporary Presidency: The Presidential “Hundred Days”: An Overview

The “Hundred Days” of 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt at the onset of his first term got sixteen major bills through Congress, is a poor guide to what contemporary presidents can plan or hope to do in their first three months. For one thing, under the Twentieth Amendment, Congress is already in regular session when they arrive, and three months takes one only to the Easter recess of the first session. For another thing, presidential “honeymoons” with the public, hence with Congress, rarely last until summer, while the crucial months for controversial bids usually come later. Third, brand‐new presidents and their associates in both the cabinet and White House tend to be too ignorant of Congress and of one another to take full advantage of the opportunities their first months bring.

Old Voters, New Voters, and the Personal Vote: Using Redistricting to Measure the Incumbency Advantage

We provide new estimates of the size of the personal vote in U.S. House elections from 1872 to 1990. We take advantage of the natural experiment that attends decennial redistricting: every ten years, most incumbents are given new districts that contain a combination of old and new territory. By contrasting an incombent's vote in the new part of the district with his or her vote in the old part of the district, we can estimate the magnitude of the personal vote-the vote that the incumbent receives because he or she represented the voters in the past. Our estimates confirm prior work that shows that a large fraction of the incumbency advantage owes to the personal vote, as opposed to challenger quality. Unlike past research, we are able to estimate the relationship between district partisanship and the personal vote. We find a significant interaction which shows that incumbents develop larger personal votes in areas where they are electorally most vulnerable. here is no doubt that incumbents today have a substantial advantage over nonincumbents in U.S. House elections. The overall size of this advantage has been fairly well established, as has the fact that incumbents' electoral strength has increased dramatically over the postwar period. Measured in terms of vote share, the overall incumbency advantage grew from a modest 1-3 percentage point edge in the 1940s and early 1950s to a 7-10 percentage point edge in the 1980s and early 1990s.1 There is much less agreement about the sources of the incumbency advantage and the causes of its growth. Congressional scholars have identified a variety of factors that may be responsible, which can be grouped into three broad categories. The first, and the focus of this paper, is electoral advantage that stems from a legislator's homestyle. Members of the House are reputedly very responsive to their constituents; in turn, their constituents reward them with their votes. Mayhew (1974b), Fenno (1974), and others detail the sorts of activities that legislators do to build a widely known and respected name, including casework, frequent visits to the district, position-taking on issues, and securing federal benefits. A second source of the incumbency advantage is candidate quality. Incumbents may win because they are the best candidates running, and they do noticeably worse when they face state legislators and other experienced challengers. Finally, incumbency may simply act as a voting cue, a label which voters rely on because party has become less relevant. Assessing the importance of these different factors has significant implications for our normative evaluations of the modern congress and our understanding

Great theatre: the American Congress in the 1990s

Figures and tables Preface Contributors Part I. Introduction: 1. Theatre in the round: congress in action Herbert F. Weisberg and Samuel C. Patterson Part II. Congress and its Audience 2. Representation in congress: line drawing and minorities Kenny J. Whitby and Franklin D. Gilliam Jr 3. Unsympathetic audience: citizens' evaluations of congress Samuel C. Patterson and David C. Kimball 4. Back from intermission: the 1994 elections and the return to divided government Dean Lacy Part III. Congress at Play: 5. Directing 535 leading men and leading ladies: party leadership in the modern congress Paul S. Herrnson 6. Little theatre: committees in congress Tim Groseclose and David C. King 7. The unfolding drama: party and ideology in the 104th house Barry C. Burden and Aage R. Clausen Part IV. Congress and Other Actors: 8. The plot thickens: congress and the president Barbara Sinclair 9. Congress and the courts: a case of casting Elliot E. Slotnick and Sheldon Goldman 10. Behind the scenes: the Supreme Court and congress in statutory interpretation Lori Hausegger and Lawrence Baum 11. Congress and foreign policy: a neglected stage Randall B. Ripley Part V. Conclusion: 12. 'The play's the thing': congress and the future Samuel C. Patterson and Herbert F. Weisberg References Index.

Intraparty Preferences, Heterogeneity, and the Origins of the Modern Congress: Progressive Reformers in the House and Senate, 1890-1920

In this article, the emergence of the modern Congress, characterized by a seniority system, strong committees, and weak party leadership, is linked to changes in external electoral forces. Specifically, we argue that the changes in both House and Senate organization were driven by the rise of heterogeneity within the dominant Republican party. We show that the centralized systems of Cannonism and Aldrichism were incompatible with the heterogeneous preferences created by the rising numbers of Progressive Republicans, causing both Houses to reform their systems of allocation of desirable committee posts. Furthermore, the differing modes of change between the Houses are due to basic differences in structure.

Participation in Congress

For every issue that arises on the legislative agenda, each member of Congress must make two decisions: What position to take and how active to be. The first has been thoroughly studied. But little is understood about the second. In this landmark book, a leading scholar of congressional studies draws on extensive interviews and congressional documents to uncover when and how members of congress participate at the subcommittee, committee, and floor stages of legislative decision making. Richard L. Hall develops an original theory to account for varying levels of participation across members and issues, within House and Senate, and across pre- and postreform periods of the modern Congress. By closely analyzing behavior on sixty bills in the areas of agriculture, human resources, and commerce, Hall finds that participation at each stage of the legislative process is rarely universal and never equal. On any given issue, most members who are eligible to participate forego the opportunity to do so, leaving a self-selected few to deliberate on the policy. These active members often do not reflect the values and interests evident in their parent chamber. A deeper understanding of congressional participation, the author contends, informs related inquiries into how well members of congress represent constituents' interests, what factors influence legislative priorities, how members gain legislative leverage on specific issues, and how well collective choice in Congress meets democratic standards of representative deliberation.

A Dynamic Model of Loss, Retirement, and Tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives

This article analyzes the relative importance of falling electoral loss rates and retirement rates in creating the structure of tenure in the modern Congress. We develop a dynamic model in which electoral loss and voluntary retirement determine a unique long-run equilibrium (or steady-state) tenure profile, which is the fraction of members in each term of service. The model is then used to derive steady-state tenure profiles for the period 1870 to 1930 and to compare them to profiles that are simulated under different counterfactual hypotheses about loss and retirement. We briefly consider more recent congresses as well. We find that declining retirement accounts for 75% of the total long-run change in turnover from 1870 to 1930. However, declining electoral loss accounts for 82% of the total long-run change in turnover from the period of "pre-incumbency" (1926-1946) to the 1980s (1982-1988).

Congressional reform: the changing modern congress

Congressional reform: the changing modern congress

Rejoinder: Congressional Informal Groups—Sideshow, or the Changing Nature of Congressional Representation?

I am grateful to Thomas Longoria and Susan Hammond for their comments, and for the opportunity to respond to several points raised concerning my article. The essay dealt with several issues, some of which deserve additional explanation, as both Longoria and Hammond point out. Nonetheless, I believe my article and the ensuing commentaries suggest a rethinking of the issue of congressional informal groups in the modern Congress. I shall begin with the three main methodological issues that Hammond and Longoria raise: the overlap between role and activity variables, response bias of survey data, and the use of elite interviews. Next, I address Hammond’s issue of the distinction between legislative service organizations (LSOs) and non-LSOs. Finally, I close with a response to Longoria’s comments on congressional groups testifying before congressional committees with two cases of the Hispanic Caucus and the 1980s immigration reform efforts.

Institutional Change, Discretion, and the Making of Modern Congress: An Economic Interpretation. By Glenn R. Parker. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 118p. $29.95.

Institutional Change, Discretion, and the Making of Modern Congress: An Economic Interpretation. By Glenn R. Parker. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 118p. $29.95.