Public Presidential Appeals and Congressional Floor Votes: Reassessing the Constitutional Threat

The assertion that public appeals by presidents can create electoral threats to noncompliant members of Congress is central to arguments about the value of "going public" as a legislative strategy. Although recent scholarship suggests a link between popular presidential rhetoric and the likelihood of bill passage, researchers have yet to examine the impact of public presidential appeals on individual legislators. This study examines the logic of electoral threats imposed by going public. We test whether a president's going public with increased intensity leads individual members of Congress to increase their support for presidential preferences on congressional floor votes. We employ several measures to assess the intensity of presidents' public appeals, including domestic speeches, nationally televised addresses, and speeches in legislators' home states. Several logistic regression models are tested to determine whether congressional support for presidential preferences on the floor is influenced by the interaction between members' electoral vulnerability and presidents' use of popular appeals. The findings suggest that presidential speechmaking has very little impact on the likelihood that members of Congress will support the president's position on roll call votes. We argue that this suggests a necessary revision of criticisms of the "rhetorical presidency." Public presidential appeals do not seem to present a considerable threat to a constitutional order that is predicated on congressional autonomy and deliberation.     

Policy Coalitions in the U.S. Congress: A Spatial Duration Modeling Approach

This paper applies spatial duration models to the analysis of cosponsorship coalitions in the U.S. House of Representatives. This approach provides a unique and simultaneous statistical analysis of ideological space (specifically, coalition formation) and geographical space. Typically, duration models are associated with temporal longitudinal data, but recently have been adapted to the spatial domain (Pellegrini and Reader 1996). In this paper, spatial duration models are further adapted to examine ideological space including a consideration of unobserved sources of spatial variation (or omitted variable bias). We examine two features of cosponsorship coalitions, breadth and clustering. Breadth is defined as the ideological distance between the two most extreme members of the coalition which is an important “signal” to the rest of Congress regarding the scope and broad appeal of the proposed legislation. In contrast, clustering refers to the distance between individual members of a coalition and reveals the tendency, or not, of ideologically similar members of Congress to support various bills. To examine breadth and clustering, we employ spatial duration models of cosponsorship that permit a multivariate analysis incorporating both the characteristics of members of Congress and the geographical regions they represent. Results indicate that cosponsorship coalition patterns are primarily determined by the content of the legislation, not the actions of the coalition leadership. While the leadership characteristics of sponsors have a limited effect on cosponsorship breadth, the size of the coalition is the primary determinent. Leadership characteristics also have little effect on cosponsorship clustering. Rather, clustering is due to members' policy preferences, as measured by distance to the coalition leader. In addition, the duration analysis results suggest that geographical proximity between members of Congress “overcomes” ideological distance. Finally, the spatial duration approach is noted as a fruitful methodology for examining explicitly spatial patterns in both ideological or geographical space.     

Consensus,Conflict, and Partisanship in House Decision Making: A Bill-Level Examination of Committee and Floor Behavior

Although conflict and partisanship are deeply entrenched in the public's view of the U.S. Congress, political scientists have noted that consensus characterizes much of the legislative branch's operations. We build on an expanding literature that moves beyond a focus on roll call voting and explore individual bills as the unit of analysis in an attempt to obtain an accurate picture of the broader context in which House decision making occurs. Drawing on evidence spanning 24 years, we document the extent to which consensus rather than conflict typifies House decision making. Our bill-level analysis facilitates a unique examination of the context in which committees operate as well as the ensuing floor environment. The results provide insight into the factors attending to the degree of consensus and conflict associated with bills—particularly the salience of the issue and the committee of origin—while painting a more complete picture of the day-to-day environment of the U.S. House.     

Roll Call Votes on Cabinet Confirmations

Studies of cabinet nominations by the Senate have focused on the process and the outcomes of cabinet confirmation votes in the Senate, while the individual votes of senators have received little attention. This study examines roll call votes on all cabinet nominations since 1969 in an effort to explore the effects political and personal factors have on senators' votes on cabinet confirmations. Three basic conclusions emerge: the most significant influences on senators' confirmation votes are personal factors, especially perceptions of the nominee being a policy extremist; negatives matter more than positives; and there are partisan differences, as presidential party senators have a higher probability of voting to confirm when allegations of wrongdoing are made.     

Historians and Political Scientists: Observations on Presidential Studies

Absenteeism on roll call votes in the U.S. House decreased just prior to events of the early 1970s, thus suggesting that the two events are related. Changes during the early 1970s increased the number, the visibility and the pubic accessibility of recorded legislator's decisions. With relevant political actors having easier access to more legislator's decisions, lawmakers have less room to deviate from what they perceive to be the electorally tenable position. While good roll call attendance rates are now the norm, this is even more so in cases of high visibility votes, i.e., conflictual votes and votes of stated presidential concern. Nonetheless, the use of strategic absenteeism by politically conflicted, southern Democrats seems to endure.     

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.     

Presidential Speeches and the Stages of the Legislative Process

Presidents go public frequently to increase their success in Congress. Yet scholars know little about when presidents speak within the legislative process or why. If presidential speeches are indeed a source of power for presidents, then presidents are likely to use them throughout the legislative process, not speak only to affect final passage. We argue that presidents speak generally to meet broad electoral and political goals, but target speeches according to their goals at each stage of the legislative process: to frame the debate at the agenda-setting stage, to push bills out of committee, and to finalize support from legislators at the roll call stage. We analyze 116 bills between 1989 and 2004, supplemented by Bush Library archival data and a case study of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. The results illustrate that presidents speak mostly at the agenda-setting and roll call stages and presidential attention at each stage varies by informational cues provided by the larger political environment.     

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.     

Neutral Bystander,Intrusive Micromanager,or Useful Catalyst?

An analysis of Forest Service-related legislative activity found that increasingly Congress is becoming involved in agency activities and decisionmaking. Congress's growing scrutiny and management of the Forest Service is indicated by rising trends in requests for agency testimony at congressional hearings, in the number of Forest Service-related bills and amendments introduced in Congress, and in the amount of Forest Service-related legislation enacted. Anecdotal evidence of direct political pressure imposed upon agency personnel by congressional members also indicates that much congressional influence occurs outside of these legislative activities. An examination of activities such as these and directives attached to annual appropriation bills also shows that not all congressional actions are productive in fostering positive agency change. The results of this study indicate the likelihood that Congress has been playing a major role in instigating change within the agency.     

The Ideological Ends Against the Middle: House Roll Call Votes on Normal Trade Relation Status for China, 1990-2000

From 1990 to 1999, the House of Representatives held roll call votes to attempt to overturn presidential extensions of Normal Trade Relation (NTR) status to China. What was once a routine matter attracting little congressional attention became a highly divisive matter. Interestingly, the coalition that formed to oppose such extensions was a partnership of strange bedfellows: extreme liberals joining their far-right colleagues to try to rescind the president's extension of normal trade status for China. When the distribution of opposition on the yearly extensions of NTR is compared to that on the vote to approve permanent NTR (PNTR) for China, the ideological distribution of opponents changes noticeably. I argue that important procedural differences between the votes on the yearly extension, and PNTR, serve to explain why ideologically extreme members formed their strange alliance.     

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.     

Gender and Patterns of Roll Call Voting in the U.S. Senate

Previous studies of gender and representation at the state legislative level and in the U.S. House of Representatives have shown that women tend to be more liberal than their male colleagues and are more likely to support women's issues. Because of the limited presence of women in the body over the years, there is scant empirical evidence to confirm whether this pattern is present in the U.S. Senate. Sound theoretical basis indicates that the institutional rules of the Senate, the Senate's individualistic culture, the Senate's six-year election timetable, and the national profile of U.S. senators may create conditions that allow gender differences in roll call voting to be more easily detected than is possible in more rigidly structured institutions such as the U.S. House. This study employs a longitudinal design that pools roll call voting data from the 103rd Congress through the 110th Congress to determine whether female senators compile substantively different policy records than their male colleagues. The results indicate that gender does systematically influence roll call voting patterns in the Senate. However, it is largely a function of female Republicans voting in a less conservative fashion than male Republicans on the basic left-right policy space and on a smaller set of issues of importance to women.     

Shirking and Ideology: Defense in the Senate

A repeated finding in political science is the influence of a representative's so-called ideology on roll call voting in the U.S. House and Senate. Many of these studies attempt explicitly to separate the impact on roll call voting of "personal" ideology from that of constituency ideological preferences. In these studies, personal ideology is viewed as a form of shirking in which members pursue their own policy preferences rather than those of their constituents. This paper shows, at least for the case of defense in the Senate in the 1980s, that the evidence is sufficient to reject the claim that shirking represents the consumption of personal ideological policy preferences. Instead, the apparent impact of shirking on defense voting was an instrumental, reelection-oriented response to President Reagan's ability to muster popular support for his defense build up, and thus cannot be regarded as shirking at all.     

"Don't Go Changing to Try and Please Me": A Preference-Consistency Analysis on Trade Policy in the U.S. House

Trade voting in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993 to 2001 provides an opportunity to move beyond examining the determinants of trade voting on single bills and to focus on the consistency members of Congress demonstrate in their trade preferences. We find that while a significant percentage of House members are consistent in their trade preferences during the time period, a surprising percentage of those members serving over the entire period are inconsistent, affecting important changes in U.S. trade policy. Ideological, partisan, and constituency- based factors prove significant cross-pressures on House members' trade preferences throughout the time period; however, we unearth differences in effects between the two parties. It is these cross-pressures that lead to inconsistent preferences among some legislators.     

The Marginality Hypothesis and Supreme Court Confirmation Votes in the Senate

Studies of Supreme Court confirmations have found that a senator's vote is primarily determined by his or her ideological proximity to a nominee and that nominee's objective qualifications. This literature does not account for the extent to which a senator's electoral safety may enhance or mitigate the effects of ideology or qualifications. We argue that senators from less competitive states are more likely to eschew a nominee's qualifications in favor of their own ideological preferences. By analyzing roll call data on confirmation votes from Byron White to Elena Kagan, we support this argument and add an intriguing new piece to the puzzle underlying the changing dynamics of Senate confirmation voting.     

When Loyalty Is Tested: Do Party Leaders Use Committee Assignments as Rewards?

Theories of parties in Congress contend that one tool that party leaders possess to induce loyalty among rank-and-file members is control over committee assignments, but conventional tests of this linkage have failed to distinguish loyalty from simply voting one's preferences in accordance with party leaders. We characterize loyal legislators as having a higher propensity for voting with party leaders when it matters, even when their preferences diverge from the mainstream of their party. Testing this strong definition of loyalty on committee assignment data for 1991–2015, we show that majority party members who support their party on the subset of votes for which party leaders have taken positions in floor speeches are more likely to be rewarded with plum committee assignments, especially those members on the ideological extremes.     

Business Backgrounds and Congressional Behavior

In the following paper, we analyze whether the behavior of members of Congress with business backgrounds differs from that of other legislators, and we find that it does. Specifically, House members with business backgrounds have closer relationships with business interests (as measured by larger contributions from corporate PACs) and demonstrate more probusiness roll call voting. We also find that members making a direct transition from a business career to the House sponsor more business-focused legislation. The significance of a business background is consistent across different forms of behavior, though the magnitude of effects is generally modest. Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature emphasizing the importance of legislator backgrounds to their behavior in office.

Republican Pete Coors brings it up in nearly every campaign speech: There are too many lawyers in the U.S. Senate.... His point is that he'd like to see more successful businesspeople running the country the same way they guide their companies. (Florio 2004)     

Book Reviews

Abstract

The coordinated behavior of members of a state delegation to the U.S. Senate can provide constituents in a state greater representation in Congress. Despite this potentially improved level of representation through coordination, popular and scholarly accounts of the U.S. Senate often feature senators from the same state at odds with one another on a variety of policy issues. In this research, we investigate competing expectations regarding the frequency (across topics) of collaborations between members of a state delegation to the Senate. We then test our expectations using patterns in bill cosponsorship in the 103rd–110th U.S. Senates. We find that senators from the same state work together often on the development of legislation, and that this coordinated activity is consistent across a variety of bill topics across many sessions of congressional activity. Notably, same-state status is an even stronger predictor of support via cosponsorship than is same-party status, raising possible avenues of breaking through partisan gridlock.     

The Pendulum of Congressional Power: Agenda Change,Partisanship and the Demise of the Post-World War II Foreign Policy Consensus

Many scholars contend that Congress rarely matters in the realm of foreign policy. The source of this collective impotence is often explained by the weaknesses in congressional institutions vis-a-vis the president, as well as a general inability to respond effectively to a dynamic international political environment. We contend that the debate over congressional activism has not adequately addressed the role of agenda change. We analyze all roll call votes in the House of Representatives relating to the international affairs agenda between 1953 and 1998. We find that presidents have become significantly more likely to stake out positions on economic and trade issues as compared to other international issues. We also observe that presidential positions in the realm of foreign policy are increasingly characterized by interparty and interinstitutional conflict. While this increased conflict has dramatically decreased the president's ability to successfully pass executive priorities in foreign affairs more generally, presidential success on economic and trade issues has witnessed a significantly greater decline. We infer from these results that changes to the foreign policy issue agenda represent one important factor that has affected not only the incentives for political parties to participate actively, but also the willingness of Congress to challenge the president in the foreign policy debate.Asked one day whether it was true that the navy yard in his district was too small to accommodate the latest battleships. Henry Stimson (chair of the House Naval Affairs Committee early in the century) replied, 'That is true, and that is the reason I have always been in favor of small ships.'1Carriers have been, are and will be for the foreseeable future an absolutely essential part of our deterrence force…2John Warner, senator from Virginia, home state of Newport News Shipbuilding     

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.