"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.     

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 strategic effects of preferential trade agreements

Most analysts agree that the recent proliferation of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) is largely the result of exasperation with multilateral trade liberalisation through the World Trade Organisation and a defensive response to the large-scale adoption of PTAs by major economies. The spread of PTAs, however, suggests that there are motivations other than economic that are inspiring these trade deals. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the use of PTAs to gain or reinforce strategic benefits, or to forestall strategic disadvantage, has been a major but largely unacknowledged driver of the recent trend towards PTAs. Three profound shifts in the international system over the past 15 years have led to the declining utility of traditional security institutions and thus the search for new forms of strategic deal-making: an enduring crisis of security institutions; the rise of new great powers; and the arrival of non-state security threats. In response, both large and small powers have resorted to a range of instruments, including strategically-driven PTAs.     

Neglect,Inattention, and Legislative Deficiencies: The Consequences of One-Party Deliberations in The U.S. House

Congressional scholars have conducted little research on the consequences of the majority party controlling bill formulation and excluding minority members from the legislative process. Critics of one-party deliberations use case-study evidence to argue that such processes lead to error-prone, often defective legislation. However, no large-N analysis has sought to operationalize and verify this effect. I develop new empirical strategies to explore claims about the relationship between deliberative procedures and policy outcomes. Examining legislation drafted in the U.S. House between 1987 and 2008, I find suggestive but consistent evidence of error-prone bills being developed under one-party processes.     

Issue Salience and Bill Introduction in the House and Senate

I propose that many if not most bills introduced in the House and Senate represent electoral position taking on the part of members. Thousands of bills are introduced every year, only a fraction of which are passed into law, much less seriously considered in the chamber. Moreover, bills are very good position-taking devices in that they can appear to voters to be a credible step in the electoral process. I search for electoral motivations by examining the content of the bills members introduce. For five different policy areas, and in both the House and the Senate, I find strong correlations between indicators of issue salience in members’ districts and the number of bills the member introduces within the policy area. In addition, in the House the relationship between salience and bill introduction is strongest among vulnerable members, although in the Senate vulnerability does not influence the relationship.     

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.     

Australia's flawed approach to trade negotiations: and where do we sign?

Economists have warned for many years that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) will not necessarily increase economic welfare in Australia given the relatively small size of the economy and the country’s lack of negotiating coin. The Productivity Commission cautioned in its major report on PTAs that there seemed to be a mindset of ‘agreements for agreement’s sake’, in part because of fears of missing out on a bandwagon that has attracted Australia’s major trading partners. Political and security considerations have played an important role in shaping Australia’s approach to PTAs. When politics trumps economics in negotiations of PTAs there is a risk of a rush to premature agreement that produces sub-optimal outcomes, that undermines broader plurilateral and global negotiations, and that introduces new and undesirable distortions in trade and public policies. Various theoretical approaches to trade policymaking provide insights into why Australian governments have been willing to conclude these sub-optimal deals.     

ARE EU COUNTRIES LESS INTEGRATED THAN U.S. STATES? THEORY AND EVIDENCE*

ABSTRACT A belief that EU integration is incomplete is often predicated on a comparison to U.S. states. Yet, with low barriers to trade and factor mobility between EU countries, is this belief correct? To address this question, we develop three theoretical predictions regarding the distribution of output and factors across members of an integrated economic area with harmonized policies and free movement of goods and factors. Empirical tests strongly support these predictions for U.S. states and 14 EU countries. Constructing a measure of integration, we find that EU integration rose from the 1960s to equal that of U.S. states by 2000.     

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.     

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.     

Trading Speed for Accuracy? Managing Goal Conflict and Accommodation in the U.S. Unemployment Insurance Program

Public managers must often cope with competing and conflicting goals. The common formulation is to assume that managers must trade‐off goals against each other. But is this always true? An alternative hypothesis is that sometimes managers may instead be able to improve outcomes on multiple goals simultaneously—by altering management practices. We test this “trade‐off” notion using a panel of state‐level administrative data from the U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) system from 1997 to 2004 and qualitative interviews from selected states. The trade‐off examined is timeliness of UI benefit payments versus the quality of UI determinations. In general, we find that state administrators often adopt management practices that facilitate improved outcomes for both timeliness and quality, indicating no trade‐off but instead a synergy between outcomes. We also find evidence of a feedback effect linking higher performance on timeliness to better quality determinations.     

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     

The economic effects of PTAs

This paper gives a short history of the development of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), followed by a summary of the economics of PTAs. The paper then examines the typical coverage of recent PTAs, and assesses their likely economic effects. Political economy considerations mean that PTAs have tended to be selective in two important ways—they have tended to be preferential, even in the provisions that go beyond goods trade, and they have tended to target only those provisions that explicitly discriminate against foreigners. This selectivity means that PTAs are an inferior path to deeper economic integration. For most of the Asian region, comprehensive domestic regulatory reform dominates as an integration strategy, while PTAs deliver relatively trivial gains. Multilateral action is an intermediate strategy, and is important for delivering trade liberalisation in sensitive sectors or in highly protected economies. These results appear to be relatively robust to the size of the PTA grouping.     

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.     

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)     

Sources of electoral support for the Australian democrats in the house of representatives and Senate elections of 1990 and 1993: A comparative analysis

Election to the Australian Senate under proportional voting and statewide quotas gives to minor parties of the political centre a chance to win parliamentary representation otherwise denied them in the single member constituency‐based House of Representatives. Focusing on the Australian Democrats, vote splitting in the context of ? consistently higher levels of support for the Democrats in the upper house provides some evidence of differences among sources of electoral support between House and Senate, but within a context of general similarity of voter behaviour. Findings support a view that, as a party of ‘concerns’ rather than ideology, with a highly unstable support base, the future of the Democrats as other than a focus for protest must remain in doubt.     

Grain Markets,Free Trade and the Bourbon Reforms: The Real Pragmática of 1765 in New Spain

The Real Pragmática of 1765 of Free Grain Trade was one of the most influential events in eighteenth century Spanish political and economic history? But was it influential in the Americas? Despite the abundant scholarship on the Bourbon reforms, we do not know much about the application of the Pragmática or more broadly about policies that affected domestic grain trade in the Americas. In this article I argue that the Pragmática was influential in increasing the participation of the viceroy in matters of wholesale and regional grain trade. Such changes in policies as applied in New Spain involved both pragmatism and a centralization of power, rather than a dogmatic support for free trade policies or a staunch support of traditional doctrines. In this I believe that New Spain did not differ from contemporary Western European countries, in which free trade was constantly being negotiated between different actors and authorities of various levels.     

How electoral integrity affects voter turnout in democracies

Does electoral integrity affect turnout? And if so, how? We analysed some variables that are closely related to electoral integrity – government actions, opposition actions, and the context in which the election is held – and find significant impact on turnout. We argue that higher turnout is often found in elections with higher electoral integrity. We tested our claims using data for over 700 elections covering 85 democracies for the 1950–2008 period. Results reveal that both boycott and election-related violence decrease turnout, but the effect of the former is substantially higher. We also find that, contrary to initial expectations, governments’ harassment of the opposition and the occasional banning of parties actually increases turnout.     

The abandonment of procurement-linked strategic activism in Australia: standing still with room to move

In this paper I examine the extent to which preferential trade agreements (PTAs) limit the Australian government's ability to use public procurement for local industry development ends. I do so not only by examining Australia's PTA obligations, but also by examining how other governments with similar obligations—such as Korea—are using public purchasing policies to promote local industrial advancement. I find that the PTA obligations of the Australian and Korean governments leave them both significant scope to use public purchasing strategically. Interestingly, however, Australian policymakers have been standing still in the room that remains, and even abandoning PTA-compliant procurement-linked development policies. South Korean policymakers on the other hand have been capitalising on every inch of space left open to them—and even experimenting with new forms of strategic public purchasing that nonetheless comply with their international obligations. I conclude by offering some suggestions as to how we might explain these countries’ radically different approaches to procurement policy, despite their very similar international obligations.