Michael S. Rocca

Beyond the Roll-Call Arena: The Determinants of Position Taking in Congress

Most analyses of position taking in Congress focus on roll-call voting, where members of Congress (MCs) regularly cast votes, thereby regularly taking positions. Left largely unstudied has been position taking beyond the domain of rollcall voting. However, analyzing non-roll-call position taking raises interesting theoretical questions. Whereas most members cannot avoid taking positions (casting votes) on roll calls, outside the roll-call arena MCs have more discretion; they must decide whether or not to take a position at all. And, while roll-call voting is directly tied to policy consequences, the connection is weaker in non-roll-call position taking. These two distinguishing features of non-roll-call position taking motivate a variety of hypotheses about who takes positions and what positions they take. Our results reveal strong constituency links to both phenomena. The results also imply that party influence is greater on roll-call position taking. We interpret these findings in the context of leading theories of congressional behavior.

The Position-taking Value of Bill Sponsorship in Congress:

What is the value of non—roll call position taking in Congress? The authors argue that non—roll call positions are used by interest groups to acquire information about the direction and intensity of legislators’ preferences. Legislators, in turn, use them to attract campaign contributions from potential donors. Examining bill sponsorship in the 103rd and 104th Congresses, the authors find a relationship between campaign contributions from labor and gun control political action committees and the positions House Democrats take through bill sponsorship. These results suggest that non—roll call position taking indeed matters.

The Effects of Citizens United on Corporate Spending in the 2012 Presidential Election

The 2012 presidential election saw a 594% increase in independent expenditures from the 2008 election (

Earmarks as a Means and an End: The Link between Earmarks and Campaign Contributions in the U.S. House of Representatives

144 million in 2008 to

The Institutional Mobility of Minority Members of Congress

1 billion in 2012), leaving little doubt that the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 Citizens United decision opened the campaign spending floodgates. To what extent are corporations, the main subject of the ruling, the source of the increase? We argue that while Citizens alters the ability of corporations to spend on campaigns, it may not alter their substantial risk in doing so. Utilizing an original dataset of political activity and campaign contributions by Fortune 500 companies, we explore whether Citizens United affected corporations’ overall contribution strategies. We find that major corporations were not a source of the dramatic increase in independent spending in the 2012 election and that their spending behavior more generally did not change as a result of the Citizens United ruling.

9/11 and Presidential Support in the 107th Congress

Legislative earmarks have taken center stage in the popular press in recent years as journalists, pundits, the president, and, sometimes, even legislators themselves question the economic, representational, and general policy implications of this type of federal spending. Some scholars suggest that legislators garner either direct or indirect electoral benefits from this behavior, but empirical findings are mixed. In this article, we place this discussion in the context of the literature on the link between campaign contributions and legislative services. We argue that MCs use earmarks to reward loyal contributors while interest groups attract earmarks by contributing to legislators’ campaigns. Utilizing a two-stage OLS technique, we find a robust relationship between defense earmarks and campaign contributions from defense political action committees during the 111th Congress.

The Effect of Race and Ethnicity on Bill Sponsorship and Cosponsorship in Congress

This article examines the extent to which race and ethnicity affect mobility to leadership positions within Congress. The authors utilize survival analysis to examine the rate at which legislators attained committee leadership positions between the 101st and 108th Congresses. The results show that black legislators attain leadership positions faster than white legislators. This may be because of the tendency for black members of Congress (MCs) to sit on less prestigious committees than white MCs, which creates greater opportunity for institutional promotion. Ethnicity, on the other hand, does not matter to mobility as Latinos acquire leadership positions at the same rate as non-Latino legislators.

Nonlegislative Debate in the U.S. House of Representatives

Immediately following the tragic events of 9/11, President George W. Bushs approval rating shot from 51% to 86%; a record 35-point rally effect according to the Gallup Poll. President Bush set another record on September 24th, 2001, as 90% of Americans approved of his performance. If public support is indeed an important presidents legislative resource, President Bush should have been his most influential during his record rally. To get a sense for President Bushs support in Congress following 9/11, I examine how members of Congress (MCs) voted on issues in which President Bush took a position in the 107th Congress. I analyze 83 votes identified by the Congressional Quarterly to determine the effect of 9/11 on presidential support in Congress. I find that MCs’ support for President Bush did in fact increase immediately following 9/11. But the unequivocal support did not last long. Despite still high approval ratings, President Bushs congressional support returned to pre-9/11 levels in 2002. These findings, I believe, have important implications for the study of rally effects specifically and congressional-executive relations in general.