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.     

(Re)assessing Parliamentary Policy Impact: The Case of the Australian Senate

A recent article in this Journal suggested that assumptions about the legislative influence of the Australian Senate may overstate its de facto power. Stanley Bach indicated that compromise with the Senate was relatively rare, and pointed out that most successful Senate amendments were government amendments. This paper provides an alternative view. We suggest that legislative influence is more subtle than Bach acknowledged, and that it is necessary to dig deeper in the data to fully understand the Senate's role. We therefore supplement his analysis in two ways: (1) through tracking the ultimate outcome of government defeats in the Senate; and (2) through analysis of two case study bills. We find that in confrontations with government the Senate ‘wins’ the great majority of the time. This shapes government behaviour in the chamber, such that many government amendments actually respond to non-government concerns. The most important element of Senate influence is therefore ‘soft power’– exercised through negotiation – backed up only in extremis by the ‘hard power’ of government defeat. This holds important lessons for the study of legislative influence more broadly, as well as demonstrating the true power of the Australian Senate.     

Majority Party Bias in U.S. Congressional Conference Committees

This article examines the representativeness of conference committees in the U.S. Congress by measuring the difference in observed policy preferences between the conference delegations and the parent bodies. We predict and find significant differences between the House and Senate in terms of the partisan bias of conference delegations. House conference delegations are systematically biased in favor of the majority party and away from the chamber median. We take the additional step of exploring the source of this bias. In particular, we examine whether majority party bias in conference is a function of partisan processes at work directly in the selection of conferees. We find evidence that the conditions of majority party influence in the House are consistent with some existing theoretical models of party influence in legislating. There is less conclusive evidence of partisan processes in the Senate, which is consistent with institutional differences in appointment practices.     

Shock troops: The emerging role of Senators in House of representatives campaigns

Since the 1949 introduction of proportional representation for the Senate there have only been two elections (1983 and 84) at which the ALP has gained more Senators in the chamber than the Coalition. The Coalition has held more seats than the ALP since 1987. The decline in Senate fortunes for the Labor Party has occurred despite (or, perhaps, because of) consecutive ALP Governments from 1972–75 and, more conspicuously, 1983–96. The professionalisation of politics through the 1980s and 1990s has dramatically changed the role major parties expect of their Senate teams. The Coalition and Labor Parties each use their Senators and Senatorial office resources as ‘shock troops’ in marginal seats, as well as points of constituency contact for electors in marginal seats or seats held by the opposition. Given that major party Senators are increasingly being used by the party machines as campaign tools, and are increasingly locating their offices and staffers in marginal seats, the numerical advantage the Coalition enjoys in the Senate is worthy of consideration. The additional campaign resources that Senators provide translates potentially into an electoral advantage in the House of Representatives for the Coalition. The Coalition's majority in the Senate may therefore be of as much interest outside the chamber as it is within it.     

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.     

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.     

John J. Parker and the Beginning of the Modern Confirmation Process

Ideological concerns' dominance of the Supreme Court confirmation process has certainly become routine, especially in the form of issue-driven interest groups' influence over the agenda for Senate debates. More significantly, the Senate normally focuses on what Laurence Tribe has called “the net impact of adding [a] candidate to the Court” ¹ in terms of steering the Court toward adherence to a particular judicial philosophy, such as originalism ² or pragmatism, ³ or toward a specific outlook on a given constitutional issue. And when the President nominates someone with prior judicial experience, the candidate's decisions, as well as his or her prior speeches or other public activities, become fair game as supposed indications of his or her fitness for service on the Court.     

Lawmakers' Preferences for Bureaucratic Discretion: The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996

Research on delegation stresses that chief executives are “privileged actors” well positioned to influence bureaucratic policy decisions. Therefore, legislative coalitions provide less authority to agencies when they disagree with executives about what policy should look like. Otherwise, executives would take advantage of voluminous agency discretion to direct bureaucrats to make decisions inconsistent with legislative coalitions’ policy goals. I stress that, in the U.S. lawmaking system, congressional committees are also privileged actors. As such—as with the president—those who experience policy disagreement with committees should wish to limit bureaucratic discretion. In addition, I examine individual lawmakers’ preferences for bureaucratic discretion to evaluate this perspective on agency design. As policy disagreement increases between senators and the Senate committee that oversees the agency/agencies receiving authority, senators prefer to limit the volume of discretion agencies receive.     

Setting the Table: Majority Party Effects in the United States Senate

This article joins the growing tide of research that studies party effects in the United States Senate. Previous work has shown that certain procedural tools disproportionately advantage the majority party at the expense of the minority. We build on this research by exploiting a new dataset that allows us to study motions to table amendments from the 91st to the 111th Congress. By examining the success of these motions, analyzing the voting calculus of individual senators on procedural and substantive votes, and simulating the aggregate impact of this tool, we provide some of the strongest evidence to date that political parties (and the majority party in particular) influence the legislative process and policy outcomes in the Senate. Our findings stand in stark contrast to the traditional vision of the Senate as an individualistic body.     

∗The Senate,Small Parties and the Balance of Power

The recent change to the number of senators to be elected from each state will alter the quota for election of senators in a way which will have the consequence of making it harder for minor party and independent candidates to secure representation in the Senate. This, in turn, will have the effect of reducing the likelihood that minor party and independent senators will hold the balance of power in the Senate with a consequent decline in the ability of the chamber to continue to make the major contribution to the governmental process at the national level that it has done in recent times. This proposition is examined first in terms of the logic of the quota system of proportional representation given various patterns of voting support for large and small parties, and secondly in terms of the performance of minor party and independent candidates in Senate elections since 1949.     

Pivotal Politics,Presidential Capital,and Supreme Court Nominations

We analyze the Supreme Court nomination process in order to provide a general explanation of presidents' propensity to win confirmation battles even in the face of an ideologically hostile Senate. The analysis serves two purposes. First, we argue that employing the conventional measure of the Senate's power to constrain the president's choice of nominees–the median senator–provides an inaccurate picture of this process. In its stead we argue that the filibuster pivot (or the sixtieth most liberal or conservative senator) more accurately captures the Senate's power over the president (Krehbiel 1998). Second, we argue that even under this more stringent spatial constraint, presidents still have the ability to win most confirmation battles with the Senate. Indeed, our results indicate that presidents often overcome situations where the Senate should reject their nominees, or where it should force them to make a less desirable choice, by invoking political capital.     

Upper House Reform in the United Kingdom and Australia

Discussion of upper house reform in the United Kingdom has been relatively muted in recent years, given the House of Lords' status as the world's last hereditary second chamber. However, a reform in 1999 removed the bulk of hereditary peers from the chamber and started a process of reflection about the appropriate role, functions and composition of the upper house. Fundamental questions arise about the power of the respective chambers at Westminster, the power of the government's mandate, and the possible territorial role of the upper house given the new devolution settlement. This paper describes recent developments, and contrasts the recent reform debate in the United Kingdom with the ongoing Senate reform debate in Australia. It discusses the extent to which views are converging and the likely outcomes of reform.     

Politics and Policy in the 103rd and 104th Congresses: Evaluating the Effects of Divided Government in the Postreform Era

The 1980 Reagan transition and the 1988 Bush transition offer important case studies for understanding the challenges of presidential transitions. Although not without its shortcomings, the 1980 transition was, at least comparably, the most successful of the transfers in power since the modern era of presidential transitions commenced with the Carter effort in 1976. 1988 offers useful lessons about "friendly takeovers": the passing of power from a president to a president-elect of the same party. The 1988 transition is also of interest because it offers the only instance of a sitting vice president elected to the presidency since Martin Van Buren in 1836. The 1988 transition, moreover, marked the ascendancy of President George W. Bush's father to the office, and it was a transition in which he and several members of this administration participated, Chief of Staff Andrew Card most notably.     

Small Parties and the Senate Revisited: The Consequences of the Enlargement of the Senate in 1984

An intriguing feature of electoral systems is that apparently insignificant modifications of their constituent rules can have important consequences. One such potentially important change, following the increase in the size of the Senate in 1984, was the shift from five to six places for each state to be filled at each half Senate election. Attention has been drawn, most notably by Sharman \[1986. 'The Senate, Small Parties and the Balance of Power.' Politics 21(2): 20-3], to the capacity of this change to reduce the representation of small parties, with adverse consequences for the role of the Senate in national government. A decline in Labor's share of the vote and growth in support for minor parties are identified as the primary reasons why the predicted outcomes have not eventuated. The paper speculates about the possible future relevance of Sharman's argument.     

A Right-of-Centre Triumph: The 2004 Australian Half-Senate Election

The Australian Senate is a significant part of the Australian parliamentary system and the electoral contest for the Senate results in representational outcomes that will influence the way the Senate will perform. This paper argues that the 2004 half-Senate election result was significant because it resulted in the Liberal–National Coalition obtaining a majority in the upper house. It accounts for this outcome by examining the contest by way of inter- and intra-party bloc contests. It finds that a particularly strong Right-of-Centre performance in Queensland, to which voters voting for Ms Pauline Hanson made a major contribution, delivered the Senate majority to the Howard government. The significance of the result also lies in the way it confounded previously held views that the combination of proportional representation used for the Senate with the need to elect six senators from each State would make it unlikely for either Labor or the Liberal and National Parties to ever win an upper house majority in the future.     

Senate Amendments and Legislative Outcomes in Australia, 1996–2007

There has been a recurring argument in Australia about how the Senate should exercise its constitutional power to amend government legislation that it receives from the House of Representatives. Much less attention has been paid to how the Senate has exercised this power, and how often Senate amendments have resulted in legislative changes that governments otherwise would not have made. This article explores the legislative record and finds that, during the Howard ministry, Senate amendments did not often provoke negotiations leading to bicameral compromise. Most often, the House either agreed to the Senate's amendments, many of which were government proposals, or disagreed to them. In the latter cases, the Senate most often gave way, instead of insisting on the legislative changes it already had approved.     

Presidential Position-Taking,Presidential Success,and Interest Group Activity

Do lobby groups help the American president achieve policy objectives? Existing research seldom evaluates interest groups and the president in conjunction, and as a result we have little systematic knowledge about how groups respond to presidential actions or whether they assist in realizing the president’s policy agenda. Building on existing data obtained through interviews with 776 lobbyists, combined with variables we generate describing issue salience, congressional attention, the political context, and policy adoption, we show that interest groups adjusted their lobbying activity to better reflect the president’s voiced preferences. Despite this strategy, we find that lobby groups had no significant marginal effect on policy adoption when controlling for the overwhelming influence of the president. The strong association between policy adoption and position-taking by the president withstands the inclusion of five alternative variables found in previous studies to condition the influence of the president over policy adoption.     

The Representation of Small Parties and Independents in the Senate

Minor party and independent senators have played a critical role in supporting procedural changes which have given the Australian Senate the ability to play an independent role in the legislative process, and to scrutinise the executive branch effectively. This article examines how this situation has followed from the adoption of proportional representation (PR) for Senate elections since 1949. In looking at the evidence available in 1948, it is argued that the current symbiotic relationship between minor parties and the Senate could not have been foreseen. Whether intended or not, the adoption of PR and the representation of minor parties has done more to enhance the operation of parliamentary democracy in Australia than any institutional change since federation.     

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.     

Party Voting in the U.S. Senate, 1877-1990: An Assessment of Long- and Short-Term Effects

Although party voting in the U.S. Senate has been affected by long-term and short-term factors, models in previous research have ignored this distinction. The author employs a relatively new tool, error correction modeling, to measure the long- and short-term effects of internal and external factors on party voting in the U.S. Senate. The results show that party voting for both major parties is a long-term equilibrium relationship with ratification of the 17th Amendment and that external factors are much more important than internal ones for explaining changes in levels of party voting.