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Does majority party control cause changes in legislative policy making? We argue that majority party floor control affects legislator behavior and agenda control. Leveraging a natural experiment where nearly one tenth of a legislature's members died within the same legislative session, we are able to identify the effect of majority party floor control on the legislative agenda and on legislator choices. Previous correlational work has found mixed evidence of party effects, especially in the mid-twentieth century. In contrast, we find that majority party control leads to (1) changes in the agenda and (2) changes in legislators' revealed preferences. These effects are driven by changes in numerical party majorities on the legislative floor. The effects are strongest with Republican and nonsouthern Democratic legislators. The effects are also more pronounced on the first (economic) than the second (racial) dimension. Additional correlational evidence across 74 years adds external validity to our exogenous evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a new and salient issue dimension at the nexus of domestic and foreign policies emerged in U.S. politics: homeland security. Given this changed policy agenda in Washington, we suggest that there are no longer two presidencies, but instead three presidencies: the domestic policy presidency, the foreign policy presidency, and the homeland security presidency. We examine the three presidencies hypothesis during the 107th Congress (2001-02) by looking at legislative statements about the president communicated to constituents by members of the House. Lindsay and Steger (1993) have noted that research on the two presidencies needs to move beyond roll call analysis, and we heed their call by utilizing a new and unique data set of franked mailings sent to constituents. Specifically, we answer the following research questions: (1) Did legislators in the 107th Congress more frequently mention the president's policies on homeland security policy, domestic policy, or foreign policy in their franked mailings to constituents? (2) Was there a partisan divide in support of the president across these three policy dimensions in legislators' franked mailings? (3) Do positions of presidential support articulated in franked mailings translate into actual roll call support? We find that there are three policy areas in which members of Congress mention the president when communicating with their constituents, and that legislators frequently discuss both domestic and homeland security policies of the president, though not foreign policy. By using this unique data source to address these research questions, we are able to develop a fuller sense of legislators' perceptions of the salience of particular issues in their districts and the relationships of the perceptions to presidential support during the 107th Congress.

Most accounts of the Clinton Senate trial are based on legal theories and description or suggest that the Senate trial was sui generis, unrelated to regular Senate business. Alternatively, we argue that presidential removal trials can best be explained through a spatial voting model, with ideological estimates for senators best predicting the trial outcome. To examine these hypotheses, we generate (a) ideal-point estimates using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods on roll-call data as well as (b) text-based (wordscores) point estimates scaled from public statements. Our results support the spatial hypothesis, but not legal or idiosyncratic accounts. Moreover, the significant discrepancy between text-and vote-based estimates provides support for Mayhew's contention that position taking for constituency benefit is rather costless. We conclude that when asked to be judges, senators, faced with multifarious political incentives, are more likely to act like legislators. Keywords: U.S. presidency; U.S. Senate; impeachment; President Clinton; spatial voting model; executive-legislative relations

Legislators' private financial holdings affect policy decisions. Due to financial self‐interest, we theorize that legislators whose personal investment portfolios include equities from firms affected by proposed policies vote for legislation that benefits those firms. We also theorize that legislators with greater personal exposure to equity investments support policies that benefit equities markets generally. We create a novel data set of legislators' personal stock investments and examine major congressional actions since the 1990s on financial deregulation and market intervention. US House members who own stocks in firms who benefit from financial deregulation vote for deregulation. House members with greater exposure to financial and automotive stocks support the financial and auto bailouts, respectively. General exposure to equities markets is also associated with support for key legislation boosting markets. The normative implications are significant, as legislators' private interests influence decisions in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]