Congressional Support Research Articles

Commitments, Ideology Clash Over DOE Research Spending

Despite congressional support for science office, U.S. payments to the international fusion experiment, ITER, could lead to severe cuts.

Whose Approval Matters? Reelection, Constituency Approval, and Senate Support for President George W. Bush

Debate exists concerning the impact of presidential approval on congressional support for the president. One source of this debate is that while theory specifies an electoral connection, suggesting that legislators will be responsive to approval within their reelection constituency, most research employs national approval measures. Lack of constituency-level data has forced studies to use national measures of approval, but in as much as national and district level approval differ, national approval will not provide quality estimates of district opinion on the president. This article uses SurveyUSA data from 2005–2006, which provide state-level estimates for approval as well as breakdowns by partisanship (Democrats, Republicans, Independent). Analysis finds that, with controls, state-level approval has a statistically significant, albeit marginal, impact on senator support for the president. Stronger effects on support are found for approval from the senators’ reelection constituency, defined as voters of the senators’ party. These findings suggest directions for future research.

“The Army is a Service, Not a Job”: Unionization, Employment, and the Meaning of Military Service in the Late-Twentieth Century United States

AbstractThis article tells the story of an often-forgotten attempt to unionize the United States armed forces in the 1970s. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), an AFL-CIO-affiliated union representing federal employees, voted to allow military personnel to join its union in 1976. Military personnel proved far more open to the bid than expected. Nursing grievances from threatened congressional cuts to their institutional benefits, between one-third and one-half welcomed the union. Though a worried Congress, a powerful military leadership, and skeptical public opinion quashed unionization within the year, the brief episode nevertheless left an influential legacy. Coming just after the difficult transition from the draft to the volunteer force, the union bid forced military leaders, soldiers, and supporters in Congress to defend both military service and military benefits from encroachments of an “occupational” model symbolized by unionization. Their successful distinction between military service and employment elevated the former as uniquely honorable and arduous—and thus deserving of unwavering congressional support. Public unions, the embodiment of the occupational threat to military service, emerged bruised by the comparisons to vaunted military service and endured a decades-long decline in membership and congressional protection.

Tikkun at 25

<i>Tikkun</i> at 25

American Indian Self-Determination: The Political Economy of a Policy that Works

Since the 1970s, federal American Indian policy in the United States has been aimed at promoting self-determination through self-governance by federally-recognized tribes. This policy has proven to be the only policy that has worked to make significant progress in reversing otherwise distressed social, cultural and economic conditions in Native communities. The policy of self-determination reflects a political equilibrium which has held for four decades and which has withstood various shifts in the party control of Congress and the White House. While Republicans have provided relatively weak support for social spending on Indian issues when compared to Democrats, both parties’ representatives have generally been supportive of self-determination and local self-rule for tribes. Analysis of thousands of sponsorships of federal legislation over 1970-present, however, finds the equilibrium under challenge. In particular, since the late 1990s, Republican congressional support for policies of self-determination has fallen off sharply and has not returned. The recent change in the party control of Congress calls into question the sustainability of self-determination through self-governance as a central principle of federal Indian policy.

Civil Service Reform Under George W. Bush: Ideology, Politics, and Public Personnel Administration

This article focuses on the George W. Bush administration’s failed effort to impose radical personnel reforms on the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. We use an analytical framework suggesting three overlapping primary reasons for reform: (a) technical concerns, (b) ideological beliefs, and (c) a desire by the executive to enhance political control. The results of our analysis show that, whereas motivations for the Bush reforms were mixed, changes advocated by the administration were largely politically and ideologically motivated. As a result, they met stiff resistance from stakeholders, particularly federal employee unions and their supporters in Congress, and the reforms were ultimately scuttled. One lesson from this experience is that reformers should avoid radical changes to personnel systems based largely on ideological and political preferences. Reforms that are more incremental in nature and grounded more firmly on technical matters related to the implementation of core personnel functions will, in our view, be more likely to succeed. Yet a conundrum exists: if presidential scholars are correct, even these types of reforms may be held hostage by proposals that reflect the views of partisans unwilling to compromise in what appears to be an enduring era of polarized politics in Washington.

“An Appeal to the People”: Public Opinion and Congressional Support for the Supreme Court

Scholars often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public support for courts cannot, by itself, explain congressional support for judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of courts will be a function of public confidence in the legislature as well as evaluations of the judiciary. We test this theory, finding that public confidence in both Congress and the Court significantly affect congressional support for the Supreme Court, controlling for the ideological distance between the Court and Congress as well as the Court’s workload. The results offer a more refined and complex view of the role of public sentiment in balancing institutional power in American politics.

At the Cross-Roads of a Reform Era: The Impact of Health Care and Immigration Reform on Latino Support for President Obama and Congress

The Obama administration has pledged to reform two failing policy systems in the United States; immigration and health care. The Obama administration is faced with the rapid growth of the immigrant population, and a lack of uniform set of policies and programs to aid in the social, economic, and political incorporation of this rapidly growing immigration population, including a lack of consensus about a path of citizenship for immigrants (Singer 2009). Furthermore, the contemporary health care system is plagued with escalating costs, economic and disparities related to access and quality, and there is also a rapidly growing uninsured population in the United States (OECD 2008). The Latino populations’ attitudes toward these two critical policy areas are particularly relevant for several reasons. First, 39.8% of the Latino community is foreign-born (Pew Hispanic Center 2009) and 28% of Latinos have at least one foreign-born parent (Suro and Passel 2003), making immigration policy a salient issue for many Latinos. Second, Latinos have the highest uninsured rates, and the lowest percentage of people with employer coverage health insurance when compared to other racial and ethnic groups in the United States (James, Thomas, Lillie-Blanton, and Garfield 2007). While researchers recognize the significance of these two policies for the Latino community, studies have yet to examine current public opinion toward these two policies, and more importantly whether these attitudes affect Latino support of the current administration. In order to fill this gap in the literature we use the 2009 Latino Decisions survey of Latinos to examine how Latino public opinion regarding health care and immigration reform affects Latino support of President Obama and Congress. We find that these two policies are significant in Latino support of President Obama and Congress. This shows that Latinos support is political in nature with policies driving their support of the current administration. Given the vital role the Latino electorate played during the 2008 election, the success of these two policy reform efforts may have major implications for the 2010 and 2012 elections.

From Private Consultation to Public Crusade: Assessing Eisenhower's Legislative Strategies on Foreign Policy

Existing scholarship describes Congress as deferring to Dwight Eisenhower on foreign policy during the majority of his presidency. In this article, I demonstrate that Congress resisted key elements of Eisenhower's foreign policy agenda throughout his presidency, and that Eisenhower needed to employ a variety of sophisticated strategies to obtain congressional backing. On foreign aid—one of his top presidential priorities—Eisenhower launched a multifaceted and innovative campaign to build congressional support, which included the establishment of White House-funded private advocacy groups to educate the public about the issue. Eisenhower's approach on foreign aid reveals that he was willing to depart from his “hidden-hand” leadership style when necessary to advance a top priority, but that even when going public, Eisenhower relied in part on others to deliver his message.

The contradictions of juvenile crime &amp; punishment

This essay explores the contradictions and puzzles of modern juvenile justice, and illustrates the enduring power of the child-saving philosophy of the juvenile court in an era of punitiveness toward offenders both young and old. The exponential growth in incarceration in the U.S. since the 1970s has been more restrained for juveniles than adults, even in the face of a youth violence epidemic that lasted for nearly a decade. Rhetoric has grown harsher in the wake of moral panics about youth crime, juvenile codes now express the language of retribution and incapacitation, yet the growth in incarceration of juveniles was attenuated and declined more responsively to declining crime rates. Almost no states have lowered the age of majority, even in the face of wholesale removal of juveniles to the criminal court. States have embraced the ideals and practice of small institutions, yet conditions in juvenile corrections often remain harsh and are common targets of litigation. Racial disparity still pervades juvenile incarceration, despite Congressional support of a collaborative project to reduce racial inequalities in juvenile detention and corrections. These conflicting trends portray an institutional and normative landscape that at once fears child criminals and seeks to punish them harshly, but at the same time pulls its punches as it adheres to the transcendent and enduring philosophy of child-saving.

Diverting the Legislature: Executive-Legislative Relations, the Economy, and US Uses of Force1

Given distinct partisan macroeconomic preferences, the partisanship of the president or majority in Congress should influence presidential decisions to use force in the face of poor economic conditions—the diversionary use of force. But previous research posits contradictory accounts of the influence of partisanship. We seek to resolve this debate by developing a game theory model, which predicts that leaders divert when government is divided and economic conditions hurt the opposition party's constituency. Leaders seek to divert the legislature from the economy in order to prevent the legislature from passing a remedial economic bill. Analyzing US conflict behavior since World War II, we examine the conditional influence of presidential partisanship and the president's cohesive partisan support in Congress on the effects of inflation and unemployment. Consistent with the model's predictions, we find that as their cohesive partisan support in Congress declines, Democratic presidents tend to use force in response to inflation and Republican presidents tend to use force in response to unemployment.

Revisiting the life and scientific reputation of Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden

Profiles of Rocky Mountain Geologists – a continuing series Hayden annoyed almost everyone he knew at one time or another; he thrived on spiteful controversy. —Mike Foster, 1994, p. 351 At the period of his greatest success Hayden was always the same unpretentious and enthusiastic seeker for knowledge. —Edward Drinker Cope, 1888 Had Congress created the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 1877, rather than a year later, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden (Fig. 1) would likely have become the first director. He was the favorite. If this had happened, Hayden's reputation and prominence today would be completely different. Figure 1. F. V. Hayden, about the time of his directorship of the U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories, 1870. Courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library. By many accounts, Hayden was the most qualified of the principal candidates for the USGS directorship, a group that included Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, and George Montague Wheeler. Congressional support for Hayden's U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, and for Hayden as its leader, was greater than that for the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel (the King Survey), the Geographical Survey West of the 100th Meridian (under Wheeler, of the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers), or the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region (the Powell Survey). At the time, from his published studies and newspaper stories, Hayden was well known and respected both in the U.S. and in Europe. He managed many people and projects, and he raised the money to keep people in the field and in offices writing their reports, the publication for which he also arranged. During the 25 years or so of his exploration in the American West—up to about 1878—Hayden's publications exceeded in number and were frequently equal to or superior in quality to those …

American Exceptionalism Revisited

We examine Democrats’ decline in the House of Representatives from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s. Debates over American exceptionalism in the realm of social policy pay surprisingly little attention to a profound transformation that occurred during and after World War II: on the international stage, the United States emerged as the hegemon; at home, the Pentagon became the largest and most powerful agency in the federal bureaucracy. In modeling electoral losses suffered by Democrats, we show that World War II mobilization played an important role. First, Democrats lost ground in congressional districts where the nascent military-industrial complex was created, specifically in aircraft manufacturing centers. Second, the impact of aircraft manufacturing intersected with wartime in-migration of non-whites. Democrats suffered significantly greater losses where both non-white population and aircraft manufacturing employment increased. Our findings corroborate accounts of the social welfare state that stress partisan control and path dependence. Conservative congresses of the immediate postwar years left an imposing legacy, making it difficult to establish social welfare reforms for decades to come. Whereas most accounts of the rise and fall of the New Deal emphasize different aspects of domestic processes, we demonstrate that militarism and expansion of national security agencies undermined congressional support at a critical juncture. This intersection of wartime mobilization and social policy—and not an inherent and enduring institutional impediment to social welfare—contributed to underdevelopment of the welfare state and abandonment of universal social welfare programs in the United States.

Determinants of congressional minimum wage support: the role of economic education

Much has been made about the lack of economic education among the public at large, yet little has been said about the limited education of Members of Congress. This paper examines the economic education levels of Members of Congress voting on the 2007 increase in the minimum wage. Controlling for a variety of characteristics of members and constituents, this study finds that members who majored in economics as undergraduates were less likely to vote for the minimum wage increase than their colleagues. No other major had a consistent influence. A large number of statistical specifications confirm the robustness of the finding.

The War Extension and Rhetoric: An Analogic Criticism of US Presidential Rhetoric During the Iraq and Philippine-American Wars

Studies on U.S. presidential war rhetoric tend to ignore the dimension of time, i.e., most focus analysis on the inception of war. In reality, however, many wars are protracted and may last beyond initial public expectations. War messages are therefore employed not only to seek congressional and public support for the inception, but also for the extension of armed conflict abroad. Using the methodology of analogic criticism, this study provides seminal ideas for what it calls the “war rhetoric of extension.” By comparing Bush’s speeches during the current Iraq War and McKinley/Roosevelt’s annual messages during the Philippine-American War, this paper argues that the war rhetoric of extension has the following characteristics: similar patterns of argumentation, epideictic statements that elevate American prestige, and paternalistic language.

Listen to What I Say, Not How I Vote: Congressional Support for the President in Washington and at Home

Objectives. Are legislators' party affiliations or is district partisanship the greatest predictor of legislative support of the president? Do members of the U.S. House emphasize different policy positions when casting roll calls than when communicating their positions to constituents? We theorize that party is less important in legislators' district-oriented behavior than in roll-call voting. When casting roll calls, legislators are agents facing multiple principals, namely, political party leaders and their district constituencies. When engaging in district-oriented behavior, the only key principal is the legislator's constituency. Methods. We analyze legislators' positions on roll calls and in platforms. Platforms are examined with a unique data set of franked mass mailings sent by House members. Linear and limited dependent variable models are employed. Results. Our findings show that constituency preferences are a more consistent predictor of legislative support for the president when analyzing legislators' platforms, and that political party has a relatively limited effect. When analyzing roll-call votes, party is the key predictor. Conclusions. Political parties may be interested in what legislators do as opposed to what they say. The platform findings are in contrast to most recent empirical work examining position taking, though consistent with the canonical works of Mayhew and Fenno. This has implications for theories of parties in Congress that tie party behavior in the legislature to partisanship in the electorate.

The First U.S. Quantitative Easing: The 1930s

During 1932, with congressional support, the Fed purchased approximately $1 billion in Treasury securities.

Promoting Early Literacy in Pediatric Practice: Twenty Years of Reach Out and Read

Reach Out and Read (ROR) is the first pediatric, evidence-based strategy to prevent problems of early childhood development and learning. With a start in a single clinic in Boston City Hospital in 1989, doctors working in >4000 clinics and practices gave approximately 5.7 million new books to >3.5 million children in all 50 states in 2008. ROR also has become a model for a different way of thinking about parent education during primary care encounters, based less on telling and more on creating real-time learning experiences. ROR flourished because of (1) the growth of pediatric interest in child development, (2) local leadership of pediatric champions as well as nonmedical supporters, coordinators, and volunteers, (3) evidence of effectiveness, and (4) public financial support attributable to strong bipartisan support in Congress, led by Senator Edward Kennedy. Since ROR started, an increasing amount of research confirms the importance of reading aloud for the development of language and other emergent literacy skills, which in turn helps children get ready for school and leads to later success in reading. Future goals include continued growth until all low-income children are reached with pediatric advice and books, a national campaign led by physicians encouraging all parents to read to their children every day, additional evidence-based, parent information to increase the effectiveness of parents reading to children, quality-improvement efforts to achieve the full potential, and global expansion.

Surveying Medical Information Across Europe: The Present and the Future

Managers from 163 European medical information departments in 30 countries completed a web-based 23-question survey. They were asked about demographics (country, company, team size, name, and reporting lines), responsibilities, training needs, and communication channels for requests. The survey included questions on their challenges, successes, and future trends. National medical information departments were compared with regional or global departments. Besides handling product requests, many departments are responsible for standard response production, safety reporting, promotional review, training, and other proactive services. Personnel are generally well trained. Some regional medical information managers identified competency gaps in copyright knowledge and professional skills. Major challenges were managing limited resources, demonstrating value, and supplying copyright-protected material across borders. Business successes included sharing information via regional databases, web-based services, and congress support. They believe the future will bring greater regulation, web technology usage, communication with patients, and organizational changes (enhanced regional or global operations and outsourcing).

9/11 and Presidential Support in the 107th Congress

Immediately following the tragic events of 9/11, President George W. Bush's approval rating shot from 51% to 86%; a record 35-point rally effect according to the Gallup Poll. President Bush set another record on September 24th, 2001, as 90% of Americans approved of his performance. If public support is indeed an important president's legislative resource, President Bush should have been his most influential during his record rally. To get a sense for President Bush's support in Congress following 9/11, I examine how members of Congress (MCs) voted on issues in which President Bush took a position in the 107th Congress. I analyze 83 votes identified by the Congressional Quarterly to determine the effect of 9/11 on presidential support in Congress. I find that MCs’ support for President Bush did in fact increase immediately following 9/11. But the unequivocal support did not last long. Despite still high approval ratings, President Bush's congressional support returned to pre-9/11 levels in 2002. These findings, I believe, have important implications for the study of rally effects specifically and congressional-executive relations in general.