Incorporation is Not Enough: The Agenda Influence of Black Lawmakers in Congressional Committees

Traditionally, scholars argue that the committee structure is central to the policymaking process in congress, and that those that wield the gavel in committees enjoy a great deal of influence over the legislative agenda. The most recent iterations of Congress are more diverse than ever before. With 55 members—of whom, five chair full committees and 28 sit atop subcommittees—the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is in a place to wield a significant leverage over the legislative agenda in the 116th Congress. However, noticeable proportional gains in minority membership in Congress have yet to produce sizable policy gains for the communities they represent. An examination of bill sponsorship from the 103rd–112th congresses reveals underlying institutional forces—i.e., marginalization and negative agenda setting—leave Black lawmakers at a distinct disadvantage compared to their non-black counterparts. Bills in policy areas targeted by the CBC are subject to disproportionate winnowing in congressional committees. Unfortunately, a number of institutional resources often found to increase a bill's prospects—including placements and leadership on committees with jurisdiction over policy areas of interest—are relatively ineffective for CBC members looking to forward those key issues onto the legislative agenda.

Policy and the structure of roll call voting in the US house

Competition in the US Congress has been characterised along a single, left-right ideological dimension. We challenge this characterisation by showing that the content of legislation has far more predictive power than alternative measures, most notably legislators’ ideological positions derived from scaling roll call votes. Using a machine learning approach, we identify a topic model for final passage votes in the 111th through the 113th House of Representatives and conduct out-of-sample tests to evaluate the predictive power of bill topics relative to other measures. We find that bill topics and congressional committees are important for predicting roll call votes but that other variables, including member ideology, lack predictive power. These findings raise serious doubts about the claim that congressional politics can be boiled down to competition along a single left-right continuum and shed new light on the debate about levels of polarisation in Congress.

Customer concentration types and public debt contracts

Purpose This paper aims to examine how a firm’s customer concentration, which is the amount of sales between a supplier firm and the major customers, affects corporate bond contracts. This study also investigates how the types of customer concentration have a significant impact on bond contracts. Design/methodology/approach The research uses the Compustat’s segment customer database and the Mergent fixed income securities database, which provides details about publicly offered US bond issues and issuers. The sample also includes the US Congressional committees’ data from the 96th to 115th congresses. To control any endogenous concerns, the author uses changes in the seniority of US senators on powerful committees and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) as exogenous shocks. For a robustness test, the author also uses the propensity score-matched pairs. Findings While higher customer concentration, on average, leads to higher yield spreads and strict covenants, firms that have the US Government as a major customer pay lower yield spreads and have higher issue ratings. However, as a firm’s sales depend too heavily on the US Government customer channel, the bond issuance is likely to have lower issue ratings. The main findings also show that firms with government concentrations take advantage of political links, leading to lower yield spreads after two exogenous events. Originality/value The findings in this paper show the importance of a firm’s customer types in bond markets by emphasizing the positive impact of the US Government as the sales channel. Exogenous event studies based on the propensity-matched sample alleviate the endogenous concerns.

Transformation of the US Energy Policy in the First Half of the 1970s.

Violation of status-quo in the Middle East, which radically influenced the world oil supply system, generated the uncertainty of prospects in politics in general and energetics in particular. For the United States, it became necessary to transform their energy strategy, which included domestic and foreign policy aspects. However until October, 1973 the Administration of the USA could not develop a strategy capable of preventing an energy crisis of 1973–1974. Nevertheless, persistent looking for a new model of energy politics continued in the United States throughout the first half of 1970. As of December 1972, at least 42 federal agencies, bureaus, departments, and offices were involved in research into energy issues. The 93rd Congress (January 1973–January 1975) involved itself was in energy-related legislation on an unprecedented scale. More than 2,000 bills were introduced, and more than 30 standing congressional committees collectively held over 1,000 days of hearings on nearly every aspect of energy policy programs and problems. Nearly 40 energy-related laws were enacted. The magnitude of these efforts indicates that the United States leadership was deeply concerned about the situation. Despite the efforts made, the US administration could not avoid the dramatic events of the energy crisis. The cause for this was the untimely transformation of American energy policy. This article shows relationship between politics and energetics and explores, therefore, political methods, used in the USA in the process of developing the new energy politics in 1970 – 1975. It covers the history of this politics institutional and legal base creation. By the modern viewpoints it highlights the main problems and barriers to energy strategy formation, which slowed down its transformation.

Diversity and Minority Interest Group Advocacy in Congress

This paper examines the role that racial and ethnic diversity plays in improving the legislative success of minority interest groups. Relying on campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures to explain minority interest groups’ influence on legislators’ behavior is not sufficient, because most minority organizations are public charities, or 501(c)(3) organizations, and as such are both banned by federal law from making candidate contributions and limited in how much they can spend on federal lobbying. I argue, however, that the inclusion of more blacks and Latinos on congressional committees enhances the lobbying influence—and thus the legislative success—of civil rights organizations in Congress. Using data from lobbying disclosure reports on bills supported by black American and Latino civil rights groups in the 110th Congress (2007–2008) and 111th Congress (2009–2010), as well as House markup data, I find that National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCR), and UnidosUS-supported bills referred to House committees with greater proportions of racial and ethnic minorities received more markups than did bills referred to House committees with less diversity. Diversity is significant in predicting committee attention even when accounting for possible confounding factors, including committee jurisdiction and the ideological composition of committee membership.

The Legislative Process: The Rise of the New Order in Congress

This chapter examines the legislative process, paying particular attention to the role of congressional leaders and the changing impact of party and partisanship. It argues that a “new order” has evolved in Congress. The new order reduces the power of the congressional committees and undermines deliberation, but it can still produce legislation, especially when Congress and the president are of the same party. The new order consists of three key elements, which are discussed in this chapter: “follow-the-leader” lawmaking, “do-it-yourself” (DIY) legislating, and “catching-the-omnibus” budgeting. The chapter also looks in detail at one very important part of the legislative process—the budget and appropriations process through which Congress exercises its constitutional “power of the purse.”

Anticommunists and Death Narratives

Chapter 5 focuses on how anticommunists used Adamic’s death, which the coroner ruled a suicide, to claim that Stalin murdered him. Anticommunists collectively constructed a version of his life intended to mute his antifascism and his criticisms of them, including his criticism that they embraced the fascist ethos. Anticommunists feared that Adamic’s repeated opposition to the communists could result in the public listening to his calls for a foreign policy that rejected colonialism and promoted peace. They smeared him before congressional committees and in the press. Some South Slavs helped advance the “Adamic as communist” narrative as a means of repenting their radical pasts. The chapter explores who else might have killed Adamic.

Political Activism and Firm Innovation

We hypothesize that political activism is valuable because it helps reduce political uncertainty, which, in turn, fosters firm innovation. We find that firms that support more politicians, winning politicians, politicians on congressional committees with jurisdictional authority over the firms’ industries, and politicians who join those committees innovate more. We employ a natural experiment to show a causal effect of political activism on innovation. We also show evidence of intra-industry and geographical political activism spillovers.