Search

The majority party leadership has different goals for different committees. As such, they tailor a variety of control mechanisms to match different committees. When a committee is considered “highl...

Although the first presidential election where both major party candidates (William Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan) hit the campaign trail, the election of 1908 is a neglected election. When scholars do address it, they typically focus on retiring incumbent president Theodore Roosevelt and his role therein. This article turns the focus away from Roosevelt, and also Bryan, and places it firmly on Taft, a reluctant candidate. Taft's role in 1908 is important because his very reluctance to embrace the changing expectations of the presidency helps to highlight the tensions between the old and new ways of campaigning and, more broadly, the traditional and modern presidencies.The article first addresses Taft's decision to abandon his “front-porch” campaign. Taft's initial inclination toward a front-porch campaign reveals well his more traditional approach to the election and to the presidency in general, just as his decision to abandon this plan and “stump” for votes reflects his submission to developin...

Congressional scholars have conducted little research on the consequences of the majority party controlling bill formulation and excluding minority members from the legislative process. Critics of one-party deliberations use case-study evidence to argue that such processes lead to error-prone, often defective legislation. However, no large-N analysis has sought to operationalize and verify this effect. I develop new empirical strategies to explore claims about the relationship between deliberative procedures and policy outcomes. Examining legislation drafted in the U.S. House between 1987 and 2008, I find suggestive but consistent evidence of error-prone bills being developed under one-party processes.

This article joins the growing tide of research that studies party effects in the United States Senate. Previous work has shown that certain procedural tools disproportionately advantage the majority party at the expense of the minority. We build on this research by exploiting a new dataset that allows us to study motions to table amendments from the 91st to the 111th Congress. By examining the success of these motions, analyzing the voting calculus of individual senators on procedural and substantive votes, and simulating the aggregate impact of this tool, we provide some of the strongest evidence to date that political parties (and the majority party in particular) influence the legislative process and policy outcomes in the Senate. Our findings stand in stark contrast to the traditional vision of the Senate as an individualistic body.

James Curry views the House majority party leadership's striking penchant for presenting members with lengthy legislation at short notice as essential to both its control of the body and its capaci...

Given significant differences between the House and Senate's amending processes, one would anticipate the Senate majority party to be far less successful when voting on the floor. However, recent work has demonstrated that majority party success on the Senate floor is remarkably similar to the House. We argue that an overlooked explanation for majority party success stems from its ability to control intra-party amending activity through coordination between members of the majority party. Utilizing a new data set consisting of all amendments receiving recorded roll call votes in the Senate from 1865–1945, we demonstrate that majority party extremists refrain from offering amendments despite the relative open-floor setting. Nevertheless, chamber majorities cannot restrict minority legislators from offering amendments designed to force them to cast uncomfortable votes and delay the legislative process.

This article applies the theory of “conditional party government” (CPG) to the interaction between the majority party and the Appropriations Committee in the period following the Republican Revolution of 1995. We extend the analysis of Aldrich and Rohde (2000b) by examining how actions within the committee have changed over time and analyzing whether behavior and outcomes continue to match the expectations of CPG theory, particularly with respect to the times in which power in Congress switched from the Republicans to the Democrats and back. The conditions of the CPG theory continued to be met so that we can continue to test the theory's predictions. We show that following the Republican Revolution, the role of the party remained paramount and the party leadership maintained its influence over the direction of policy. While in the majority, both parties used the Appropriations Committee as a vehicle for policy change and the party leadership monitored committee actions, either by blocking policy shifts aw...

Party-based theories argue that leaders of the majority party use restrictive rules to increase that majority's influence over policy. However, informational theorists suggest that restrictive rules reduce information costs and encourage committee specialization. Using data on every bill on which the House Rules Committee placed a rule from the 94th through 109th Congresses, I test these explanations. Considering the use of restrictive rules, the evidence verifies some of the predictions of partisan theories, but unveils mixed support for informational theories. In addition, we learn that Democratic and Republican majorities differ with respect to the use of restrictive rules. The results indicate that Republican majorities behaved as more of a procedural cartel than their Democratic predecessors.

This article examines the representativeness of conference committees in the U.S. Congress by measuring the difference in observed policy preferences between the conference delegations and the parent bodies. We predict and find significant differences between the House and Senate in terms of the partisan bias of conference delegations. House conference delegations are systematically biased in favor of the majority party and away from the chamber median. We take the additional step of exploring the source of this bias. In particular, we examine whether majority party bias in conference is a function of partisan processes at work directly in the selection of conferees. We find evidence that the conditions of majority party influence in the House are consistent with some existing theoretical models of party influence in legislating. There is less conclusive evidence of partisan processes in the Senate, which is consistent with institutional differences in appointment practices.

There is a tension between the conventional wisdom about Senate parties and certain empirical realities. Most accounts of Senate parties suggest that majorities lack meaningful agenda control, give...

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...

This article examines recent developments in one of the most important staff units in Congress–the staff of the House Appropriations Committee. We consider changes in staff politics on this committee in light of the competing claims of informational and partisan theories. Drawing primarily on evidence from interviews with current and former Appropriations Committee staff members, and with former chair Robert Livingston (R-LA), we look at the effect of the shift in party control in 1995 on the organization and operation of this staff, which has traditionally been known for providing nonpartisan expertise to the Appropriations Committee and the House. We find clear evidence that changes in the operation of this staff unit after 1994 have caused it to become more responsive to the goals of the majority party. Although we also find evidence of an informational dimension in Appropriations staff politics, we conclude that this case offers stronger support for conditional party government theory.

While White (1989) thoroughly examined the House Appropriations Committee after the congressional reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, we begin to offer an updated picture of the counterpart committee in the Senate. We find that there has been considerable change in the behavior of appropriators in the postreform era. Specifically, partisanship within the Senate has increased substantially, but even more interesting is the rise of partisanship within the Appropriations Committee itself. Table motions have become an increasingly partisan device used by the majority party to inhibit minority amending challenges. Indeed, table motions have clearly become the preferred strategy to defend appropriations legislation from attacks on the floor. In spite of the partisan conflict within the Appropriations Committee, we continue to find that committee members retain considerable institutional advantages in relation to nonmembers in affecting funding decisions on the Senate floor.

Despite strong theoretical justification, the intersection of the two central organizing features of the U.S. Senate, parties and committees, has received little scholarly attention. This article focuses on that nexus by exploring party-based voting in three Senate committees during the 1980s. Drawing from previous research, several hypotheses are developed that guide expectations about party conflict, unity, and success in the Armed Services, Energy, and Labor committees. Party leadership, committee membership, and policy agendas are found to be important explanations for the patterns of partisanship that emerge in roll call voting in those committees. Because of the size of Senate committees and small partisan margins that often exist, party leadership strategy also is found to influence the ultimate success of the majority party. The differentiated committee system, it is argued, offers diverse opportunities for party influence in the Senate.

Budget policy dominated the congressional agenda during the 1980s. During that same period, the Speaker of the House of Representatives became more involved in formulating the priorities of the majority party, a task traditionally left up to committees. This paper traces the development of the Speaker's role in formulating budget priorities by assessing changes in the Speaker's relationship with the House Budget Committee. The paper identifies the conditions under which the Speaker became a more active participant in budget policymaking and the individual qualities that define each Speaker's style. In particular, I compare the leadership styles of Speakers Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, Jr. (D-Mass.) and James Wright (D-Tex.). Both O'Neill and Wright operated under similar conditions that enhanced the Speaker's role in policymaking: divided government, large deficits, and high levels of party unity. But they exercised different leadership styles, and the differences are based partly on two individual factors: p...