Charles J. Finocchiaro

Redistricting and Party Polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives

The elevated levels of party polarization observed in the contemporary Congress have been attributed to a variety of factors. One of the more commonly recurring themes among observers of congressional politics is that changes in district boundaries resulting from the redistricting process are a root cause. Using a new data set linking congressional districts from 1962 to 2002, we offer a direct test of this claim. Our results show that although there is an overall trend of increasing polarization, districts that have undergone significant changes as a result of redistricting have become even more polarized. Although the effect is relatively modest, it suggests that redistricting is one among other factors that produce party polarization in the House and may help to explain the elevated levels of polarization in the House relative to the Senate.

War for the Floor: Partisan Theory and Agenda Control In the U.S. House of Representatives

This article extends recent research on partisan agenda control in the U.S. House of Representatives to the issue of procedural control of the legislative agenda via special rules. In particular, we draw out a facet of cartel and conditional party government theories that has not been addressed in prior analyses: the simultaneous interrelationship between positive and negative agenda control. Using roll-call data on two procedural matters—votes to order the previous question on a special rule and votes to adopt a special rule—over the 1953–2002 period, we found that, in the area of procedural control of the floor agenda, the majority party’s amount of agenda control depends to a significant degree upon the party’s homogeneity and power. In recent work, Cox and McCubbins (2002, 2005) have elaborated on their theory of parties in Congress by focusing on the ability of the majority party, as a procedural cartel, to control the floor agenda of the U.S. House of Representatives. In this article, we build upon their efforts by considering the concept of agenda control as it relates to one of the primary mechanisms used to shape the floor agenda: procedural decisions contained in the special rules that govern consideration of bills coming before the House. Prior research has been largely confined to questions surrounding the nature of special rules, while the variation in the use of special rules and changes in party success in this area have received much less attention. To further our understanding of this aspect of legislative organization, and to elaborate the theoretical and empirical relationship between positive and negative agenda control, we take as our starting point two closely related perspectives, cartel theory and conditional party government theory. We posit that, although there are not large-scale conflicts between the two theories, there are some differences between them with regard to procedural control.

In Search of Killer Amendments In the Modern U.S. House

Numerous studies have examined the incidence of killer amendments in Congress, but most of these studies have been either case specific, focusing on the legislative maneuverings around a single issue or bill, or temporally limited, focusing on strategic activity in only one or two Congresses. In this article, we present the beginning of a comprehensive research agenda for the systematic study of killer amendments. Using roll-call data from the 83d through the 108th U.S. House (1953–2004), we identified those bills that (a) were successfully amended and (b) subsequently went down to defeat, a necessary condition for the existence of a killer amendment. We then examined these cases in greater detail, using both spatial analyses and case studies. Our analysis uncovered five cases, four of which are new, that appear to have the characteristics of true killer amendments, thus setting the stage for future analyses across time and legislative chambers and bodies.

Responsiveness and Electoral Accountability in the U.S. Senate

This article examines the link between elections and the representational behavior of senators by considering whether ideological congruence with state preferences impacts vote shares on Election Day. We advance the literature on electoral accountability by proposing a more refined theoretical and empirical assessment of congruence with constituent preferences. Additionally, our analysis focuses on the effect of divergence in the Senate, which has been subject to significantly less attention than the House, and examines all elections to the upper chamber involving incumbents from 1960-2004. We find that measures of ideological divergence that are conditioned on the underlying ideological preferences of state constituencies significantly improve on existing measures, and that senators who are out of step with their state do in fact suffer at the polls.

Partisanship, Consensus, and Committee-Floor Divergence A Comparison of Member Behavior in the 96th and 104th Congresses

Although some studies of Congress have employed aggregate-level ideological measures to characterize the outlier tendencies of congressional committees, such measures cannot reveal intracommittee variation in the propensity for disagreement between committees and the floor. In this analysis, we examine differences in voting behavior between members of the committee to which bills were initially referred and the House in the 96th and 104th Congresses. We demonstrate that significant variation occurs both within and among committees, and divergence is at times quite high among some committees not traditionally considered outliers. In the multivariate analysis, we discover that many vote-level factors significantly influence the degree of committee-floor divergence, and a considerable range of variation is evident in the level of divergence across committees. We also find that the number of committees exhibiting divergent behavior, the degree of this divergence, and the breakdown between the parties differs dramatically between the two periods.

An Institutional View of Congressional Elections: The Impact of Congressional Image on Seat Change in the House

The literature on seat change in U.S. House elections abounds with explanations regarding the factors contributing to the biennial change in the partisan balance of the body. While a number of theoretically and empirically appealing models have been presented, many base their explanations around presidential politics and a variety of factors independent of Congress. In this article, I argue that in developing models of congressional seat change, it is worthwhile to consider how the public image of the institution impacts the electoral success of its members. I describe and test a model that captures the influence of the public’s perception of Congress on party seat change. Encompassing tests suggest that this framework significantly improves upon existing models. The results underscore the importance of endogenous, Congress-specific factors in explaining aggregate seat change in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Consensus, Conflict, and Partisanship in House Decision Making: A Bill-Level Examination of Committee and Floor Behavior

Although conflict and partisanship are deeply entrenched in the publics view of the U.S. Congress, political scientists have noted that consensus characterizes much of the legislative branchs operations. We build on an expanding literature that moves beyond a focus on roll call voting and explore individual bills as the unit of analysis in an attempt to obtain an accurate picture of the broader context in which House decision making occurs. Drawing on evidence spanning 24 years, we document the extent to which consensus rather than conflict typifies House decision making. Our bill-level analysis facilitates a unique examination of the context in which committees operate as well as the ensuing floor environment. The results provide insight into the factors attending to the degree of consensus and conflict associated with bills—particularly the salience of the issue and the committee of origin—while painting a more complete picture of the day-to-day environment of the U.S. House.

Earmarks and Subcommittee Government in the U.S. Congress

In recent years, considerable scholarly attention has focused on earmarks, the quintessential example of pork barrel politics. We assess the degree to which existing theories can explain the distribution of earmarks in the U.S. House of Representatives. First, drawing on informal interviews with individuals on Capitol Hill regarding the earmark process, we argue that assessing institutional and constituency-level factors that affect the earmark receipts of individual members requires examination at the level of the Appropriations subcommittees. Second, we demonstrate that both distributive and partisan theories of legislative organization are applicable to the distribution of earmarks. Finally, we present results indicating that contrary to the conventional wisdom, most subcommittees do not distribute pork based on electoral vulnerability. Rather, legislators’ status in the appropriations process has the most influence. These findings offer insights into the path forward as debate continues over congressionally directed spending.

Distributive politics, the electoral connection, and the antebellum US Congress: the case of military service pensions

We investigate the rise of federal military pensions in the antebellum US Congress to examine whether key aspects of the contemporary electoral connection were present in earlier historical eras. Overall, the political responses of members of Congress to pressures for military service pensions reveal that the quest for credit-claiming opportunities significantly shaped the adoption and evolution of this type of distributive legislation. Analyzing key legislative activity from 1818 to 1832, we find that members’ electoral interests gave rise to a particularistic and often inefficient system of benefits. Specifically, what began as a relatively simple program to provide for disabled Revolutionary War veterans grew into a broader entitlement-style program based on military service that legislators carefully cultivated in order to maximize their prospects for subsequent political advantage. Our analysis thus reveals that crucial features of the electoral connection were indeed present in the antebellum-era Congress, a finding that broadens our collective understanding of the early foundations of American political development.

Research NotePork-Barrelling in Australian Politics: A Reconsideration of Leigh

This research note replicates Leighs (2008) analysis of pork-barrelling in Australian politics and tests the validity of his findings using geographic techniques. Distributive politics is integral to nearly all theories of legislative politics because it is fundamental to the connection between legislators and constituents, and can be used to facilitate coalition-building. This note addresses an aspect of pork-barrelling that has been overlooked in most previous scholarship. It argues that distributive politics is, at its core, a geographic, constituency-centred process. It is therefore essential to reconsider the conventional models and take geography into account in both substantive and statistical terms. To that end, we replicate several of Leighs results using a relatively new technique, Geographically Weighted Regression, and reveal substantial spatial heterogeneity in the coefficients. Our findings highlight the importance of political geography and have important implications for studies of legislative politics and elections. 本文重复了李（2008）对澳大利亚政治分肥拨款的分析，用地理学技术检测了其发现有效性。分配政治内在于几乎所有的立法政治理论，因为它是立法者与选民之间联系的基础，有利于联盟的构建。本文探讨了分肥拨款被以往学术研究所忽略的一个方面。作者认为，分配政治其核心是一个地理的、以选区为中心的过程。因此有必要重新检讨固有的模式，切实而且从统计的意义上采纳地理的视角。我们使用了一种相对新近的技术，即地理加权回归分析来重复李的几个成果，发现空间同质系数很高。我们的发现突出了政治地理的重要性，对于立法政治以及选举的研究有参考意义。