Lawrence S. Rothenberg

Commitment and the Campaign Contribution Contract

Theory: Commitment problems make establishing long-term relationships between members of Congress and organized interests extremely difficult. Hypothesis: Political action committees whose contribution behavior is unfavorable to an election winner are not forced to pay for their mistakes in the subsequent election to get back into the representatives good graces. In other words, strong punishment strategies are not employed to enforce what we label the campaign contribution contract. Methods: Because theory suggests that campaign contributions involve decisions about whether to make a donation and how much to give, a general econometric framework allowing these two decisions to be either independent or correlated is utilized. This model subsumes both Tobit and the combination of probit and ordinary least squares estimation. A large scale data set designed to uncover any evidence that elected representatives commit themselves ex ante to punish groups for opportunistic behavior is employed. Covering 1977-86, this data set consists of roughly 115,000 campaign contribution decisions made by large corporate, labor, and trade political action committees concerning long-time members of Congress. Ancillary information is incorporated for model specification purposes. Results: The willingness of legislators to punish is marginal, suggesting that evidence for credible commitment is weak. We need to reconsider whether legislators and group leaders can possibly forge long-term relationships. Additional thought must also be given to the motivations for campaign contributions and to what a reasonable enforcement mechanism for commitment might look like.

Lame-Duck Politics: Impending Departure and the Votes on Impeachment

One of the peculiarities of the December 1998 votes in the House of Representatives to impeach Bill Clinton was that they took place during a lame-duck session. Roughly 10 percent of the voting population were in their final term and therefore no longer faced any risk of electoral retribution by the citizenry. While most of the relevant empirical literature suggests that the absence of electoral discipline does not matter, in theory, these departing legislators could ignore the preferences of their districts and vote according to their own personal preferences, the wishes of special interests, their new constituencies when relevant, or any other idiosyncratic factor. Because the votes on impeachment are so politically important, and since they offer an exceptional opportunity to examine the so-called last term problem, our analysis explores whether the factors influencing the votes of departing members of Congress were different than those influencing the votes of their continuing colleagues. We find that, contrary to past findings regarding political shirking, those leaving the House exhibited contrasting behavioral patterns relative to those who were continuing in the 106th Congress. In deciding their vote choices on the impeachment articles, reelected incumbents weighted district preferences far more heavily than departing members. Consequently, our results suggest that the severing of electoral ties is relevant for legislator behavior and that it is a matter of some importance whether or not a vote takes place during a lame-duck session.

Influence without Bribes: A Noncontracting Model of Campaign Giving and Policymaking

Efforts to find empirical evidence that campaign money impacts policymaking choices have offered scant support for group influence. A possible explanation is that the hypothesis that those receiving campaign monies should adjust their policy choices to favor their donor requires the untenable assumption that groups and legislators can implement contracts. We develop a new, alternative, model in which a policymaking legislator cannot make contracts but cares about policy, fundraising, and reputation. In our model, the group gives only to those it believes shares it policy preferences. Nonetheless, we show that the groups giving impacts incumbent policy choices. Importantly, when groups ideologically match, the relationship between actual contributions and bias is not straightforward. As long as a group is uncertain about a members primitive policy preference, it can influence her policymaking even when it contributes to her challenger or abstains from giving altogether. A key implication of our model is that empirical work requires a different research design to discern if money biases policymaking.

A Unified Theory of U.S. Lawmaking: Preferences, Institutions, and Party Discipline

We develop a unified theory of lawmaking that integrates preferences, institutional features, and imperfect party discipline. This model both parsimoniously subsumes numerous extant models and allows for examination of heretofore unexplored equilibria behavior. To demonstrate this, we pinpoint what effects the kinds of changes that reformers often focus on—strengthening parties and loosening the filibuster rule—might have on the equilibrium gridlock interval and generate a number of nonintuitive results. We also find that our unified models empirical implications are consistent with the gridlock pattern found in the data. We conclude that this model is theoretically important and empirically relevant.

Does It Really Hurt to Be Out of Step

Scholars have seemingly established that constituents hold “out of step” legislators electorally accountable. Empirically, however, such claims have not been based on measures placing districts and perceptions of legislators’ preferences in the same space. We remedy this using the 2006 and 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, and Aldrich and McKelvey’s scaling procedure, finding that electoral success is roughly consistent with Downsian logic but not with the blanket statement that out-of-step incumbents are penalized. Voters punish out-of-step incumbents conditional on having a sufficiently more “in step” challenger. Effects are substantial, but so are incumbent advantages.

Preferences, Parties, and Legislative Productivity

Chiou and Rothenberg (2003) utilized models of legislative productivity, synthesizing parties and preferences by deriving and measuring different equilibrium gridlock intervals, finding that such models outperformed alternatives depending on preferences alone. However, their temporal scope is limited to post-World War II. Generalizing theoretical models—notably recognizing the 1917 enactment of Rule 22 creating the Senate filibuster rule—and expanding historical scope empirically will produce results, inspiring greater confidence and better ability to distinguish whether partisan features matter. Hence, the authors generalize and test models using data extending to the late 19th century. Results indicate that a model combining preferences with party unity better explains outcomes than does a preference-based model, a model where parties control the agenda but cannot discipline members, or a model where the president rules his legislative party. In addition, findings are consistent with the inference that Rule 22 did not change the filibuster rule guiding the Senate substantially.

Institutional features of congressional decisions: The fight to prohibit smoking on airlines

A pervasive theme of the congressional politics literature is that the committee system is fundamental in determining the policy status quo. Such an assertion hinges crucially upon committees controlling their jurisdictions; congressional delegation is undermined if a committee can assert authority over any issue domain at any time. Yet, representatives may possess an incentive to support a policy proposal that would change the status quo, even if it entails disregarding procedures. Indeed, standard conceptualizations of how members of Congress make their voting choices assume that only the benefits and costs associated with a policy matter, and they do not consider institutional factors such as whether a bill emerged from the correct committee.This analysis examines whether representatives will sacrifice policy interests to preserve institutional features of the legislature. The effort in 1987 to curb smoking on airplanes — which became embroiled in a difficult-to-resolve jurisdictional dispute — serves as a vehicle to analyze how sensitive members are to such features. The results demonstrate that a sizable number put aside their [generally moderate] policy preferences and voted against limits on smoking for institutional reasons. These findings have important implications both for specifying the determinants of policy change and for understanding institutional stability.

Executive appointments: Duration, ideology, and hierarchy

While contemporary scholars generally view the Senate’s nominee approval role as impacting bureaucratic capacities and the president’s ability to realize campaign pledges, empiricists and theorists focus on different elements of bargaining. Since empiricists typically study confirmation delays, and theorists normally analyze equilibrium nomination preferences, theory and data rarely inform one another. We remedy this by specifying an executive appointment model jointly incorporating delays and appointee ideologies. Besides predicting appointees’ equilibrium ideologies, and contrary to past claims about the relationship between ideology and duration, this theory details how ideological differences between the president and his opposition do not straightforwardly induce longer delays; rather, effects are conditioned by factors such as the office’s policy importance and divided government. Additionally, different pathways for parties to impact appointee ideology and duration are flexibly incorporated. Empirically, theoretical hypotheses receive support and evidence of parties impacting Senate trade-offs between delay and policy outcomes and successfully pressuring key members over high-stakes appointments are uncovered.

Modeling Legislator Decision Making: A Historical Perspective

Although scholars have put enormous effort into developing models of legislative choice behavior, they may not have sufficiently considered the underlying choice process and its relationship to the institutional environment. Our analysis does so by jointly integrating more realistic models of legislator decision making with a historical perspective on institutional evolution. We apply a unified model, incorporating participation and vote choice in a theoretically and econometrically sensible manner, to roll call voting and participation choices in the 73rd (1933-1934), 89th (1965-1966), and 104th (1995-1996) United States Congresses. We consider whether the same factors affect behavior over time, whether abstention choices affect outcomes, and whether integrating voting and participation is advantageous. Our models fit the data well and reveal significant, intuitive, differences in decision making over time that are related to Congress’s development and that are relevant for policy. Realistic models and an appreciation for institutional evolution are related and important for considering legislative choice behavior.

Coalitional Maintenance Politicians, Parties, and Organized Groups

Research on parties has bifurcated between studies of parties in elections and parties in the legislature. This analysis brings the theoretical insights from the study of legislative parties to bear on the role that parties play in elections. The authors apply recent theories of legislative parties to highlight the dilemmas that parties face in electing their candidates and attempting to mediate between these office seekers and interest-group contributors. The authors maintain that parties best serve the long-term interests of their candidates by rewarding those who cater to interests aligned with the party and punishing others who solicit support from opponents. This proposition is tested using data on party contributions to House incumbents during the 1995-1996 electoral cycle. The authors find that incumbents who relied more on opposition groups for funds in the 1993-1994 cycle received less funding from their party. The results provide evidence that parties play the role of intermediary between groups and politicians.