Minority Party Capacity in Congress

When, and under what circumstances, are congressional minority parties capable of influencing legislative outcomes? We argue that the capacity of the minority party to exert legislative influence is a function of three factors: constraints on the majority party, which create opportunities for the minority party; minority party cohesion on the issue at hand; and sufficient motivation for the minority to engage in legislating rather than electioneering. Drawing on data on every bill considered in the House of Representatives between 1985 and 2006 and case examples of notable lawmaking efforts during the same period, we show that our theory helps predict which bills are considered on the House floor, which bills become law, and the substance of policy-making outcomes. Our findings have important implications for theories of congressional party power and our understanding of minority party influence on Capitol Hill.

Bill Content, Legislative Outcomes, and State-Level Resistance to National Policies

Recently, scholars of the lawmaking process have urged their colleagues to devote more attention to the potential impact of bill content on legislative outcomes. Heeding their call, this paper builds an original dataset of over 5,000 pieces of state-level legislation addressing issues that span the ideological spectrum. It compares proposals that challenge the authority of the national government in a specific domain to proposals that lack federalism-related implications and finds that the former, all else being equal, make less legislative progress toward enactment. In addition, it categorizes the measures that resist national laws based on the specific nature of the challenge they pose. Its analysis finds that measures that are inconsistent with existing national law but work within the law’s legal framework make more legislative progress than measures that seek to nullify the national law or that vow not to cooperate with it. It also confirms that sponsor characteristics such as majority status, the number of cosponsors, institutional rules such as hearing requirements, and state-level factors like party control of the state legislature affect how much progress proposals make toward enactment. Thus, the paper demonstrates the importance of legislative content as an explanatory factor and sheds light on the nature of intergovernmental relations in the contemporary United States.

Legislative Process in International Organizations

In this analytical essay, we advance a simple but powerful claim: scholars can better understand outcomes of international organizations (IOs) by developing theories that explicitly make assumptions about legislative process. Because process assumptions powerfully explain domestic legislative outcomes and many international assemblies demonstrate similarities to domestic legislatures, scholars could usefully employ legislative-process-centric approaches when theorizing about outcomes in world politics. Following an explication of why scholars might focus on legislative procedure, we describe several legislative procedures and highlight variance across those procedures within several well-known IOs. We also suggest that this variance and the shadow of power politics cast over IOs provides fertile ground for comparative legislative scholars—including scholars of the U.S. Congress—to develop and test new theories of legislative procedure.

The polarization dynamics of electoral reforms

Electoral reforms affect legislative outcomes by influencing incumbent legislators’ behavior, new entrants’ behavior, and the probability that incumbents are replaced with new entrants. Empirical work on electoral reforms and polarization has focused on new entrants’ behavior. We employ a simple decision theoretic framework with partial incumbent policy persistence and spatial voting to examine the three channels jointly. We show that a reform designed to encourage ideological moderation produces larger effects on polarization when the reform is implemented than when it is removed. The key insight is that implementing a moderation-inducing reform generates a set of challengers who are more likely to defeat incumbents while the incumbents are more likely to win reelection when the reform is removed. We then empirically examine how elections and legislative polarization respond to unlimited PAC contributions in state legislatures. Examining incumbents’ decisions to stand for reelection, the electoral performance of incumbents who do run, and partisan polarization, we find empirical support for our predictions.

Who lobbies the lobbyists? State Medicaid bureaucrats’ engagement in the legislative process

Research on bureaucratic power typically focusses on rulemaking and policy implementation, while bureaucrats’ participation in the legislative process remains underexplored. We theorise and test a specific mechanism by which bureaucrats attempt to sway legislative outcomes, which we term indirect bureaucratic lobbying. Using a novel survey of state-based health lobbyists in 25 states, we show that state Medicaid agency staff routinely request lobbying assistance from provider associations and consumer advocates. We also provide the first systematic evidence of the conditions under which indirect bureaucratic lobbying is likely to occur. Our results suggest that individual-level policy agreement interacts with institutional factors, most notably agency performance and gubernatorial power, to increase the likelihood that bureaucrats will use this strategy to attempt to influence legislative deliberations.

Women’s Rights in Tunisia and the Democratic Renegotiation of an Authoritarian Legacy

Since the 2011 revolution, Tunisia has been negotiating what it is to become, a processof rebirth in which women’s rights is key. The ongoing debates reflect a confrontation betweenthe feminist policies of Habib Bourguiba (the first president of the Tunisian republic) andalternative notions of women’s rights. In this article, I examine the debates that are currentlytaking place in Tunisia. I argue that the topic of women’s rights is crucial in the power strugglebetween the political elites within Tunisia. It is symbolic of the much wider battle over the future of the country. Moreover, the legislative outcomes of the debates are indicative for the postrevolutionary political dynamics, showing the strength of so-called secularists.