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Theories of partisan influence in Congress suggest that the leadership can influence vote choices and legislative outcomes. Cox and McCubbins (2005) have theorized and Cox and Poole (2002) have found that party strength is most evident on procedural matters. In this paper, we take advantage of a new source of data providing updates from the Majority Leader's Office that at times indicate the leadership's positions on upcoming legislation and scheduled floor votes. Utilizing these data from recent congresses, we seek to offer a more nuanced explanation of voting in the U.S. House of Representatives. Whereas others have implicitly assumed that the party influences all procedural votes, our preliminary findings suggest that not all procedural votes are created equal. In fact, these floor updates indicate that the majority party offers direction on some procedural votes (e.g., ordering the previous question and special rules), but not on others (e.g., the motion to recommit). Our findings have direct implications for individual voting behavior and legislative outcomes in Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the progressives pushed for the adoption of the direct primary, one of their goals was to wrestle away the political machine’s control over ballot access to ensure a more open electoral process. An open system, they argued, would help to curb many of the corrupt practices inherent in the current system. The party bosses, however, were able to weaken many of the direct primary laws in order to maintain some form of control over the nomination process. This paper develops a model to empirically test the effect of the direct primary on the openness of the two-party system in congressional elections. The findings suggest that certain rules associated with the primary reforms did little to encourage outsiders from leaving their third parties to seek a major party nomination, especially in machine cities. These results run contrary to the notion that primary elections were instrumental to the decline of third parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential sources of the polarization observed in Congress have been attributed to a variety of factors. In this paper, we seek to more directly link patterns of polarization in the U.S. House to underlying changes in representatives? constituencies resulting from redistricting. As districts become more liberal or conservative over time, we should expect members representing these districts to alter their behavior to reflect these trends. Using a new dataset linking congressional districts over time, we examine whether changes within districts contribute to polarization in the U.S. House. We show that while there is an overall increasing trend of polarization, districts that have undergone significant changes as a result of redistricting have become even more polarized. This finding has direct implications for analyses examining aggregate levels of polarization in Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the progressives pushed for the adoption of the direct primary in the early 1900s, one of the goals was to wrestle away the political machines’ control over ballot access in order to ensure a more open electoral process. An open system, they argued, would help to curb many of the corrupt practices that take place when nominees are chosen in the proverbial “smoked filled back rooms.” The party bosses, however, were able to weaken many of the direct primary laws in order to maintain some form of control over the nomination process. Using returns from the 1904-1910 congressional elections, this paper develops and tests an empirical model to determine the effect of the direct primary on the openness of the two-party system. The findings suggest that certain rules adopted concurrently with the primary reforms did little to encourage outsiders from leaving their third parties to seek a major party nomination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s, the states were required by law to redraw legislative and congressional district boundaries. During the past 40 years, states have adopted a variety of methods for redistributing internal population shifts and taking into account the addition or elimination of existing seats. In this paper, we examine how differences in redistricting plans have affected the competitiveness of U.S. congressional elections. Specifically, we focus on three commonly employed methods for redrawing districts: legislative, independent commission, and judicial plans. We find that the degree of electoral competition generally increases when commissions or courts are responsible for drawing new legislative districts. Moreover, we find a distinct pattern in partisan differences in redistricting strategy when Democratic or Republican controlled state governments seek to offset their minority party status in the U.S. House of Representatives. The effects vary when we control for the number of seats gained or lost in each state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predictions from the party cartel theory (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994, 2002). We obtain leverage on the question of institutional party influence by focusing on a "natural experiment" involving the behavior of exiting House members. We argue that retiring House members are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect source (when compared to higher-office seekers and reelection-seeking members) to determine the existence of party influence. Results from a pooled, cross-sectional analysis of the 94th through 105th Congresses (1975-98) suggest that party influence is indeed present in Congress, especially where the party cartel theory predicts: on procedural, rather than final-passage, votes. Moreover, we find that procedural party influence is almost exclusively the domain of the majority party. This latter finding is especially important in that most prior studies have been limited solely to investigating interparty influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]