David W. Rohde

Presidential Vetoes and Congressional Response: A Study of Institutional Conflict

This paper presents an initial attempt at a systematic analysis of the veto process. The authors argue that outcomes at all three stages of the process-the veto decision, the override attempt, and the success of those attempts-depend upon the state of the political environment (e.g., stage of the electoral cycle) and the prevailing resources of the president. Relevant presidential resources are the proportion of congressional seats controlled by the presidents party and the level of public support for the president. In the case of the congressional response to presidential vetoes, two additional features which characterize the environment within Congress are hypothesized to be influential: the policy domain of the vetoed legislation and the voting alignment which prevailed at the time of passage. Empirical analysis of vetoes and congressional responses from 1945 to 1980 provides general support for the theoretical argument and for most specific hypotheses.

The Transition to Republican Rule in the House: Implications for Theories of Congressional Politics

The 1994 congressional elections were dramatic. The Republicans won control of the U.S. House, ending the longest continuous reign by a single party in the nations history and including the defeat of a sitting Speaker for the first time this century. These results caught nearly everyone by surprise. Hardly a pollster, pundit, scholar, or even Republican party leader anticipated such GOP victories in the House. As dramatic as the election returns proved to be, Republican activities within the House in the 104th Congress were equally as dramatic. Speakerto-be Newt Gingrich (GA) led an aggressive change in the rules and practices of the House, apparently with the hope that such changes would result in dramatically different policies forthcoming from it. In this article we investigate the nature of the structural and procedural changes, focusing in particular on the manner in which the newly elected Republican majority reorganized its partisan and leadership institutions with the apparent expectation of using them to enact outcomes the party collectively sought to achieve. Our purpose is to consider what these changes reveal, not just about the different views between the two parties as to the appropriate ways to conduct the publics business, but also as to the importance and role of structure and process in congressional politics. The House has long been the more highly structured and rules-driven of the two chambers. Over the last few decades, the

Democratic Committee Assignments in the House of Representatives: Strategic Aspects of a Social Choice Process *

This paper examines the committee assignment process for Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Unlike previous studies of committee assignments, this paper employs data on the requests for assignments submitted by members to the Committee on Committees. The theoretical perspective employed is one in which all the participants in the process are rational actors who have goals they want to achieve and who choose among alternative courses of action on the basis of which alternative is most likely to lead to the achievement of those goals. We argue that the allocation of committee assignments affects the goals of all the participants in the process, and thus we consider the choices of actors in the process in terms of their goals; specifically the goals of re-election, influence within the House, and good public policy. After first considering the process from the point of view of the member making requests, we show that the members requests are related to the type of district he represents, and that the number of requests he makes is related to such considerations as whether he is a freshman, whether he faces competition from a member from his state, and whether there is a vacancy from his state on his most preferred committee. The process is also considered from the point of view of the members making the assignments. Decisions on assignments are found to be affected by seniority (where success in getting requested committees is inversely related to seniority), margin of election (where members from marginal districts are more successful), and region (where southerners are less successful than members from other regions).

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.

Progressive Ambition among United States Senators: 1972–1988

A rational-choice model is used to account for the decisions of United States Senators to run for president. The model predicts that senators will be more likely to run for president if their relative costs of running are low, if they have no political liabilities that might reduce their chances of winning, and if they have a propensity to take risks, which we measure by their past willingness to take risks in running for the Senate. The model works well in accounting for the decisions of Democrats to seek the presidency in 1972, 1976, and 1984, and can explain why few Republican senators ran in 1980. The model is used to predict which senators in the 99th Congress are relatively likely to run for president in 1988. The model works better in accounting for the past behavior of Democrats than Republicans, and also generates more plausible predictions about future Democratic presidential candidates. This partisan difference results largely from the different opportunity structures of the two parties. Finally, we discuss the changing dynamics of the nomination process and the implications of this change both for our model and for American electoral politics.

Third-Party and Independent Candidates in American Politics: Wallace, Anderson, and Perot

Between 1852 and 1992 the United States held thirty-six presidential elections. The Democrats won fifteen, the Republicans won the other twenty-one. This duopoly has been threatened from time to time, and Perots 1992 challenge was remarkably successful in winning popular votes. But no third-party or independent candidate has come close to winning the presidency, largely because the electoral rules in the United States create barriers that third parties and independent candidates have been unable to surmount.1 We review U.S. elections since 1832, for these barriers to new political parties were in place even then. The Republicans displaced the Whigs between 1854 and 1860, despite these structural barriers, by changing the issue agenda over slavery.2 Fortunately for the United States, but unfortunately for third par-

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.

Dimensions, Issues, and Bills: Appropriations Voting on the House Floor

One of the fundamental findings in the congressional literature is that one or sometimes two dimensions can successfully describe roll-call voting. In this paper we investigate if we can reach the same conclusions about low dimensionality when we divide the roll-call agenda into subsets of relatively homogeneous subject matter. We are primarily interested in the degree to which the same ordering of representatives is yielded across these different groups of votes. To conduct our analysis we focus on all roll calls on the 13 annual appropriations bills across eight congresses. When we concentrate on these smaller issue areas, we find that voting is multidimensional and members do not vote in a consistent ideological fashion across all issue areas.

Advising and Consenting in the 60-Vote Senate: Strategic Appointments to the Supreme Court

The requirements of presidential nomination and Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominees present two anomalies: under what circumstances can ideologically extreme nominees win confirmation and, given political polarization and the possibility of a filibuster, how are any nominees successful? This paper employs a simple unidimensional spatial model to explore these anomalies. The principal results show that little change in Court policy is possible with a single appointment, and this fact interacts with certain contexts to give the president a relatively free hand in choosing extreme nominees. Less firm conclusions are reached about the second anomaly, but the analysis sets the stage for further work on that aspect.

The Gingrich Senators and Party Polarization in the U.S. Senate

The political parties in the Senate are almost as polarized at they are in the House. Nevertheless, the explanations for party polarization work better in the House than they do in the Senate. In this article, we argue that the polarization in the House has directly contributed to polarization in the Senate. We find that almost the entire growth in Senate party polarization since the early 1970s can be accounted for by Republican senators who previously served in the House after 1978—a group we call the “Gingrich Senators.” While our analysis indicates that part of this effect has its roots in the senators’ constituencies, the experience of these representatives serving in the House continues to exert a real and substantial effect on their voting behavior in the Senate.