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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

“三个代表”对执政党领导理论的再创新

“三个代表”重要思想不仅丰富和发展了马克思主义党建理论宝库,而且对执政党领导理论进行了创新。一是“三个代表”思想升华了领导就是服务这一领导本质理论;二是“三个代表”思想丰富了党的领导职能的科学内涵;三是“三个代表”思想为党的领导工作提出了一个新的价值目标;四是“三个代表”思想是党的领导工作的一个新的评价标准。     

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.     

Public and Partisan Opinions of the Speaker of the House

Using polling data from 1982 to 2009, I develop a model of public opinion toward the Speaker of the House. I show that, in addition to economic and institutional factors, the speaker's ideology and events associated with the speaker's responsibilities in office affect the public's opinion toward this congressional leader. I also examine the partisan differences in the formation of public opinions about the speaker. I find that minority party partisans are more likely to have negative evaluations of the speaker when the speaker has more ideologically extreme views which lead to higher levels of polarization. In addition, members of different parties weigh economic and institutional factors differently in their evaluations of the speaker.     

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.     

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.     

Rules to Live By: Agenda Control and the Partisan Use of Special Rules in the House

A great deal of research in the 1990s was devoted to exploring the consequences of the ceding of greater agenda control to the majority leadership in the House during the era of Democratic control. The intent of this article is to build on that earlier work to discuss the continuing consequences of strengthened parties for decision making from the 1990s onward. Specifically, we find that as the parties became increasingly homogenous over time, partisan conflict over special rules votes grew as well. After the 1970s reforms, with the Democratic majority more homogeneous and the leadership having more influence over committees, the content of legislation coming out of committees became steadily more satisfactory to the majority (and less so to the minority) over time. These expectations did not change with the advent of a Republican majority, and the subsequent results did not change either. The Gingrich and Hastert speakerships continued the trend of increasing levels of partisanship on rules votes and majority control of satisfactory committee outcomes. We also find that a switch back to Democratic control in 2006, did not lead to lower levels of partisanship. The data suggest that Democrats were just as successful, if not more so, in using rules to control the legislative agenda during the 110th Congress as the Republicans were in the 109th.