Postreform House Research Articles

Partisan vote buying and suspensions in the Postreform House

In the US House, the Suspension of the Rules procedure provides a route by which vote buying may occur. To investigate the conditions under which partisan theories anticipate that this behavior is more likely to happen, I use a dataset of all bills on which a final passage vote was taken in the House between 1975 and 2010. The House is more likely to consider bills by suspension to provide side payments to three types of bill sponsors from the majority party: ideologically distant members of this group; members whose preferences are located within the first 30% of the space in the majority party blockout zone; and members whose preferences are located on the minority party side of the chamber median.

Rule Assignment in the Postreform House: A Test of Three Competing Theories of Legislative Organization

Each of the three major sets of competing theories of congressional organization makes different predictions about the behavior of the House Rules Committee. Several studies have examined which theory best explains the special rule assignments made by the House Rules Committee during the postreform period (Dion and Huber f996; Krehbiel 1997; Sinclair 1994). Each of these political scientists reaches different conclusions. As a result, we have a confused picture of how best to understand the behavior of the House Rules Committee. We argue that the lack of clarity in the literature is largely a byproduct of poor model specification. Our research extends the time period under consideration, introduces several models that we believe more accurately assess the predictions derived from partisan models of organization, and makes significant improvements to earlier indicators used in the literature. Our multivariate analysis includes variables from all of the prominent models of congressional organization. In our examination of bills voted out of committee with a roll call vote from 1981-94 and assigned a special rule by the House Rules Committee, we find that restrictive rules are more likely to be assigned to bills reported to the House by a committee with a party unity vote. Indicators derived from other models of congressional organization largely fail to achieve statistical significance.

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.

Southern Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. By Stanley P. Berard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. 250p. $22.95.

The rise of partisanship in Congress has been one of the most conspicuous features of American politics during the 1990s. David Rohde's (1991) Parties and Leaders in the PostReform House demonstrated that much of this rise in partisanship could be attributed to the convergence in congressional voting between Northern and Southern Democrats. Since the New Deal, the latter had traditionally allied with Republicans on many issues in a bipartisan conservative coalition that generally dominated both Houses of Congress and constrained liberal legislative outcomes. While Rohde and Barbara Sinclair (Legislators, Leaders and Lawmaking, 1995) have emphasized how institutional rule changes in the 1970s created a much greater incentive for party loyalty among member of Congress, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which enhanced partisanship in Congress has been driven by “bottom-up” electoral imperatives. Stanley Berard's new book on Southern Democrats in the House convincingly shows that major changes in the southern electoral environment were equally important in promoting convergence in the voting records of Northern and Southern Democrats, leading to a more partisan House overall.

Explaining the Role of Restrictive Rules in the Postreform House

Abstract Four competing explanations have emerged regarding restrictive rules in Congress. Informational theory claims that rules reduce information costs and facilitate committee specialization. The distributional perspective suggests that rules enforce legislative bargains and help members achieve gains‐from‐trade. Another claim is that rules increase the Rules Committee's independent influence over policy. Lastly, partisan theory asserts that rules are used to increase the majority party's influence over policy.Abstract This analysis tests these claims during the 97th, 98th, 104th, and 105th Congresses. The findings demonstrate that theoretical constructs developed in earlier analyses of special rules are not robust over time and across legislative contexts. The results refute majoritarian assertions that rules are used as informational devices. Similarly, little evidence supports the claim that Rules Committee preferences independently affect rule assignment. Instead, a partisan principal‐agent framework emerges as the most useful construct to explain procedural choice in the postreform House.

Explaining the Role of Restrictive Rules in the Postreform House

Explaining the Role of Restrictive Rules in the Postreform House

Eye of the storm: the South and Congress in an era of change

Introduction Critical Events in Contemporary Southern Politics: Dynamic Growth and Partisan Percolations by Ronald Keith Gaddie and Donna R. Hoffman What You See Is...Essentially...What You Get: House Races in the Contemporary South by Stanley P. Berard and David W. Rohde When Legislators Change Sides: The Implications of Party Defections in the South by James M. Glaser Congressional Responsiveness to Redistricting-Induced Constituency Change by Christine L. Sharpe The Contemporary South and the 1998 Elections by Charles S. Bullock III Southern Party Leaders in the Postreform House by Ronald M. Peters, Jr. The Conscience of the Revolution: Southern Influence in the House Republican Class of 1994 by Nicol C. Rae It's the Variable, Dummy: The Evolution of Congressional Ideology, 1947-1996 by Frank B. Feigert and Michael Ault Testing Hypotheses on Increased Ideological Polarization in U.S. House Delegations from the South After Redistricting by Allison L. Hayes and Kenneth A. Wink Payback or Continuity? GOP Support of the Religious Right in the House of Representatives by Mark Caleb Smith Epilogue: The South and Congress at the End of the Twentieth Century References Index

Explaining Partisanship on Special Rules in the Postreform House

Informational, distributive and partisan theories offer competing interpretations of the role of restrictive rules in the US House. Empirical tests in this literature focus almost exclusively on the amendment restriction portion of special rules, treating open rules as friendly and restrictive rules as unfriendly to the minority party or chamber as a whole. Oddly, however, there is a significant amount of conflict - partisan conflict in particular - connected with open rules. This suggests that the structuring of amendment possibilities cannot be the only relevant feature of special rules and that an exclusive focus on amendment restrictions might cause analysts to underestimate the importance of partisanship in the rules process. We find that partisan conflict on special rules results not only from the restrictiveness of the rule, but also from specific types of waivers (especially blanket waivers and waivers protecting legislative language in appropriations bills) and other under-studied features of special rules (such as time caps and pre-print requirements).

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.

Presidential Address: Southern Parties in State and Nation

One-half century ago, V. 0. Key, Jr., published his masterpiece, Southern Politics in State and Nation. Key's analysis of the failure of democracy in the South must count as one of the great achievements of our discipline. His explanation is rich and complex. Certainly the anti-liberal basis of society in the midtwentieth-century South was crucial-"Whatever phase of the southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro," he wrote (1984[1949], 5). But it was not only that the South was an illiberal society, what really mattered was that the South was also non-democratic. The failure of democracy can be traced to the absence of party competition and, according to Key, the consequent failure of a coherent and organized party system to emerge. His explanation is that the lack of organized partisan competition to win the support of the great body of the people, as James Madison might have put it, by itself accounts for the failure of democracy. In this account, therefore, if only there was regularized competition, there would be organized parties, and if only there were at least two organized political parties, democracy would inevitably follow. A cottage industry then arose to study, first, the possibility of partisan realignment in the South (e.g., Converse 1966; Phillips 1970), subsequently it sought to assess the inroads Republicans were making in their ability to compete in the South (e.g., Beck 1977; Black and Black 1987), and most recently that industry turned to examine the culmination of the process, ending with a fully competitive (perhaps even dominant) GOP in the South (e.g., Aistrup 1996; Black 1998; Lamis 1990). The attraction of this stream of research is understandable. These are scholars considering whether trends are pointing toward sustained, organized partisan competition. If that were to be so, we would then conclude that the full flowering of democracy would at last be expected to appear in the South.

Meeting Competing Demands: Committee Performance in the Postreform House

Theory: A conditional model of committee behavior is proposed to explain variation in committee responsiveness to chamber and party principals. Hypotheses: Committee member behavior is consistent with the preferences of both the floor and the party caucuses; variation in salience explains differences in committee responsiveness to noncommittee colleagues. Methods: Committee-specific votes are scaled to produce spatial locations for committee, floor, party caucuses, and party committee delegations; a Monte Carlo simulation is used to assess the statistical significance of voting alignments. Results: Postreform House committees generally act in a manner acceptable to both the chamber and majority party; the Democratic caucus is frequently represented by extreme committee delegations; members of salient committees are more loyal agents of the chamber and majority party than are members of low salient committees.

The Speaker and the Budget: Leadership in the Post-Reform House of Representatives. By Daniel J. Palazzolo. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. 262p. $39.95.

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The Speaker and the Budget: Leadership in the Post-Reform House of Representatives, by Daniel J. Palazzolo

The Speaker and the Budget: Leadership in the Post-Reform House of Representatives, <i>by Daniel J. Palazzolo</i>

The speaker and the budget: leadership in the post-reform House of Representatives

One of the most important changes in Congress in decades was the extensive congressional reforms of the 1970s, which moved the congressional budget process into the focus of congressional policy-making and shifted decision-making away from committees. This overwhelming attention to the federal budget allowed party leaders to emerge as central decision makers. Palazzolo traces the changing nature of the Speaker of the House's role in the congressional budget process from the passage of the and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to the 100th Congress in 1988. In the early 1970s, the Speaker attended to primarily supportive and managerial tasks that helped establish and maintain the budget process. Yet, as the deficit grew and budget politics became more partisan in the 1980s, the Speaker became more involved in policy-related functions, such as setting budget priorities and negotiating budget agreements with Senate leaders and the president. Consequently, the Speaker's role as leader of the institution was subordinate to the role as party leader. Palazzolo develops broader theoretical insights about congressional leadership by explaining how the Speaker's roles evolved and how different Speakers - Carl Albert, Tip O'Neill, and Jim Wright - performed their roles. He asserts that leadership is produced by both the qualities of individual leaders and the institutional, political and policy-related circumstances that shape congressional politics. Leadership roles develop in response to problems and opportunities in the budget process that stem from changing conditions, but individuals partly determine how these roles are performed. The Speaker and the Budget incorporates an eclectic range of research findings, including personal interviews with current and former members of Congress and key staff personnel. Its descriptions of budget politics and the perspective it gives to congressional leadership should be of interest to students of Congress, budgeting, and political leadership, as well as practitioners involved in making budget policy.

Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House.David W. RohdeThe Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process.D. Roderick Kiewiet , Mathew D. McCubbins

<i>Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House.</i>David W. Rohde<i>The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process.</i>D. Roderick Kiewiet , Mathew D. McCubbins

Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House, by David W. Rhode

Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House, <i>by David W. Rhode</i>

The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process. By D. Roderick Kiewiet and Mathew D. McCubbins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 286p. $34.00 cloth, $12.95 paper. - Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House. By David W. Rohde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 232p. $39.95 cloth, $13.95 paper.

The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process. By D. Roderick Kiewiet and Mathew D. McCubbins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 286p. $34.00 cloth, $12.95 paper. - Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House. By David W. Rohde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 232p. $39.95 cloth, $13.95 paper.

Rohde, David W.Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House.

"Rohde, David W. Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House.." Congress & the Presidency, 19(1), pp. 90–91

Parties and leaders in the postreform house

Parties and leaders in the postreform house

Managing uncertainty in the House of Representatives: adaptation and innovation in special rules

The postreform House of Representatives of the 1980's is strikingly different from the House of the 1970s. A most important change is the increasingly creative use of special rules, which structure floor debate on major legislation. The new trade of special rule craftsmanship now plays a pivotal role in managing the uncertainties of decisionmaking in the House. During the 1970s new issues and new members disrupted old ways of doing business, while organizational and procedural reforms redistributed influence and resources in ways not always anticipated. These combined to produce a much less stable, predictable environment for the Rules Committee and the entire House. In response, the Rules Committee and the Democratic leadership devised new strategies in the form of special rules. These special rules are more complex and varied in their provisions and more likely to be restrictive in their effect on amending activity. Special rules have altered members' political calculations and strategies, changed the ways committees can protect themselves from attack on the floor, and presented the minority party with new constraints on proposing legislative alternatives. Stanley Bach and Steven Smith examine these dramatic changes in the character of special rules and their use to shape debate and decisions in the House.