Party Caucus Research Articles

The social identity voting model: Ideology and community structures

Social identity voting (SIV) is a new model of voting behavior based on the principles of social identity theory. We introduce and use this model to analyze roll call votes for the 35th through 112th US Congresses. Comparing out-of-sample accuracy of SIV and Poole and Rosenthal’s Weighted NOMINAL Three-step Estimation (W-NOMINATE), we find that SIV performs better than the one- or two-dimensional W-NOMINATE model and that generally, W-NOMINATE needs up to 10 dimensions to produce accuracy comparable to that of SIV. The differences between SIV and W-NOMINATE are further clarified in three case studies: first, a longitudinal examination of all Congresses; second, an analysis of the 112th House of Representatives; and third, a study of the Tea Party caucus in the 112th House of Representatives. Each study sheds new light on the potential motivations driving voting behavior, supporting our assertion that the SIV and W-NOMINATE models provide two distinct approaches to understanding voting records. SIV, with its emphasis on political identity derived from group membership, expresses combinations of individual and group preferences which contribute to legislators’ ideological classifications.

Black Tea, Green Tea, White Tea, and Coffee: Understanding the Variation in Attachment to the Tea Party Among Members of Congress

The Tea Party is the most significant political movement in 21st century American politics. First, it has had an extraordinary effect on the Republican Party. A boon to conservative Republicans, it has made life difficult for moderate Republicans, particularly those who are elected officials. Somewhat surprisingly, given the burgeoning literature on the mass-level Tea Party, the Tea Party in government has generated relatively less interest (or scholarship). And what research there is on the Tea Party in government suggests that the foundations of the movement in the mass public are not easily translatable into Tea Party legislators’ incentives or their actions (see, for example, Arceneaux and Nicholson 2011 and Gervais and Morris 2012). One reason for the dearth of research on the Tea Party in government is the difficulty associated with identifying which legislators are “true” Tea Party members. While Tea Party Caucus membership has been used to identify Tea Party members, it is a flawed measure, and now that it is dormant, it has lost even the limited usefulness it once had. In this paper, we address this limitation of the current literature. We use an array of different types of data to tap into a politician’s connection to the Tea Party. This data include campaign contributions from organizations explicitly tied to the Tea Party movement, endorsements from Tea Party organizations, and the prevalence of joint media references to individual politicians and the Tea Party. These data suggest that Tea Party attachment is a multi-dimensional variable. We label the various types of Tea Party supporters as Black Tea, Green Tea, White Tea, and Coffee, and we demonstrate that the ideological dispositions and institutional positions of members vary according to their type of Tea Party attachment. We conclude with a discussion of our future research and the significance of organized variation in Tea Party attachment for legislative policymaking.

The Changing Roles of House Party Leadership Organizations: The House Republican Policy Committee

More than 100 members in each of the two House party caucuses participate in the parties’ formal organizations—the extended party leadership. What purposes do these institutional components of the parties serve, and how and why have they changed over the last three decades? This article begins to answer these questions through a case study of the Republican Policy Committee based on primary documents as well as quantitative analysis. I show that the Republican leadership has used the committee for participation, coordination, and communication functions within the Conference, but that the roles of the committee have changed substantially in response to strengthening party government conditions, GOP majority status, heightened competition for control of the House, and the individual goals of key Republican leaders. Among other changes, the committee became more important for coordinating policy positions and strategy during the 1980s, but the strong, centralized majority leadership in the 1990s diminished this important coordination function and left the committee with an emphasis on partisan communication.

Polarization and Ideology: Partisan Sources of Low Dimensionality in Scaled Roll Call Analyses

In this article, we challenge the conclusion that the preferences of members of Congress are best represented as existing in a low-dimensional space. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations altering assumptions regarding the dimensionality and distribution of member preferences and scale the resulting roll call matrices. Our simulations show that party polarization generates misleading evidence in favor of low dimensionality. This suggests that the increasing levels of party polarization in recent Congresses may have produced false evidence in favor of a low-dimensional policy space. However, we show that focusing more narrowly on each party caucus in isolation can help researchers discern the true dimensionality of the policy space in the context of significant party polarization. We re-examine the historical roll call record and find evidence suggesting that the low dimensionality of the contemporary Congress may reflect party polarization rather than changes in the dimensionality of policy conflict.

Voting from the Pew: The Effect of Senators' Religious Identities on Partisan Polarization in the U.S. Senate

Partisan polarization in the Senate is in part a product of the increased sorting of evangelical Christians into the Republican caucus. The relationship between senators' religious identities, party affiliation, and ideology has changed since the 1970s. Whereas congressional party caucuses in the past were more diverse in their religious composition, evangelical Christian senators have sorted themselves into the party that most closely resembles the values of their religious identities, leading to greater overall polarization.

Explainingvariation in the Competitivenes of U.S. Senate Elections, 1922-2004

Understanding the nature of political competition is a central issue in political economy. This paper offers an explanation for observed variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections since direct elections to the Senate became fully effective in 1922. We deliberately abstract away from candidate-specific factors to look at more general features of the electoral landscape. In the framework we develop, national party-specific constraints on the ideological positioning of local Senate candidates interact with the heterogeneity of state electorates to determine the number of highly competitive electoral contests. The model predicts that the number of local contests that are highly competitive will be greater: (1) if a party's national caucus is ideologically more heterogeneous, signaling a decline in the ability of the national party to impose restrictions on local candidates and/or greater tolerance on the part of contributors of deviation from the national party image; (2) if voters in a state are more ideologically heterogeneous; and (3) if only registered party members may vote in a (closed) state primary. To test these hypotheses, we use a spline estimation procedure to predict the effect of key factors identified by the theoretical framework on the size of a highly competitive segment or set of elections, as opposed to segments where one or the other party dominates. The results provide some support for the hypothesis concerning primary elections, and strong support for the two predictions concerning the heterogeneity of the national party caucus and of local electorates.

THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF LAME-DUCK LAWMAKING: THE TEXT, HISTORY, INTENT, AND ORIGINAL MEANING OF THE TWENTIETH AMENDMENT

Echoing arguments made by two prominent legal scholars, members of the House of Representatives’ Tea Party Caucus challenged the constitutionality of laws passed by the outgoing 111th Congress after the November 2010 elections. Such “lame-duck lawmaking” violates the Twentieth Amendment, they charged. These claims have become part of the partisan rhetoric. This Article examines the text, history, intent, and meaning of the Amendment in light of arguments that its overriding intent, and perhaps enforceable duty, is to bar lame-duck Congresses from conducting regular business after the elections. The extensive history of congressional deliberation on the Amendment shows that the sponsors’ principal goals were to advance the date for the installation of a new Congress and administration, abolish the old short session of Congress, and assure that a newly-elected Congress resolves disputed presidential elections. These purposes are captured in both the text of the Amendment and the original meaning of the arguments made by its supporters. The constitutional history, sponsors’ intent, and original meaning for the Amendment do not in any way call into question the constitutionality of lame-duck lawmaking. The Twentieth Amendment is a clear, precisely worded, and virtually self-enforcing provision that substantially advances democratic norms of popular governance.

Reading the Tea Leaves: Understanding Tea Party Caucus Membership in the US House of Representatives

AbstractIn the summer of 2010, 52 Republican members of the US House of Representatives joined the newly formed Tea Party Caucus, bringing the first institutional voice to the Tea Party movement. To understand both thepolicyorientations of the organized Tea Party (in its caucus manifestation) and the institutional strength of the caucus's membership, we assess the extent to which caucus members are distinctive from their fellow Republicans in the US House of Representatives. Our results suggest that membership in the caucus is primarily driven by ideology and economics. Specifically, we find that Tea Party Caucus members are Republicans who are ideologically oriented toward limited government and lower taxes and who hail from particularly prosperous congressional districts. We find no evidence that Tea Party Caucus members serve safer districts or have greater seniority or institutional stature than their Republican colleagues who are not members of the caucus. These findings, we believe, speak not only to the nature and orientations of the Tea Party Caucus, but to the wider Tea Party movement itself.

Legitimate Absenteeism: The Unconstitutionality of the Caucus Attendance Requirement

Dubbed by the Washington Post as “undemocratic,” the caucus system for selecting delegates to national party presidential nominating conventions tends to disenfranchise identifiable factions of voters, including deployed service members, religious observers, persons with disabilities or in poor health, students who attend school away from home, and shift workers unable to leave work during caucus hours. This Note contends that eligible party voters have the constitutional right to vote in their political parties’ caucuses without being physically present. It presents three central constitutional arguments that raise doubts about the constitutionality of the physical attendance requirement of many state party caucuses: first, that the attendance requirement may violate the First Amendment associational rights of voters; second, that it may breach Fourteenth Amendment equal protection of the right to vote; and third, that it may constitute an unconstitutional poll tax. This Note proposes four alternatives to the present caucus system that could eliminate or mitigate the potential unconstitutionality of the physical attendance requirement. Additionally, it examines which actors are best situated to reform caucuses. It concludes that the most effective avenues toward reform are an associational rights judicial challenge or congressional legislation.

Walter Nash

Walter Nash was born in Kidderminster, England in 1882. He migrated to New Zealand in 1909 and soon joined the New Zealand Labour Party. He was its National Secretary from 1922-31 and in 1929 was elected MP for Hutt in a by-election, a seat he held until his death. As Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister in the first Labour government(1935-49) he was involved in tough trade and finance negotiations with Britain in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War II. In 1941 he was appointed Minister to Washington — New Zealand’s first diplomatic representative there - and he put New Zealand on Washington’s political map. (Later New Zealand representatives soon learned that Walter was well and favourably known there for years after the end of his term.) He was Leader of the Opposition in 1950-57 and Prime Minister from 1957 to 1960. Nash acquired a genuine devotion to his adopted country and its interests, but he never lost his affection for Britain, 'the Old Country’ in his words. In 1956 he was exceedingly reluctant to criticise Britain for its part in the Suez debacle until his Labour Party caucus forced his hand. In 1962,he travelled to Britain at Prime Minister Holyoake’s request to talk to Hugh Gaitskell, the British Labour Party leader, and his senior colleagues, about how New Zealand’s interests might best be protected ifthe Macmillan government succeeded with the first British application to join the European Economic Community (EEC), an application effectively vetoed by French President Charlesde Gaulle in 1963.

Congressional Leadership on the Front Lines: Committee Chairs, Electoral Security, and Ideology

During the 2006 campaign, many on the political right expressed anxiety about the slate of Democratic representatives and senators poised to become committee chairs in the event of a Democratic victory. After the election, despite post-election promises of “unity” and “bipartisanship” among congressional Democrats, the question remained: How well would this progressive group of “old bulls” work with the new majority, the existence of which was due in part to the 61 Democrats representing House districts that President George W. Bush won in 2004? (Greenblatt 2007, 524) In this paper, we investigate the claim that Democratic committee leaders in the 110thCongress are out of step with their party caucus by comparing the ideological leadership profiles of chairs in the 110thCongress with those of their Republican predecessors in the 109th, as well as those of Democratic chairs from the “Textbook,” “Reform,” and early “Post-reform” eras. We show that Democratic chairs in the 110thCongress are primarily drawn from the most liberal ranks of the Democratic Caucus, particularly in the House. The authors wish to thank Sara Callow for her excellent and timely research assistance.

In Search of the Uncovered Set

This paper pursues a number of theoretical explorations and conjectures pertaining to the uncovered set in spatial voting games. It was stimulated by the article “The Uncovered Set and the Limits of Legislative Action” by W. T. Bianco, I. Jeliazkov, and I. Sened (2004, Political Analysis 12:256—78) that employed a grid-search computational algorithm for estimating the size, shape, and location of the uncovered set, and it has been greatly facilitated by access to the CyberSenate spatial voting software being developed by Joseph Godfrey. I bring to light theoretical considerations that account for important features of the Bianco, Jeliazkov, and Sened results (e.g., the straight-line boundaries of uncovered sets displayed in some of their figures, the “unexpectedly large” uncovered sets displayed in other figures, and the apparent sensitivity of the location of uncovered sets to small shifts in the relative sizes of party caucuses) and present theoretical insights of more general relevance to spatial voting theory.

Term Limits, Campaign Contributions, and the Distribution of Power in State Legislatures

Using campaign contributions to legislators as an indicator of member influence, we explore the impact of term limits on the distribution of power within state legislatures. Specifically, we perform a cross‐state comparison of the relative influence of party caucus leaders, committee chairs, and rank‐and‐file legislators before and after term limits. The results indicate that term limits diffuse power in state legislatures, both by decreasing average contributions to incumbents and by reducing the power of party caucus leaders relative to other members. The change in contribution levels across legislators in different chambers implies a shift in power to the upper chamber in states with term limits. Thus, the impact of term limits may be attenuated in a bicameral system.

Redistributing Campaign Funds by U.S. House Members: The Spiraling Costs of the Permanent Campaign

In this article, we document and analyze the increase in the redistribution of campaign funds by U.S. House members during the 1990 through 2000 election cycles. By examining the contribution activity of members' leadership PACs and principal campaign committees, we show that House incumbents substantially increased their contributions to other House candidates and to the congressional campaign committees. The amount of money a member redistributes is a function of that member's institutional position: the greater the position's level of responsibility to the party caucus, the more campaign money the member redistributes, particularly as competition for majority control increases. Also, a member's capacity to raise surplus campaign funds, his or her support for the party's policy positions, and the level of competition for partisan control of the institution all affect the amount the member redistributes.

What are the limits to public service advising? The ‘Public Argument’ test

Some Wellington policy advisers seem to feel underemployed these days. Although the volume of work is reportedly high, they complain about being relegated to implementing policies rather than formulating them. Where big picture policy is concerned, it is said that governments mostly develop their ideas outside the public service’s field of vision, in party caucuses, think tanks, and prime ministers’ inner circles, or in consultation with special advisers who report directly to ministers. Policy advisers are then left to fill in the blanks. Some imply that things used to be ‘better’ and that advisers used to exert more leverage over high-level policy directions.

Still a Traditional Political Class? Patterns of Parliamentary Recruitment in Brazil (1946–2002)

This article aims at identifying patterns of parliamentary recruitment in Brazil. Fifteen legislatures elected between 1946 and 2002 to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies are investigated. Data on the path and political experience of every Brazilian federal representative are examined, including the representative's point of entry into politics, offices held, and length of career before achieving a parliamentary seat. Results show that parliamentary recruitment in Brazil demonstrates a pattern of lateral entry into a legislative career. A high and continuous parliamentary renewal rate is the most prominent feature and is a phenomenon common to different regions, states, and parties. The marked turnover does not take place only in caucuses of urban and electorally competitive states. Neither is it a phenomenon unknown among more conservative party caucuses. Even traditional, conservative parties, over this time period, have experienced significant levels of turnover inside their caucuses in the legislature.

Party Caucuses and Coordination: Assessing Caucus Activity and Party Effects

Party caucuses are increasingly important to members' allocation of time. This article reports findings from new data on the minutes, frequency, timing, and attendance of House party caucus meetings. I argue that the party caucuses increasingly affect political and policy information flows to members. This growing party coordination has resulted in a greater bonding and shared strategic information among rank‐and‐file copartisans.This research also contributes to the party effects literature. Earlier research on congressional partisanship has used roll‐call data to measure both member preferences and party effects. I investigate whether or not members' attendance at party caucus meetings immediately prior to key congressional votes imposes partisan cohesion beyond members' preferences. The results indicate that party coordination contributes to greater congressional party unity on key floor votes at both the bill and member level controlling for members' ideological preferences. This party coordination effect occurs even during a period of high intraparty preference homogeneity.

Consequences of the Unreformed Canadian Electoral System

Introduction In a classic article on the system in Canada, (1968) argued that the single-member plurality system (SMP) for choosing federal Members of Parliament had harmful effects on the party system. The mechanics of this system increased the regional distinctiveness of party caucuses beyond what occurs through social cleavages and voting shares. Since only one candidate can win in a riding, a party with a substantial vote across the constituencies in a region might receive few seats. Thus the party caucuses are more extreme regionally than is justified by voting shares. The system has made a major contribution to the identification of particular sections/provinces with particular parties. It has under-valued the partisan diversity within each section/province. By so doing it has rendered the parliamentary composition of each party less representative of the sectional interests in the political system than is the party electorate from which that representation is derived (Cairns 1968: 62). This is what Weaver (1999) refers to as the Cairns effect. Nevertheless, aside from replying to a criticism of his article in the CJPS (Lovink 1970; 1970), wrote little on this topic subsequently (Cairns 1979; 1981). In April 2001, he submitted a written affidavit in support of the Green Party's suit against the Canadian over SMP under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (2) Although Cairns' analysis has been critiqued by other scholars (Lovink 1970; Courtney 1980; Wiseman 1991; 1997), over time it has become increasingly accepted. (3) This has not yet led to a successful reform movement politically, however. The continuing disproportional federal results over the past three elections have been abetted by some strikingly disproportional provincial election results. This has led to more concerted questioning of the system by academics and political activists. Changing the system has managed to secure a tenuous foothold on the formal political agenda in Canada. This paper examines the empirical claims of Cairns' original analysis, their validity during the third of a century since the original article, and why they are having greater impact recently. The Electoral Systems Debate There are several different forms of systems (technically, electoral formulae) in the world. Nevertheless, the most-discussed alternatives are SMP and different versions of proportional representation (PR). In PR systems, seats are distributed on a countrywide or regional basis, and parties rewarded according to their share of the vote in multi-member constituencies. In recent years, mixed systems combining these two systems have made considerable inroads (Shugart and Wattenberg 2001). The ongoing debate between proponents of the two systems traditionally has revolved around the relative priorities of the need for a single party and constituency service versus the accurate representation of voting shares. Strong government advocates see SMP as more likely to produce a with a legislative majority (but not necessarily an overall majority or even a plurality of voters) and one in which there is a direct link between the local constituency and its one representative. PR advocates prefer having a legislature reflecting the partisan distribution of votes more closely, even if that leads to a multiparty formed after the election through negotiations among political leaders. Recent research also has suggested that the form of system may also be an important factor in policy outcomes, irrespective of the partisan coloration of governments (Weaver and Rockman 1993; Lijphart 1994a). did not focus on this broader debate, nor did he advocate a particular alternative formula. Instead, he concentrated on particular disadvantages of SMP for Canada and the general failure to address the issue. …

The Politics of Institutional Choice: The Formation of the Russian State Duma By Steven S. Smith and Thomas F. Remington. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 180p. $42.50 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Politics of Institutional Choice is an important contribution to the literature on legislative institutions. The authors' backgrounds complement each other to good effect. The result is a study that is both conversant with the literature on legislative politics in the United States and Western Europe and solidly grounded in the politics of contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the adoption of reformed legislative institutions by the Russian Republic in 1993 left the newly elected representatives with the need to devise a working set of parliamentary institutions for the newly formed bicameral legislature. The “building materials” out of which these were fashioned—legislative committees, party caucuses, rules allocating agenda control to leaders—resemble those of the U.S. Congress and Western European parliaments, but the institutional structure was adapted to the needs of Russian politics.

Party Discipline and Universalism: The Case of Budgeting in Berlin

Work on the US Congress has found that when partisan differences are strong, legislation tends to be passed by minimum winning coalitions. When partisanship is weak, Congress and its committees often rely on the norm of universalism or 'giving something to everyone' to pass legislation. Universalism in legislative voting is expected to lead to bloated or inefficient public spending. This article investigates whether these hypotheses about party discipline and universalism hold true outside the United States. A comparison of fiscal decision-making in local legislatures in eastern Berlin, where newly created political parties are weakly disciplined, and in western Berlin, where established party caucuses are highly disciplined, finds this is indeed the case. The article concludes by raising questions for future research on universalism and other post-communist legislatures.