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.     

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.     

Balancing Multiple Goals: Analyzing Votes on Free Trade Agreements in the U.S. House of Representatives

Despite increasing polarization in the House of Representatives, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) often pass not only with, but often because of, support from both parties. What explains these patterns? When do members cross party lines to support (or oppose) trade legislation? We argue that members are both ideologically and electorally motivated. Further, we argue that the relative balance of these incentives varies across the membership in meaningful ways. We examine House votes on 11 PTAs and find that ideology and district trade position have independent effects on support for free trade. We also find that the effect of trade position is conditioned by the ideology of the legislator; moderates are more responsive to their constituents' interests on trade.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Earmarks and Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives

Popular treatments of earmarks abound with allegations that members of Congress use them to aid their reelection campaigns, but the academic literature has yet to examine whether earmarking influences elections. To begin to fill this void, we search for relationships between earmarking and several facets of electoral competition and outcomes in the 2008 and 2010 House elections. There are three principal findings. First, in both election years, active earmarkers faced weaker primary election competition than other members. Second, in 2008 there was a positive correlation between earmarking and campaign receipts. Third, both of these correlations exist only among Democrats. These findings suggest that earmarks critics might be correct in charging that members, particularly Democrats, benefit from the earmarks they place into spending bills.     

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。     

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.     

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.     

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 Messages from the District: Explaining Presidential Support in the U.S. House of Representatives

Legislators are highly sensitive to those parts of their reelection constituencies whose support is least solid. Therefore, out-party members of Congress should be more supportive of the opposing party's president when that president enjoys greater electoral support among the legislators' reelection constituencies. This hypothesis is tested in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 1980s and 1990s. The hypothesis is supported, even with controls for the ideology of the member and the political orientation of the district. The findings suggest legislators have a sophisticated view of their districts and perceive electoral messages from the voting patterns of their constituents. The results also imply that presidential success is conditioned by the forces that operate in the congressional election context.     

Legislator Gender and Legislator Policy Priorities in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and the United States House of Representatives

This paper suggests that the findings of the literature on gender differences in legislator policy priorities in advanced industrial democracies very well may be generalizable to nations in the developing world, particularly those in Latin America. Previous studies of gender differences in legislator policy priorities have been confined to a small number of advanced industrial democracies. These studies have found women legislators to give a higher degree of priority than men to policies in the thematic areas of women's rights and children and families. Employing data on bill introduction, this paper tests for and finds similar gender differences in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and the United States House of Representatives. Significant gender differences were found in both national legislatures in the areas of women's rights and children and families. No significant gender differences were found in other areas widely considered to be of traditional interest to women.