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.     

Representational Styles in the U.S. House of Representatives

This paper attempts to explicate and test the assumptions underlying typologies of legislative behavior. Quantitative data on a wide range of behaviors of 150 House members are used to produce a typology of styles of congressional behavior and to test two related theories of congressional behavior. Cluster analylsis reveals four distinct types of representatives: (1) activists, who are fairly extreme ideologically, highly active and highly visible, (2) backbenchers, who are inactive across all dimensions of behavior sampled here, (3) ingratiators, who are highly constituency-oriented, active in the solicitation and exploitation of casework, and very moderate ideologically, and (4) ideologues, who are moderate in their general level of activism, and rather extreme ideologically. Individual electoral threat is a weak determinant of the style a representative will adopt. Years of seniority within the institution and the political culture of the home district have major effects.     

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.     

Dilemmas of Party Leadership: Majority Whips in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1962-1982

This article examines party leadership in the context of personal ambition, institutional commitments and the representative's dilemma of choosing between a national vs. local perspective. The research focus is on the careers of five recent House Democratic party leaders and their tenure as appointed majority whips. From these case studies the whip, who occupies the third-ranking leadership post in the House, appears as an emerging leader who must develop strategies to enable him to balance a series of contradictory expectations: loyalty to leadership vs. self-promotion, service to the rank and file vs. policy impact, and support for national party positions vs. district preferences.     

Electoral Disproportionality and Bias Under the Alternative Vote: Elections to Australia's House of Representatives

Studies of electoral disproportionality and bias under Australia's alternative electoral system have mainly relied on the two-party preferred (2PP) vote totals for all electorates, irrespective of whether these are needed to determine the election outcome there. We argue that separate analyses should be undertaken for two groups of electorates – where the determination is made using the first-preference (FP) votes and where the 2PP redistributed votes are needed because no candidate wins a majority of FP votes, illustrating this with an analysis of the 2007 House of Representatives election results.     

Electoral and Partisan Forces in the Roosevelt Era: The U.S. Congressional Elections of 1938

Since nearly all studies of U.S. congressional elections test competing theories with data from the postwar era, we know very little about the applicability of contemporary theories to elections in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper takes a first step in exploring theories of electoral politics in the historical context of the 1938 elections. I believe a closer look at this particular election is valuable for a variety of reasons. First, turnover among incumbents in 1938 was extremely high by contemporary standards, yet no systematic explanation for the record number of losses exists. Additionally, this political era was characterized by intense polarization between Congress and the president even though the Democrats controlled both institutions. An extended analysis of this historical era can also explore the role strategic challengers played in the electoral arena before the emergence of candidate-centered elections. By exploring these significant events, I shed light on an otherwise neglected aspect of American political development.     

Shades of Orange: The Electoral Geography of Ukraine's 2004 Presidential Elections

Two American geographers and noted specialists on the electoral geography of post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine describe and analyze the three rounds of Ukraine's pivotal and highly contested presidential elections in late 2004. In an effort to shed light on the underlying demographic and socio-economic correlates of the vote (e.g., age, income, urban/rural residence, language/ethnicity), the authors pay special attention to changes among the rounds, providing background to widespread allegations of electoral fraud in round two (first runoff). Finally, they summarize results of bivariate and multivariate regression analyses that reveal which among the various correlates contribute most to explaining differences in the vote. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H10, O18, R10. 6 figures, 5 tables, 26 references.     

Changing the Rules to Change the House: Electoral Reform and the 2006 Electoral Contest for the Victorian Legislative Council

On 25 November, 2006, Victorians participated in a general State election in which a new electoral system was being used for the Legislative Council. The electoral reform was part of an overall reform of the upper house undertaken by the Bracks Labor government. This article examines the electoral reform of the Victorian Legislative Council and the politics associated with this major change. It argues that this reform was the product of a Labor commitment to reform Australia's State upper houses that had already been implemented in three other States. It also reviews the outcome of the 2006 election to assess the extent to which the outcome matched the expectation of advocates of reform.     

Decision-Making on Roll Call Votes in the House of Representatives

This article explores notions of contextual decision-making in congressional floor voting, based on structured interviews with 80 House Members. The research documents that congressmen make up their minds in different ways on different kinds of votes. Decision-making was found to be variegated; the major distinction is between high and low profile votes. The article also offers an optimistic assessment of the potential for constituency/representative linkages in House voting.     

National Forces and the U.S. House Vote, 1980-2004: The Uncertain Progress of Nationalization

Much recent scholarly attention has focused on the theme of growing nationalization in U.S. House elections. In this study, I reach a mixed verdict concerning the extent to which national forces have become more determinative of the House vote from 1980 to 2004. Only voter partisanship, but not ideology, economic evaluations, or assessments of presidential candidates' personal qualities, has increased in importance during presidential year elections. Since presidential voting, on the other hand, has come to depend more heavily on all these factors except the last, this means that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the bases of House and presidential voting actually have grown less, rather than more, similar over time.     

美国众议院关于“慰安妇”问题的H．Res．121议案

2007年1月31日,关国众议员迈克·本田（Mike Honda）向关国众议院提交了H．Res．121议案,表达众议院在“慰安妇”问题上的关切,要求日本对“慰安妇”问题正式做出明白和明确的道歉。随之在美国国会历史上第一次举行了由三名“慰安妇”幸存者组成的听证会,几经波折后H．Res．121议案终于在7月30日被美国众议院一致通过。正是借助H．Res．121议案不仅使得“慰安妇”问题迅速地引起世人注意,而且得以在美国众议院这个平台上以及从美-日同盟角度来探讨“慰安妇”问题,这些对于“慰安妇”问题发展的影响意义深远。