Super Legislature
The Relational Determinants of Legislative Outcomes: Strong and Weak Ties Between Legislators
Justin Kirkland
Journal of Politics, July 2011, Pages 887-898
Abstract:
In the repeated interactions of a legislative session, legislators develop working relationships that can be used in the pursuit of legislative goals. I develop a theory of influence diffusion across a legislative network of relations based on strategic actors building relationships in order to increase legislative success. Building on sociological theory initially developed by Granovetter, my research indicates that it is the weak ties between legislators that are the most useful in increasing legislative success. I test my theory using state legislative data from eight state legislatures, along with a second analysis of the U.S. House of Representatives. Empirical analysis provides consistent support for the notion that weak ties lead to legislative success.
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Policy bundling to overcome loss aversion: A method for improving legislative outcomes
Katherine Milkman et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
Policies that would create net benefits for society that contain salient costs frequently lack enough support for enactment because losses loom larger than gains. To address this consequence of loss aversion, we propose a policy-bundling technique in which related bills involving both losses and gains are combined to offset separate bills' costs while preserving their net benefits. We argue this method can transform unpopular individual pieces of legislation, which would lack the support for implementation, into more popular policies. Study 1 confirms that bundling increases support for bills with costs and benefits and that bundled legislation is valued more than the sum of its parts. Study 2 shows this finding stems from a diminished focus on losses and heightened focus on gains. Study 3 extends our findings to policies involving costs and benefits of the same type (e.g., lives) generated by different sources (e.g., food vs. fire safety).
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Which Buck Stops Here? Accountability for Policy Positions and Policy Outcomes in Congress
Philip Edward Jones
Journal of Politics, July 2011, Pages 764-782
Abstract:
What do constituents hold their representatives accountable for? Previous work outlines two distinct but often conflated theories of accountability: democratic theory suggests that voters respond to the policy positions representatives take; retrospective voting theories suggest that they respond to the outcomes of these policies. Using new survey data, this article demonstrates that perceived congruence with their senators' policy positions influences voters' decisions much more than do perceptions of peace and prosperity. This finding holds when correcting for endogeneity using instrumental variables analysis, when considering members of the majority and minority parties separately, and when looking at specific policy areas. Replicating previous studies of retrospective voting suggests that they overstated the importance of policy outcomes for congressional elections due to omitted variable bias. The buck that stops with Members of Congress is for the positions they take, not for the policy outcomes they preside over.
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Political Concentration and Legislative Success: One Case of Soda and One Case of Beer
Jason Kelly
Princeton Working Paper, 2011
Abstract:
This paper evaluates how the dispersion of a commercial industry across U.S. congressional districts, and the concentration of employees within each district, affects the likelihood that a particular industry will be successful in pushing favorable legislation through the U.S. House of Representatives. An examination of member support for two pieces of legislation, one which provides antitrust exemptions for the distribution of soft drinks and another that does the same for the distribution of malt beverages, finds a strong positive correlation between the concentration of employees from these industries within a congressional district and the likelihood that the representative of that district will support the legislation. I also find that in both cases the number of employees per district that are needed to have an impact on member support is surprisingly small and that the best strategy to maximize the likelihood of legislative success for both industries is an unequal distribution of employees across districts.
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The President's Role in the Partisan Congressional Arena
Matthew Lebo & Andrew O'Geen
Journal of Politics, July 2011, Pages 718-734
Abstract:
Models of presidential success have sometimes focused on the importance of political capital and sometimes looked at the partisan environment of Congress. We develop time-series models of success that refine and integrate these perspectives while reframing the matter in terms of research on congressional parties. Measures of the ideological and partisan makeup of Congress are used to explain presidential success from 1953 to 2006 but the approval of the president's base is important as well. We also show the electoral consequences to congressional parties of presidential success - congressional parties gain and lose seats based on the battles won and lost by the president. This gives legislators (not) of his party an incentive to see his agenda implemented (defeated). Studying both the causes and consequences of presidential success in Congress is meant to integrate theories of the two institutions along with extant theories of party behavior.
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Influence without Bribes: A Noncontracting Model of Campaign Giving and Policymaking
Justin Fox & Lawrence Rothenberg
Political Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Efforts to find empirical evidence that campaign money impacts policymaking choices have offered scant support for interest group influence. A possible explanation is that the hypothesis that those receiving campaign monies should adjust their policy choices to favor their donor requires the untenable assumption that interest groups and legislators can implement contracts. We develop a new, alternative, model in which legislators and interest groups cannot engage in any form of contracting, and legislators care about both the policy and fundraising implications of their policy choices. In our model, an interest group gives only to those it believes shares its policy preferences. Nonetheless, we show that the group's giving impacts incumbent policy choices. Importantly, when groups ideologically match, the relationship between actual contributions and bias is not straightforward. As long as a group is uncertain about a member's primitive policy preference, it can influence her policymaking even when it contributes to her challenger or abstains from giving altogether.
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The Constituency Motivations of Caucus Membership
Kristina Miler
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The popularity of congressional caucuses is puzzling, given the dominance of political parties and rules that specifically limit caucuses' resources. Yet modern caucuses offer legislators the unique advantage of complete discretion over their membership decisions, which allows legislators to tailor their memberships to their district. As a result, caucus membership is an important means of constituency representation. Using original data from the 108th Congress, this article examines the House caucus system and legislators' membership in all 441caucuses. There is strong evidence that legislators' decisions about caucus membership reflect their constituents even when controlling for party, committee, electoral security, and seniority. Legislators from heterogeneous districts belong to numerous caucuses, which allows them to represent the multiple interests in their constituency. In addition, legislators are more likely to belong to caucuses that address specific issues relevant to constituents.
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The Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures
Boris Shor & Nolan McCarty
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The development and elaboration of the spatial theory of voting has contributed greatly to the study of legislative decision making and elections. Statistical models that estimate the spatial locations of individual decision-makers have made a key contribution to this success. Spatial models have been estimated for the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court, U.S. presidents, a large number of non-U.S. legislatures, and supranational organizations. Yet one potentially fruitful laboratory for testing spatial theories, the individual U.S. states, has remained relatively unexploited, for two reasons. First, state legislative roll call data have not yet been systematically collected for all states over time. Second, because ideal point models are based on latent scales, comparisons of ideal points across states or even between chambers within a state are difficult. This article reports substantial progress on both fronts. First, we have obtained the roll call voting data for all state legislatures from the mid-1990s onward. Second, we exploit a recurring survey of state legislative candidates to allow comparisons across time, chambers, and states as well as with the U.S. Congress. The resulting mapping of America's state legislatures has great potential to address numerous questions not only about state politics and policymaking, but also about legislative politics in general.
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Party Pressure in the U.S. State Legislatures
James Coleman Battista & Jesse Richman
Legislative Studies Quarterly, August 2011, Pages 397-422
Abstract:
We extend Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart's (2001) method of measuring party influence over roll-call voting to the comparative state legislative context. Examining 27 state lower chambers, we find that overall parties exert detectable influence on 44% of all roll calls and 69% of close votes, but that the incidence of party influence varies strongly across chambers. Taking advantage of the comparative leverage the state context brings, we find that party influence responds significantly to measures of legislative careerism and state socioeconomic diversity, with majority size playing some role. The effect of preference polarization is complicated and conditioned by challenges facing the legislature, and we find results both challenging and conditionally supporting the conditional party government account.
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Terry Sullivan & Scott de Marchi
Journal of Politics, July 2011, Pages 748-763
Abstract:
This article introduces a simple theory of bargaining between presidents and members of Congress. Although it employs the analytics common to the typical "sequenced" theories, its approach places more emphasis on give and take, on less reliable information about intentions, and on more complex strategic considerations. The formal results highlight a presidential tenure effect, which in turn suggests four empirical expectations. The article then uses a unique empirical opportunity and data to assess and eventually validate expectations suggesting, in turn, that declining presidential tenure has a substantial effect on confidential bargaining, making coalition formation more erratic and costly. The article concludes with a theoretically informed discussion of how growing congressional seniority led to imposing the 20th and 22nd constitutional amendments.
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Kristin Kanthak
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Institutional rules that create winners and losers can also compel those who anticipate losing to quit that institution. In legislatures, these anticipatory exits have implications both for representation and our understanding of how seniority systems work. The current project constructs a model of anticipatory exit in which legislators who are not favoured under the rules leave, thus making room in the seniority queue for their more favoured colleagues. Empirical analysis of the US House of Representatives supports the model: Legislators most distant from their party are about as likely to run for higher office as they are to receive institutional power, whereas those most proximate to the party virtually never run for higher office and almost certainly receive a subcommittee chair.
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Will Bullock & Joshua Clinton
Journal of Politics, July 2011, Pages 915-930
Abstract:
Scholars, politicians, parties, and the U.S. Supreme Court argue that restricting the set of eligible voters for a primary election affects the nature of representation voters receive from elected officials. Evidence supporting this argument is elusive because the same elected officials are often responsible for determining the type of primary election used. Using a quasi-natural experiment resulting from a 1996 constitutional referendum in California, we examine whether expanding the eligible primary electorate from only registered partisans to any registered voter affects who is elected and the positions elected representatives take. We show that the blanket primary appears to favor the election of more moderate representatives and that incumbents take more moderate positions in the U.S. House of Representatives and California Assembly. This is true only in less partisan districts, and there are no effects in districts dominated by a single party. These differential effects suggest that concerns about representatives becoming increasingly polarized in legislatures are not likely remedied by simply expanding the set of voters eligible to participate in primary elections.