The Changing Roles of House Party Leadership Organizations: The House Republican Policy Committee

More than 100 members in each of the two House party caucuses participate in the parties’ formal organizations—the extended party leadership. What purposes do these institutional components of the parties serve, and how and why have they changed over the last three decades? This article begins to answer these questions through a case study of the Republican Policy Committee based on primary documents as well as quantitative analysis. I show that the Republican leadership has used the committee for participation, coordination, and communication functions within the Conference, but that the roles of the committee have changed substantially in response to strengthening party government conditions, GOP majority status, heightened competition for control of the House, and the individual goals of key Republican leaders. Among other changes, the committee became more important for coordinating policy positions and strategy during the 1980s, but the strong, centralized majority leadership in the 1990s diminished this important coordination function and left the committee with an emphasis on partisan communication.     

The Multiple Roots of Party Loyalty: Explaining Republican Dissent in the U.S. House of Representatives

Why does any member of Congress choose to be loyal to one's party? The conventional wisdom is that party loyalty stems from constituent expectations, electoral concerns, or a lawmaker's ideological beliefs. However, this neglects two other, less-instrumental reasons for sticking with a political party: partisan identity and personal connections with party leaders. I test these alternative theories as well as conventional ones on a set of key moments in the 113th Congress (2013–2014) when rebellion against House Republican leadership by the rank-and-file was especially noteworthy. The results provide some support for both the party identity and personal connection hypotheses. They also indicate that although constituency characteristics help predict the likelihood of dissent from GOP leaders, there is little evidence for the electoral hypothesis, while cross-cutting ideological preferences as well as preferences along the traditional left-right spectrum prove statistically significant. In short, evidence reveals both personal and instrumental roots of party loyalty in Congress.     

Coalition-Building by Party Leaders: A Case Study of House Democrats

This study explores the process by which party leaders build winning coalitions. Focusing on House passage of impoundment legislation in the 93rd Congress, the essay documents the extensive efforts of Democratic leaders to create a viable bill and persuade party members to support it. Analyses of whip counts demonstrate that the leaders passed the impoundment bill in part because they could bargain with and convert “successful” party members whose past career advancement and future achievements depended in part on leadership assistance. The essay concludes by identifying six conditions that nurtured the bargaining capacity of the Democratic leaders and fostered their coalition-building success.¹     

Social Movements,Political Elites and Political Opportunity Structures: The Case of the Woman Suffrage Movement from 1890-1920

Many contemporary theories of party leadership derive their concepts from organization theory and economic theories of rational choice. They stress the institutional contexts that shape leadership possibilities and the relationship between members (principals) and leaders (agents) in shaping leadership decisions. Both the macro (institutional context) and micro (principal-agent) theories assume that the main role of party leaders is to marshal majority support for legislation on which the party takes a position. Focussing on party position legislation, however, provides only a partial view of party leadership. This article expands this perspective by considering the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform bill, in which party leaders avoided taking a clear policy stand and pursued other interests instead. In broadening the assumptions inherent in organization theory to include behavior beyond taking party policy stands, we uncover leadership roles that are missed by those who adopt the policy-centered approach. Applying other organization theory concepts, we broaden principal-agent theories by explaining divergent leadership roles in the consideration of non-party position legislation as behavior that is typical for legislative leadership. We conclude that the nature of non-party position legislation provides party leaders a greater latitude to diverge from their expected party leadership roles and to behave according to their different strategic situations, district and state interests, philosophies, and personalities.     

The House Member as Teacher: An Analysis of the Newsletters of Barber B. Conable,Jr.

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 maintained a plateau of higher news visibility relative to their primary competitors in the House, committee chairs, though there have been some recent exceptions to this trend that are highly suggestive.     

Majority Party Bias in U.S. Congressional Conference Committees

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.     

Cultural retaliation: the cultural policies of the ‘new’ Front National

This study examines the conception of culture and the cultural policies of the French Front National. Tracing the developments of the party’s cultural agenda before and after Marine Le Pen took over the leadership of the party from her father, I show how the Front National has adapted its discourse on cultural policy to its wider programmatic profile. In the context of a strategy of de-radicalisation promoted by Marine Le Pen, recent years have witnessed focussed efforts by the party leadership to professionalise and modernise the party’s cultural policy programme. However, the analysis of the party’s current cultural policy agenda reveals a remarkable continuity in the way the party leadership conceives of national culture and of what cultural policy should promote. This programmatic continuity becomes apparent in the analysis of the local cultural policies of municipalities won by the Front National in 2014. Exploring the cultural agendas of ten local governments with a Front National majority, I argue that the cultural policies of the Front National remain deeply rooted in a nativist understanding of culture and a dirigiste approach that wilfully excludes postcolonial minorities.     

Divided Government and the Rise of Social Regulation

Political scientists have debated the causes of divided government since the Reagan administration. In addition, a handful of scholars have also pondered the possible consequences of divided party rule for politics and policy. Still, one serious oversight in the divided'government literature is the potential consequences of divided party rule for the types of policy pursued during divided and unified party regimes. Divided government may create incentives for conflicting institutions to use social regulation debates, often considered the most divisive public policy debates, as "wedges" in order to damage the opposing party in future elections. Each party also has an incentive to embrace social regulation in order to reaffirm its allegiance to its core constituency. This article tests the hypothesis that divided government produces more important social regulation votes than unified government. I define the population of important votes as all Key Votes in the House of Representatives from 1953 to 1998. The data analysis reveals that important social regulation votes are in fact more prominent during eras of divided government than during unified party control. This finding has potential implications for the tenor of our national politics as well as the public trust.     

The 1984 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Election Studies

This paper examines the role of leadership in the U.S. House in the context of arguments raised in Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government. It begins with a discussion of the speakerships of Henry Clay and Thomas Reed as counterexamples to Wilson's generalizations (a model that links the degree of preference homogeneity among legislative followers to a leader's decision about whether to exert policy leadership is presented in an Appendix). Next we argue that preference homogeneity, leadership style and institutional structure form a kind of equilibrium, drawing on the history of the House for supporting evidence. Finally we discuss the application of our theory to House Democrats in the 1980s.     

Determinants of National Television News Coverage of Women in the House of Representatives, 1987-1998

This study adapts Timothy Cook's 1986 analysis of news coverage of members of Congress to women legislators. The relative impact of independent variables on the amount of television news coverage received by women in the House from 1987 to 1998 was determined using Poisson regression. These included structural variables (leadership, seniority, party control of the chamber, and membership on a prestigious committee), member characteristics (racial minority status, media market size, party and attractiveness), and member activities (legislative activity, ideology, scandal, authorship of women's bills, and running for higher office). Factors that were significantly related to the amount of coverage received by a congresswoman were: authorship of women's bills, running for higher office, media market size, political party, and seniority. Leadership did not have the same payoff for women's visibility that it did for the largely male group of legislators in Cook's study. Authoring a large number of pieces of legislation did not enhance women's coverage, but authoring bills on women's issues did.     

Owner parties and party institutionalisation in Italy: is the Northern League exceptional?

Studies on party institutionalisation commonly argue that parties with personalist leadership and weak organisation are unlikely to remain in power beyond leadership succession. In other words, these parties will rarely attain their own institutionalisation. From this perspective, the recent Italian political reality represents a conundrum. Three parties of this type – Northern League; Forza Italia; Italy of Values – confronted significant resignation issues concerning their leaders, but only the League, contrary to the theory, made a decisive step toward institutionalisation by removing its founding father and remaining an actor with national blackmail potential. This article addresses this challenge and provides a solution to this conundrum. In particular, the article demonstrates that an approach that considers both party factors and critical events is necessary to account fully for the variance of outcomes and, more generally, for party change.     

Party Leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives: Making Theoretical Sense of Ambition and Context

This article focuses on the policy-making activities of House Republicans in their early transition to power (104th Congress) as well as in their settling in (105th Congress). Key components of House governance, as practiced by the Democrats in the 103rd Congress, serve as a benchmark for comparison. The analysis reveals substantial differences between the size, scope, and thrust of the leaders' issue agendas. Over time, decision-making apparatus and strategies for building floor coalitions and publicizing party views vary as well. Using data from interviews with the principals and a host of sources from the government and the media, I find evidence that draws attention to the power of personal ambitions and political contexts.     

Identifying the Critical Members of the House of Representatives

This article combines the historical record of presidential-congressional relations with previous scholarly findings to develop a model that identifies the members of Congress whose support is critical to the president's ability to build enacting coalitions. It then analyzes the relationship between President Obama and the House of Representatives during the 113th Congress as a case study that demonstrates the model's utility. Conventional wisdom and political pundits suggest that presidents working in divided government will have impossible difficulty working with Congress, but history suggests otherwise. The president's ability to successfully build enacting coalitions during divided government requires him to perform two rather disparate tasks. First, the president must minimize the amount of presidential party members who cross party lines to vote against the president's position. Second, the president must entice at least some opposition party members to cross party lines and support the president's position. Using data from 1981 to 2015, I find that representatives’ behavior on presidential support votes are related to constituency-level presidential strength, electoral vulnerability, ideological moderation, and ideological extremity. I use these results to identify the critical members of the 113th Congress. When a majority of these critical members supported President Obama's positions his legislative efforts were successful. When a majority of these members opposed the president's positions, the House Republican majority defeated the president.     

The Lost Leader: Sir Stafford Northcote and the Leadership of the Conservative Party, 1876–85*

Sir Stafford Northcote has gone down in history as a man who fell short of the ultimate achievement of being prime minister largely because of personal weakness, and lack of political virility and drive. The picture painted by Northcote's political enemies – most notably the Fourth Party – has been accepted uncritically. Yet, political motives lay behind the actions of these supporters, and their harsh black and white portrait is not illustrative of the complexity of the situation in which Northcote found himself. Although individual characteristics undoubtedly played a part in his final political failure, underlying dynamics and structural transformations in politics and political life were more significant. It was more than simply the misfortune in succeeding the exceptionally charismatic Disraeli as leader. Northcote was faced with unparalleled disruption in parliament from Irish Nationalist MPs; the starkly polarised debate on the eastern question left him detached as a moderate. His temperament was better suited to constructive government rather than to opposition. However, following general election defeat in 1880, Northcote was denied this opportunity. Equally, his position in the lower House denied him the capacity to define a clear political critique of the Liberal government. Northcote's leadership of the party reflected the changing nature of British politics as radicals, tories, Irish Nationalists and Unionists increasingly contested the consensual style more appropriate to the political world of Palmerston and the 14th earl of Derby.     

Japan's Political Leadership Deficit

Analysts have long pondered the question: 'Who rules in Japan?'. Prime Ministers who have exercised strong leadership have been the exception rather than the rule. Despite the widespread acknowledgment that Japan's political leadership deficit undermines the ability of the government to act swiftly in a crisis and to exercise international leadership in trade and foreign policy, a systematic explanation for Japan's weak political executive is yet to be advanced. While historical and cultural factors cannot be ignored, more relevant in a contemporary context are institutional factors that restrict the power of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. A parliamentary Cabinet system is not incompatible with strong leadership but, in Japan's case, the inability of the political executive to exercise indisputable authority, or indeed, merely to exercise the legitimate prerogatives of Prime Ministerial and Cabinet Office, is directly attributable to the constraints imposed by a collection of informal power structures within the ruling conservative party and by an autonomous central bureaucracy, all of which have held power away from the political executive. Various institutional remedies are currently being pursued to enhance the leadership of the executive branch. They are part of a deliberately engineered shift in power from non-elected bureaucrats to elected politicians. The reforms will also help to diminish the influence of ruling party factions over personnel selections to executive office and the ascendancy of internal policy cliques within party policymaking.     

Partisan Efficiency in an Open-Rule Setting: The Amending Process in the U.S. Senate, 1865–1945

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.     

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.     

The Judicial Bookshelf

Millions were reminded on January 20, 2009, that the inauguration of an American President is as remarkable as it is routine. In this distinctly republican rite, the chief executive publicly subordinates himself to the fundamental law of the land. As the Constitution dictates, “[b]efore he enters on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: ‘I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.’” ¹ This display of constitutional fealty was remarkable because the variety of political systems, experiences, and cultures across today's globe graphically illustrates that the seamless and peaceful transfer of authority from one political party or individual to another, as was witnessed at President Barack Obama's inauguration and at President George W. Bush's inauguration in 2001, is not always a foregone occurrence everywhere. January's event was routine in that, from the outset of government under the Constitution and with the notable and tragic exception of 1860, the defeated party or individual has accepted, if not welcomed, the verdict rendered by the electoral process. That was the outcome even in 1800, when the notion of a violence‐free shift of control in a country founded on the principle of government by the “consent of the governed” ² was first put to the test at the presidential level. The assumption of authority by Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic‐Republicans from John Adams and the Federalists marked the world's first peaceful transfer of power from the vanquished to the victors as the result of an election. ³ Given the stark national partisan differences that had crystallized in the short time since ratification of the Constitution and the fact that finalization of the election required extraordinary intervention by the House of Representatives to break an Electoral College tie, this outcome was a greater achievement than is sometimes acknowledged. “Partisanship prevailed to the bitter end and showed no signs of abating,” according to one historian who has recently revisited this critical and precedent‐setting election. “Over the campaign's course, George Washington's vision of elite consensus leadership had died, and a popular two‐party republic … was born.” ⁴     

Party development in the early decades of the Australian parliament: a new perspective

This study offers a new perspective on the development of political parties in the Australian House of Representatives. We analyse a data set of 3060 legislative votes to estimate how parties influenced the behaviour of 287 legislators who served in the first 12 parliaments (1901-31). We show that the socialisation of members and cohort replacement effects, as well as a decline in private member business and committee votes, explain why partisanship increased over time. Our results challenge two widely held beliefs about the organisation of political parties in the legislative arena and the Australian party system. First, the analysis demonstrates that the government’s ability to increase party discipline through control of the legislative agenda is limited when parliament is engaged in nation-building projects. Second, our study suggests that introducing restrictive parliamentary procedures played a role in consolidating Australia’s unique two-party system, which opposes Labor to the Liberal–National coalition.     

‘A Tiny Little Footnote in History’: Conservative Centre Forward

In May 1985, two years after he had returned to the back benches, Francis Pym launched the first organised display of dissent within the parliamentary Conservative Party against Margaret Thatcher's leadership: Conservative Centre Forward. Those Conservative MPs who joined the group were very much believers in One Nation Conservatism. Conservative Centre Forward survived for barely a week after going public; it rapidly collapsed amid accusations of disloyalty and inept leadership. The group proved to be a short-lived experiment which achieved little of note and exposed those who were involved to widespread ridicule. Yet, it was precisely because Conservative Centre Forward collapsed so quickly and achieved so little that it was significant. In its own way, the short life of the group provided a revealing commentary upon the character of the mid-1980s Conservative Party. It was a party which, on the one hand, was moving inexorably to the right and therefore ever further away from the values of One Nation Conservatism which Conservative Centre Forward espoused. On the other hand, it was a party which was still traditional enough to view open displays of dissent, of whatever magnitude, as a threat to the unity upon which its continued electoral success depended.