Browsing by Subject "Congress"

Despite the crucial role that conference committees can play in the legislative process, relatively little is understood about the forces that influence conference outcomes and the priorities of conferees. In particular, the literature on conferences rarely considers the importance of parties, while prominent theories of party government in Congress do not engage the role of conferences in the legislative process. Given the unique features of the conference reports (i.e., they are subject only up-or-down votes, they are generally protected from further amendments, they enjoy a high probability of passage, and they provide a means to make controversial changes/additions to legislation with minimal scrutiny) conferences can be a useful means for majority conferees to further the legislative goals of their party. To the extent that one of the goals of a legislative majority is to pass legislation that better reflects the interests of its members, then partisan politics should play an active role at the conference stage and in the decisions of conferees. This dissertation serves to connect the conference and party government literatures by considering the claim that majority parties in Congress can and do use the conference process to pursue a partisan legislative agenda.

This broad claim is considered in three separate chapters that test hypotheses about the role of party politics in different aspects of the conference process. Chapter two tests the hypothesis that more partisan conference delegations are associated with changes in policy that are more consistent with the majority party's preferences. Since the Speaker of the House has sole discretion over the composition of the House's delegation it is possible that strategic selection of conferees could advantage the preferences of the majority in the House. Using original data that includes information on every conference committee from 1981-2008 the empirical analysis shows that changes in House minority support in roll call vote before and after conference are smaller for conferences where the percentage of the House majority delegation is larger. Increases in minority shifts of support within both chambers is also predicted by increased support for the report by minority conferees and more bipartisan support in the opposing chamber. Though the analysis cannot directly test whether strategic selection by the House Speaker is effective, the results do show that if a conference delegation is dominated by the majority party that conference reports are more partisan. Thus the results indicate that the decision to appoint conferees can be used to influence the partisan content of conference outcomes.

Chapter three looks at whether compromises made in conference reflect a bias towards the interests of majority members. Using newly available data from the first session of the 110th Congress, which allow for a comparison of earmarks before and after conference, the chapter provides one of the first analyses of how earmarks are changed during bicameral negotiations. Specifically, this chapter tests hypotheses on whether the earmarks of majority, well-connected, and electorally vulnerable members are advantaged in how conferees decided to change the value of pork barrel projects in conference. Lastly, since earmarking is generally considered to be free of partisan conflict, the data provides a demanding test of the existence of a majority bias. The results show evidence of majority bias for Representatives and Senators in conference earmarking during the 110th Congress.

Chapter four focuses on decision making in conference at the level of individual conferees. Using original data collected on every conferee's decision to sign a report from 1981-2008 the analysis this chapter tests the extent to which party loyalty is a factor in conferee decision making. Through descriptive, multivariate, and multilevel analyses of signature decisions the results show that majority affiliation, relative to committee and individual preferences is increasingly the dominant factor in predicting whether a conferee signs a conference report. This results also establish that contextual features of a conference, such as whether the bill was referred to multiple committees before conference, whether the bill considered was an appropriations measure, and whether the House was in a position to act first on the conference report, are all significant predictors of disagreement. Lastly, the results provide evidence that partisan conflict in support of conference reports generally increased over this period and that unified governments accentuate this conflict. These results support the overarching claim of the project in that conflict over the content of conference reports is increasingly divided along party lines to the advantage of the majority party.

Together the different analyses of the three chapters provide evidence of the claim that majority parties can and do pursue partisan goals in the contemporary conference process. Furthermore the results advance scholarly understanding of the many forces at play in conference committee bargaining and how they contribute to legislative outcomes through the complexities of the conference process.

The three papers in this dissertation seek to measure more accurately critical concepts in the field of American political institutions so as to inform and enable theory-building. The first paper addresses committee prestige in the U.S. House of Representatives, arguing that the seniority of members transferring off of standing committees reveals important information about the relative prestige of those committees. In response, I import a measure called PageRank which enables me to exploit information on seniority while measuring committee prestige. I then demonstrate that the prestige of a legislator's committee portfolio predicts the political action committee (PAC) contributions she receives for the next campaign cycle. A second paper tackles the theoretical possibility that majority parties may manipulate their control over committee assignments for partisan goals, countering a vast literature which has generally failed to find evidence of partisan manipulation across stage legislatures. I argue that several theoretical and practical constraints render universal stacking impractical and introduce a new measure of partisan stacking called "seats above expectation" (SAE); I find little evidence of universal partisan (or ideological) stacking in state legislatures. I then argue that majority parties should selectively stack committees under two circumstances: (1) when the operations of committees affect the electoral prospects of all legislators, generating so-called "uniform electoral externalities;" and (2) when committees in a polarized setting are endowed with gatekeeping rights. Leveraging SAE, evidence from the states confirms these selective stacking hypotheses. The final paper examines political polarization, offering a more behavioral conception and a network-based measure, called modularity, applicable to collegial courts and legislatures alike. After demonstrating validity, I then measure polarization at the U.S. Supreme Court and in both houses of Congress using opinion-joining and cosponsorship networks. My primary contributions here are to argue that polarization need not be equated with partisan polarization and to develop a measure which permits such a distinction and decomposition. Indeed, I find that while polarization is tantamount to partisan polarization in the present-day Congress, as recently as four decades ago partisanship accounted for just over half of measured polarization.

Questions of party power and legislative outcomes are central to our understanding of Congress. And yet, our knowledge of these concepts has many gaps. We know little about exactly how parties negotiate legislative deals with their members—and hold them to their deals—or about how parties exert agenda control before bills reach the floor. We also have limited knowledge of how predictably the outcomes of bills are, particularly from their content. These questions remain unanswered largely because political scientists have traditionally not had data or methods at their disposal to answer them. In my dissertation, I provide some answers to these questions via a focus on text analysis.

In chapter one, I examine how parties make deals with recalcitrant members on landmark legislation, and more importantly, how members are held to their deals. Particularly, I argue that public statements are a tool wielded by the party, and when members are convinced to vote for a bill they are provided incentive to make a statement in support of the bill to lock them into their vote. Using a novel data set of all public statements made by members of Congress, and two pieces of landmark healthcare legislation (the Affordable Care Act in 2009-2010 and the American Health Care Act in 2017) I show that members of Congress do make public statements after they make deals to vote with the party, and that these statements are likely for the purpose of precommitting to vote with the party.

In chapter two, I seek to quantify the level of agenda control exerted by the majority party on bills that never reach a final passage vote. To do this, I present the first systematic estimates of how members would have voted on bills based on a characterization of bill content from bills’ text, would they have come to a final passage vote. I find that the majority party not only exercises negative agenda control, but also considerable positive agenda control. I also find that the minority party in the House is systematically and consistently shut out of the agenda process.

In chapter three, I investigate how predictable the outcome of bills is and whether bill content has a part to play in the predictability of bill outcomes. I find that I am able to predict where bills end up in the US House of Representatives with high accuracy, and that knowledge about the content of a bill has a sizable effect on how well I am able to predict bill outcomes.

Intelligence is an integral part of states’ foreign policy formation and implementation. In the American context, the intelligence community is involved in essentially every national security discussion occurring in government, yet it remains relatively obscure to academia and the broader public. The inherently secretive nature of intelligence impedes the collection and analysis of reliable and representative data. Consequently, broad generalities and sensational accounts pervade public discussions and even academic research. We can have little confidence that we have a complete picture of how these clandestine organizations operate, their success as instruments of policy, or their effectiveness in warning.

Congress is nominally endowed with the primary responsibility for piercing this curtain of secrecy and ensuring the community’s primary goals are pursued efficiently and lawfully. Unfortunately, the secrecy that makes congressional oversight necessary also perversely disincentivize it. These efforts largely occur in private, taking members away from electorally beneficial activities. Inattentive voters, few interest groups, incomplete control of intelligence budgets, and no natural voting constituency exacerbate this problem. Despite these shortcomings, intelligence committee service has been highly coveted in recent years.

I argue that Congress members see other electoral benefits to intelligence committee service. At the institutional level, party and committee leadership see opportunities to search for failures or executive malfeasance in closed hearings and to bring salient issues to public attention in open sessions. At the individual level, committee members perceive that service bolsters foreign policy credentials and provides regular opportunities to take critical policy positions. Finally, while the public may be uninformed and inattentive on intelligence, they do pay attention to salient crises or alleged malfeasance, providing an electoral connection to the above partisan motivations.

I provide evidence of these incentives in a quantitative analysis of oversight hearing data, natural language processing of committee member communications on Twitter, and a national online survey with two survey experiments. I find that partisan political factors like divided government, election cycles, and party identity can influence patterns of committee and individual behavior, as well as the beliefs held by the public. In short, for intelligence oversight its politics as usual.

At the beginning of and throughout each Congress, Members adopt institutional regimes to organize the House. Their choice of regime determines how power is distributed in the chamber and, critically, where along the ideological spectrum United States public policy is produced. In this work, I (we) compare the validity of two prominent theories of congressional organization: floor theory, which contends that power is vested with all Members voting on the floor; and party theory, which contends that power is at least conditionally vested with the majority party. I examine the question of institutional regime, power distribution, and the location of public policy through two lenses: first, I take a macro view in analyzing final passage coalitions in the post-Reconstruction (1881) House; next, I take a micro view in analyzing the motion to recommit in the post-Republican Revolution (1994) House. I find that Members adopted an institutional regime empowering the majority party from approximately the adoption of Reed’s Rules (1890) to the Great Depression (1932) and again from approximately the congressional reforms of the 1970s to at least the modern decade. These results indicate that U.S. public policy likely reflected the ideal point of the median Member in the majority party during these two periods. However, I also find that neither floor nor party theory adequately explains congressional organization in the intervening mid-century period, indicating the need for further research.

Many factors affect responsiveness of elected policy makers to public opinion. While a full understanding of this topic is not possible without decades of careful research, this dissertation examines a few important areas. In particular, I look at the effects of party competition on legislator responsiveness, the dynamics of interest group politics and the ability of some voters to obtain disproportionate representation, and the nuances of how to interpret public opinion itself for a specific policy.

The first two chapters, on party competition and interest groups, make use of secondary data generated by the government, other scholars, and various relevant organizations. The chapters employ data on the behaviors and characteristics of members of Congress, election results, campaign finance data, and population and demographic information. Using appropriate econometric models, I find in chapter 1 that significant competition between the two major parties does serve to increase responsiveness to the public at the level of the individual legislator, with effects at the aggregate level being somewhat weaker. In recent years, it is difficult to estimate these effects because of the generally high levels of party competition and low variance across district.

Using similar data and methods, the exploratory analysis in chapter 2 suggests a relationship between unorganized groups of voters and the positions their elected officials take, independent of party, district average public opinion, and organized interest group contributions. The results also suggest that context matters a great deal in determining which groups will be influential.

Chapter 3 examines the nature of public opinion itself, using the Affordable Care Act as a case study. I conducted a survey experiment to assess how the distribution of opinions on the Affordable Care Act might change in response to priming different design features of the law. My findings indicate that opinion on the ACA is malleable and depends on what pieces of the law people think about at the time of response. In the real world, this implies that which parts of the ACA are highlighted and how it is discussed publicly will affect its future. Policy pork, as defined in the chapter, can build up support, but wedge provisions in the law can serve to entrench the opposition further. These implications can also be applied to other complex, highly visible reform bills.

A final concluding chapter attempts to apply these findings, as well as other political science research, to the case of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA). Based on my assessment of the political context of this act, which was hailed as a permanent resolution to a longstanding debate over Medicare provider payments, I argue that the debate is not actually over, and that group interests, the design of the law, and broader contextual factors will ensure the debate continues.

Ideas are an often-ignored part of the political science literature on legislation. Most studies of Congress focus on institutional concerns, party considerations, gains from exchange, and other unideated concepts. But the exchange of ideas in the writing of bills represents the fundamental realization of public policy in practice, and any story of major legislation that does not adequately deal with where the ideas in said statutes come from is missing a vital part of the story. Particularly, the role in Congressional hearings as an information exchange is often given only prima facie concerns in legislative expertise models, but what exactly is being transmitted is almost never addressed directly.

In the first section, I study how think tanks position themselves strategically to influence Congressional behavior. Using a dataset of think tank citations from Congressional floor speeches and committee testimony records, I compare the influence of think tanks based on a new measure their ideology, and in doing so, show that think tanks engage in strategic ideological positioning to maximize their influence. An additional hypothesis examined is the relationship between think tank members' previous work experience in government with the organizations' overall prominence. By treating think tanks as strategic actors in the complex constellation of legislative politics, this chapter makes the argument that think tanks need to be considered in even the most cursory account of the policy making process.

In the second section, I introduce an approach to idea tracing that is better able to answer the questions: whom does Congress listen to and when during the legislative process do they listen? Using machine learning and text-as-data approaches, I establish a more direct framework to evaluate the impact of testimony on the language of legislation through the development a text reuse approach to map specific ideas from congressional hearings to bills. Specifically, I focus on the language of Dodd-Frank and systematically trace the development of ideas with calls to testify in Congress from experts. In doing so, I provide the first account of who is being listened to during the legislative process.

The final substantive section expands on the previous section and applies the technique developed more broadly, to multiple pieces of important financial legislation. Using a topic model to identify major policy areas, I establish a more direct causal framework to evaluate the impact of testimony on the language of legislation. Utilizing a modified text-reuse method which combines a localized alignment text-reuse algorithm for identifying reused ideas, I compare the rate of idea reuse between hearings and final bill language for four major bills, spanning four Congresses. This allows for an effective way to test which speakers are being listened to during hearings, and under what conditions expert testimony has an impact on bill writing. By focusing on financial legislation, this paper can directly compare the work of people in multiple Congresses and, by discussing multiple bills, see when these speakers matter and when they don't, and in doing so, model a network of influence of external speakers in Congress.

The tension between Congress and the president over which branch controls the use of military force abroad has existed since America’s founding. Congress' constitutional powers over declarations of war and military funding constantly push against the president’s role as commander in chief of the American armed forces. Scholars today largely accept the president’s preeminent role in use of force decisions, but they still recognize that Congress influences this all-important policy realm. While many scholars have studied the various ways that Congress influences the use of military force abroad, very few have attempted to model the conditions under which that influence takes place. Even fewer include a logically relevant variable in their models despite scholarly evidence of its potential impact, the personal military experience of the most elite members of the executive and legislative branches. Using a list of uses of force compiled by the Congressional Research Service, this paper develops a unique measure of formal influence over use of force decisions and tests that influence against a simple difference in veteran proportions between Congress and the Cabinet to determine if veterans impact this inter-branch tension. Ultimately, this paper finds no statistically significant relationship between these two variables; indeed, when considering deliberate decisions to engage in combat operations, the president is just as likely to initiate force without Congress’ approval as he is with it.