Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government and the Modern Congress: The "Universal Principle" of Change

In Congressional Government Woodrow Wilson analyzes change in Congress during its first century of development. This essay argues that Wilson's analysis of the 19th century Congress, which explains congressional behavior as an outgrowth of both institutional and societal forces, provides a more useful interpretation of change than the institutionalist perspective dominant in the specialized studies of the modern Congress. The essay illustrates the value of Wilson's analysis to contemporary scholars by tracing its impact on the evolution of the author's interpretation of the congressional reforms and changes of the 1970s. The essay attributes the continuing value of Congressional Government to its broad and unified portrait of Congress as a whole.     

Congress and Foreign Policy: Toward a More Functional Analysis

Crabb, Cecil V., Jr., and Pat Holt, eds. Invitation to Struggle: Congress, The President and Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1980. Pp. xii, 234. $9.75, paper. Franck, Thomas M. and Edward Weisband. Foreign Policy by Congress. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Pp. ix, 357. $15.95, hardbound. Spanier, John, and Joseph Nogee, eds. Congress, The Presidency and American Foreign Policy. New York: Pergamon Press, 1981. Pp. xxxii, 211. $30.00, hardbound; $10.95, paper. Whalen, Charles W., Jr. The House and Foreign Policy: The Irony of Congressional Reform. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Pp. x, 207. $18.95, hardbound; $9.95, paper.     

Evaluating the Impact of the Congressional Budget Office at Middle Age

The Congressional Budget Office, which turned 40 years old in 2015, was created in order to provide the Congress with independent budgetary and economic information. The impact of CBO has been most clearly felt in its cost estimates of pending legislation. CBO is sometimes criticized for its estimates, and the article addresses several of these criticisms. The future influence of CBO will depend on its ability to maintain its nonpartisan reputation.     

Race-based districting: does it help or hinder legislative representation?

This paper assesses the impact of using race-based districts on membership diversity of the US Congress and state legislative chambers as well as on electoral competition and voter participation in US Congressional and state legislative elections. In the 1990s membership diversity has increased in the US House of Representatives and state legislative chambers due to increased reliance on the use of race and ethnicity in drawing Congressional and legislative districts. But anecdotal evidence suggests that the creation of more homogeneous districts may lead to a decline in electoral competition, and thus a decline in voter participation in elections held within those districts. Uncompetitive Congressional or state legislative districts are posited to reduce the incentives for candidates or parties to mobilize voters and to restrict the electorate to habitual voters only. A lack of incentives to vote in district elections may diminish overall participation and have consequences in elections for statewide offices. I examine electoral competition and voter participation in recent Congressional and state legislative elections to determine whether electoral competition and voter participation have decreased, and whether that decrease can be linked to changes in the homogeneity of districts. I conclude by suggesting that bodies who adopt districting plans as well as those charged with a review of such plans take into account how line drawing affects electoral competition and voter participation as well as membership diversity.     

Ethics and the Party Brand: The Case of the Office of Congressional Ethics

Dating back to its creation in 2008, the independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) has faced criticism from the very members of Congress it is tasked with investigating. Despite this criticism, a majority of House members both voted to create OCE in 2008 and have ultimately backed away from any efforts to rein in the office. Why? Through an examination of both the passage of OCE in 2008 and subsequent efforts to rein in its power, this article argues that partisan considerations and pressure from party leaders played a critical role in OCE's creation and survival. The creation of the independent commission in the House thus demonstrates the power of the party valence brand in the contemporary Congress.     

Five Factions,Two Parties: Caucus Membership in the House of Representatives, 1994–2002

This paper examines the extent of ideological cohesion and distinction of two Republican congressional factions (the conservative Republican Study Committee and the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership) and three Democratic congressional caucuses (the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, the liberal Congressional Black Caucus, and the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus) in the House of Representatives from 1994 to 2002. Whereas much of the literature on congressional caucuses has focused on the reasons members join such groups and the policy and political orientations of those groups, this paper examines how much unity exists in the voting behavior of the members of Congress who join caucuses in comparison to their fellow partisans not in a faction. Although political parties are still a major unifying force for their respective party members, we do find that factional members are more ideologically cohesive than are nonfactional members. Joining a faction is not an insignificant activity for members. Factions allow like-minded colleagues to come together and vote on common issues, at times against direction of their party.     

Notes from the Book Review Editor

Robert A. Wilson, ed. Power and the Presidency. New York, NY: Public Affairs, 1999. Pp. xii, 162. $20.00 hardbound.

Rosen article for the New Republic, "The Supreme Court Commits Suicide," next to a Weekly Standard piece by Nelson Lund lauding the Court's "Act of Courage."

Charles O. Jones, ed. Preparing To Be President: The Memos of Richard E. Neustadt. Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2000. Pp. vii, 194. $25.00 hardbound.

Dennis L. Soden, ed. The Environmental Presidency. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 366. $73.50 hardbound, $24.95 softbound.

Judy Schneider and Michael L. Koempel. Congressional Deskbook 2001-2002: 107th Congress. Alexandria, VA: The Capitol.Net, Inc., 2001. Pp. xxviii, 610. $79.50 softbound.

Diana Dwyre and Victoria A. Farrar-Myers. Legislative Labyrinth: Congress and Campaign Finance Reform. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 291. $22.95 softbound.     

The campaigns and elections of congresswomen Edith Green and Julia Butler Hansen

The Third Congressional Districts of Oregon and Washington face each other across the Columbia River. It is not surprising that for more than a decade each district had been represented in Congress by the same representative or that they were both Democrats. Though Oregon's Third District is much more urban and compact than Washington's, they share some of the demographic and economic characteristics which are usually associated with Democratic constituencies outside of the South, namely, a relatively high proportion of persons employed in manufacturing or other heavily unionized occupations, who are relatively mobile, or of fairly recent ethnic stock. What is not so expected is that both incumbent Congressmen were Congresswomen — Edith Green of Oregon and Julia Butler Hansen of Washington. Mrs Green and Mrs Hansen were chosen as the specific subjects of this study because they had both demonstrated political longevity in retaining Congressional office throughout see‐sawing political changes in party domination in both their states and the national administration. They were both longstanding members of the Democratic Party. They were both from the Pacific Northwest, giving them common regional interests, and indeed, while from different states, their districts are continuous with the Columbia River as a common boundary adding specific common district interests. Each had attained what are generally recognized as powerful positions within the structure of the Congress as chairpersons of important subcommittees: Mrs Green as Chairman of the Special Subcommittee on Education of the House Committee on Education and Labor; Mrs Hansen as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Appropriations for the Interior and Related Agencies of the House Appropriations Committee. And finally, both women were in their early sixties.     

A Review of “The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney”

Craig, Barbara Hinkson. The Legislative Veto: Congressional Control of Regulation. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983. Pp. xviii, 176. $16.00.

George C. Edwards III. The Public Presidency: The Pursuit of Popular Support. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. Pp. x, 276. Hardbound, $16.95; softbound, $8.95.

Goldenberg, Edie N., and Michael W. Traugott. Campaigning for Congress. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1984. Pp. 192, Bibliography, Index. $9.50.

Kau, James B. and Paul H. Rubin. Congressmen, Constituents, and Contributors: Determinants of Roll Call Voting in the House of Representatives. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishing, 1982. Pp. ix, 160. $25.00.

Melnick, R. Shep. Regulation and the Courts: The Case of the Clean Air Act. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1983. Pp. x, 404. Hardbound, $22.95; softbound, $11.95.

Shelley, Mack C. II. The Permanent Majority: The Conservative Coalition in the United States Congress. University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1983. Pp. 201. $24.50.

Sinclair, Barbara. Congressional Realignment: 1925-1978. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Pp. 201. $25.00.

Spitzer, Robert J. The Presidency and Public Policy: The Four Arenas of Presidential Power. University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1983. Pp. 189. $18.75.

Turner, Michael. The Vice President as Policy Maker: Rockefeller in the Ford White House. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982. Pp. xviii, 252. Hardbound, $29.95.     

Congressional Position Votes in the Truman Administration, 1947–52: A View from the White House

Scholars have routinely overlooked Harry Truman in analyses of presidential position votes in Congress. The principal data source for longitudinal studies of executive-legislative relations, Congressional Quarterly, did not regularly begin compiling presidential position votes until 1953. Yet position votes for the Truman administration do exist. Archival research at the Harry Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, revealed that the president commissioned his White House staff to undertake an analysis of position votes spanning the 80th, 81st, and 82nd Congresses (1947–52). This research note analyzes Truman's success rate on this set of domestic and foreign policy votes and provides details on the 83 House and 99 Senate position votes for future use by researchers.     

ADMINISTRATIVE LOBBYING EFFECTIVENESS: WOMEN AND ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES IN U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE

This paper compares the administrative lobbying efforts of women's and environmental groups to nudge the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) to conform with Congressional mandates. In 1973, Congress mandated that AID involve women in its development programs, and AID responded with the establishment of a small, resource-poor monitoring office whose leader nurtured a wider constituency for the issue. In contrast, AID ignored its responsibilities under the National Environmental Policy Act, but once established environmental groups initiated a suit against AID, its General Council joined the environmental monitoring office and other executive branch advocacy units to increase environmentally sound programming. The progress of these two issues is compared, focusing on interest groups, internal AID structure, and the issues themselves.     

The Foreign Policymaking Role of Congress in the 1990s: Remote Sensing Technology and the Future of Congressional Power

In the midst of a period of Congressional assertiveness on foreign policy, a new technology has emerged for commercial use with the potential for enhancing Congress' information-gathering processes and agenda-setting role. The effect may alter the balance of power in the relationship between Congress and the President. Congress' access to news media stories of imagery may provide an independent information source on U.S. or foreign military installations and activities. Such a source could be utilized to assess issues such as Pentagon appropriations, treaty compliance, and foreign aid funding. The thesis of this article is that when interest groups and the news media use remote sensing imagery on foreign policy issues, the foreign and national security policymaking process will be transformed by enhancing the information status and the public agendasetting role of previously excluded segments such as interest groups, the news media, and the general public. The expanded role of these groups will decentralize decisionmaking by fragmenting power and likely restructure the relationship between the Congress and the executive over these policy areas during the 1990s.     

A Voice for Black Interests: Congressional Black Caucus Cohesion and Bill Cosponsorship

This study enhances our understanding of the vexing dilemma (i.e., the crosspressures emanating from individual goals and collective aspirations) confronting black legislators. Extant research based on roll call votes or on interest group scores that are also based on roll call votes is limited in what it can tell us about African-American representation in Congress. By examining African-American representatives' cosponsorship of legislation, this study uses a more accurate measure of members' legislative behavior and thus overcomes the "censored sample problem" associated with roll call data. Bill cosponsorship is a good indicator of a representative's intensity of commitment to constituent interests. We examine public bills cosponsored by African-American representatives from 1971 through 1993. The analysis finds that the cohesiveness of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) transcends policy arenas, notwithstanding higher rates of cosponsorship on social issues, and that the number of bills cosponsored by the CBC is noticeably higher after 1982. In addition, analysis suggests that CBC members, just like all members of Congress, respond to the structure that governs the House and the political forces that shape their electoral fortunes.     

Representation and Agenda Setting

We develop a new approach to the study of representation based on agenda setting and attention allocation. We ask the fundamental question: do the policy priorities of the public and of the government correspond across time? To assess the policy priorities of the mass public, we have coded the Most Important Problem data from Gallup polls across the postwar period into the policy content categories developed by the Policy Agendas Project ( Baumgartner & Jones, 2002 ). Congressional priorities were assessed by the proportion of total hearings in a given year focusing on those same policy categories, also from the Agendas Project. We then conducted similar analyses on public laws and most important laws, similarly coded. Finally we analyzed the spatial structure of public and congressional agendas using the Shepard‐Kruskal non‐metric multidimensional scaling algorithm. Findings may be summarized as follows: First, there is an impressive congruence between the priorities of the public and the priorities of Congress across time. Second, there is substantial evidence of congruence between the priorities of the public and lawmaking in the national government, but the correspondence is attenuated in comparison to agendas. Third, although the priorities of the public and Congress are structurally similar, the location of issues within the structure differs between Congress and the general public. The public “lumps” its evaluation of the nations most important problems into a small number of categories. Congress “splits” issues out, handling multiple issues simultaneously. Finally, the public tends to focus on a very constrained set of issues, but Congress juggles many more issues. The article has strong implications for the study of positional representation as well, because for traditional representation to occur, there must be correspondence between the issue‐priorities of the public and the government. We find substantial evidence for such attention congruence here.     

The State of Research on Gender and Political Participation

Woodrow Wilson declared the early Gilded Age to be a time of Congressional Government, when the legislature “reigned supreme” and was the federal polity's “motivating force.” Yet that same Congress, and era, have been immortalized pejoratively as bastions of corruption; of politicos, spoils–and, most especially, of omnipotently evil lobbyists. This essay argues that both lobbying and the notoriety it aroused in the Grant years were essentially by-products of systemic change. Corruption did exist, but much of what contemporaries saw as illicit was merely new; neither Washington nor the polity as a whole had yet devised mechanisms, or even language, appropriate to emerging conditions. In fact, lobbying was a necessary and even beneficial force in post-Civil War America, one that actually helped officials and citizens to function as the scope, procedures, and agenda of governance underwent dramatic transformation.     

Institutions,Rules, and the Lawmaking Process

Binder, Sarah A. Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. 250. $59.95, hardbound; $18.95, softbound.

Dion, Douglas. Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew: Minority Rights and Procedural Change in Legislative Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Pp. 312. $49.50, hardbound.

Krehbiel, Keith. Pivotal Politics: A Theory of U.S. Lawmaking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. 240. $42.00, hardbound; $17.00, softbound.

Hammond, Susan Webb. Congressional Caucuses in National Policy Making. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pp. 272. $39.95 hardbound.     

Enduring Rivals: Presidential Success and Support in the House of Representatives

We compare presidents' legislative support and success at the vote level of analysis. In so doing, we remind readers that these two outcomes measures, collected by Congressional Quarterly, Inc., may or may not reflect presidential agenda preferences. Success refers to a victory for the president on his vote positions, while support refers to margin of legislators taking the same position on the vote as the president. The vote level provides numerous characteristics of the legislation itself that serve as useful predictors of these two presidential position outcomes. These include its substantive nature, the stage of the vote on the floor, and the issue area of the vote. In addition to the characteristics of the votes themselves, we also incorporate presidential resources and environmental conditions. Virtually all of the component variables within these three concepts contribute to explaining presidents' legislative success and support in the House. We also find that, while models of overall House success and support perform similarly, controlling for party coalitional support dramatically alters the observed relationships. Therefore, without this further analysis, scholars risk misinterpreting the relationship between the president and Congress. Although we have not measured influence, we believe that these findings raise important implications for scholars of presidential-congressional relations and also suggest avenues for further research.     

LITERATURE REVIEW

M. Kenneth Bowler, The Nixon Guaranteed Income Praposal: Substance and Process in Policy Change
Bruce Ian Oppenheimer, Oil and the Congressional Process
Thomas R. Dye, The Politics of Equality
Randall B. Ripley, The Politics of Economic and Human Resource Development
Hawkins, Brett W., Politics and Urban Policies
Richard I. Hofferbert, The Study of Public Policy     

Stalinist political spectacle and the defeat of the opposition: The Fifteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1927

The Fifteenth Party Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) took place in December 1927. It brought to an end the inner-Party struggle of the Soviet Communist Party by confirming the expulsion of Leon Trotsky, Gregorii Zinoviev and other oppositionists from Party and government posts. The Fifteenth Party Congress marked the domination of Iosif Stalin and his allies over the whole Party and the beginning of Stalinist politics which flourished in the following decades. Despite extensive scholarly interest in this crucial Party congress in the history of the early Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, little has been studied on the organisational aspect of the Fifteenth Congress. This article examines the process of establishing the organisational and institutional mechanisms ahead of the Fifteenth Congress, which enabled Stalin and the Central Committee to unanimously affirm the correctness of the Party line. It also explores how Stalin attained legitimacy as the Party leader during the pre-Fifteenth Congress discussion and how it was presented at the Fifteenth Congress. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how the ‘memory’ of the Fifteenth Congress was constructed and how the Party leaders institutionalised the meaning of the Fifteenth Congress. Through these examinations, this article will shed fresh light on the Fifteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and will contribute to the study of the rise of Stalinism.     

Executives, Legislatures, and Decentralization

This article considers the role of executives and legislatures in authoring decentralizing legislation to study the type of decentralization each sought to achieve. I find that differences across branches are more significant than differences across political parties. The executive played a significant role in the process of decentralization emphasizing administrative forms of decentralization. Congressional efforts to write laws, on the contrary, focused on the political aspects. Thus, the involvement of both branches in policymaking contributed to the multidimensional form and high degree of decentralization in Colombia.