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The Forum ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Curry ◽  
Frances E. Lee

Abstract In today’s hyper-partisan environment, scholars and commentators contend that the filibuster poses a nearly insuperable obstacle to a Senate majority party’s agenda, limiting Congress’s output to non-controversial measures. Drawing on data about congressional majority party agenda priorities from 1985 to 2020 we identify when and how majority party legislative efforts fell short of success and take stock of the degree to which the filibuster was the primary culprit. Not surprisingly, our data confirm that the filibuster is a significant problem for majority party agendas. But an even more common cause of failure is the majority party’s inability to agree among themselves. Despite increased voting cohesion generally, parties in the polarized era still routinely struggle to bridge their own internal divides.


2021 ◽  
pp. 21-40
Author(s):  
Neilan S. Chaturvedi
Keyword(s):  

Chapter 2 lays out the theory for why moderates so often fail to take on the mantle of being the pivotal voter. Theoretically, as the Senate loses moderates and becomes more polarized, the remaining moderates should gain power and become pivotal to every vote. This chapter argues that in the polarized era, moderates are cross-pressured as they are elected from states in which the opposition is the majority party or from swing states that have a roughly equal number of partisans from both sides. As a result, moderates must balance a volatile coalition of voters by avoiding traceability on most issues. Chapter 2 argues that in the onstage legislative game, when senators can shape and defend legislation, they should remain inactive and invisible. In the behind-the-scenes legislative game, where senators negotiate and push their influence behind closed doors, they should seek consensus but avoid driving legislation too strongly.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135406882110524
Author(s):  
Andrew O Ballard ◽  
Hans JG Hassell

While scholars agree that parties are interested in both pragmatic (electoral) and programmatic (policy) goals, they disagree about the relative importance of those goals. How parties weight these goals has implications for the effect of party involvement on legislative behavior. We argue that parties emphasize these goals differently based on whether they are in the majority or minority. We examine links between party support in primary elections for the US Congress and subsequent legislative behaviors, finding that candidates who received more party support during the primary election were more likely to engage in partisan efforts in the next Congress. Further, party support of incoming legislators is linked to increased partisan behavior through leapfrog representation. We find that these relationships are stronger for majority party candidates, suggesting that parties put a greater emphasis on winning majorities when in the minority but a greater emphasis on policy congruence when in the majority.


2021 ◽  
pp. 801-824
Author(s):  
David Gelman ◽  
Max Goplerud

This chapter analyzes the trends in speaking behavior in the United States Congress from 1921 to 2010 in the House and Senate. We find that key determinants of political behavior from the existing American and comparative literature (seniority, committee leader, party leadership, ideological extremism, and majority party membership) correspond to more floor speeches by members. Senators deliver more speeches per member than their counterparts in the House, although the determinants of activity are broadly similar. Splitting the results by historical period and examining the relationship by the polarization of the chamber show that the effects of certain variables have changed considerably over time. In the House, in particular, the effects of committee leader, extremism, and majority party status have increased over time while the effect of seniority has noticeably decreased in the post-Gingrich period.


2021 ◽  
pp. 572-593
Author(s):  
Eric Magar

This chapter describes the institutions of legislative debate in the Mexican Cámara de Diputados and assesses predictors of floor participation. Multiple regression models are fit on more than 23,000 speeches between 2006 and 2020. They show that majority party members get privileged floor access, in both the number of speeches delivered and their word length, even after accounting for larger parties having more potential speakers. Other status indicators, such as committee chairs, party leaders, and seniority, have more modest but also positive effects in debate. Women speak more than men. And the removal of single-term limits in 2018, which tend to personalize elections, associate with a significant surge in floor participation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Samin Aref ◽  
Zachary P. Neal

AbstractIn network science, identifying optimal partitions of a signed network into internally cohesive and mutually divisive clusters based on generalized balance theory is computationally challenging. We reformulate and generalize two binary linear programming models that tackle this challenge, demonstrating their practicality by applying them to partition signed networks of collaboration and opposition in the US House of Representatives. These models guarantee a globally optimal network partition and can be practically applied to signed networks containing up to 30,000 edges. In the US House context, we find that a three-cluster partition is better than a conventional two-cluster partition, where the otherwise hidden third coalition is composed of highly effective legislators who are ideologically aligned with the majority party.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Volden ◽  
Samuel Kernell ◽  
Roger Larocca ◽  
Alan Wiseman

While scholars have long noted presidential powers over congressional lawmaking arising through persuasion, veto bargaining, and public appeals, we argue that an important tool is missing from this list. Specifically, presidents who are strategic in their choices of early coalition partners in Congress – such as effective sponsors of administration bills – significantly enhance their chance of legislative success. We identify more than 1,400 executive branch proposals appearing as bills in Congress between 1989 and 2006. We examine which members of Congress sponsor these bills, finding strong evidence of disproportionate sponsorship by effective champions, such as majority-party members, committee and subcommittee chairs, lawmakers with proven effectiveness in the previous Congress, party leaders, and senior lawmakers, all else equal. Analyzing the fate of these proposals, we find that much of the success of the president’s agenda in Congress depends on these critical and strategic partnerships with effective congressional proponents.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135406882110415
Author(s):  
Sigrid Van Trappen

This study examines whether ethnic majority party selectors’ ethnic biases (e.g. beliefs about the political traits of ethnic minority aspirants) impede the selection of ethnic minority aspirants in a proportional representation system. To this end, a quasi-experiment was conducted among local party chairs in Flanders (Belgium). The participants were asked to evaluate both a hypothetical ethnic minority aspirant and an ethnic majority aspirant. When the participants were negatively biased against the ethnic minority aspirant, the selection chances of the ethnic minority aspirant vis-à-vis the ethnic majority aspirant declined. Additionally, the quasi-experimental data were linked to an analysis of the real-life candidate lists composed by the participants for the 2018 local elections in Flanders. The participants’ ethnic biases could not predict the percentage of ethnic minority candidates on the real-life candidate lists. Instead, the presence of ethnic minority voters, aspirants and co-selectors determined the diversity of the lists.


Author(s):  
NICHOLAS G. NAPOLIO ◽  
CHRISTIAN R. GROSE

Does majority party control cause changes in legislative policy making? We argue that majority party floor control affects legislator behavior and agenda control. Leveraging a natural experiment where nearly one tenth of a legislature’s members died within the same legislative session, we are able to identify the effect of majority party floor control on the legislative agenda and on legislator choices. Previous correlational work has found mixed evidence of party effects, especially in the mid-twentieth century. In contrast, we find that majority party control leads to (1) changes in the agenda and (2) changes in legislators’ revealed preferences. These effects are driven by changes in numerical party majorities on the legislative floor. The effects are strongest with Republican and nonsouthern Democratic legislators. The effects are also more pronounced on the first (economic) than the second (racial) dimension. Additional correlational evidence across 74 years adds external validity to our exogenous evidence.


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