Sarah A. Binder

The Dynamics of Legislative Gridlock, 1947–96

David Mayhews Divided We Govern (1991) sparked an industry of scholars who alternately challenge or confirm the work on theoretical and empirical grounds. Still, we lack a definitive account of the proportions and causes of legislative gridlock. I revisit the effects of elections and institutions on policy outcomes to propose an alternative theory of gridlock: The distribution of policy preferences within the parties, between the two chambers, and across Congress more broadly is central to explaining the dynamics of gridlock. To test the model, I construct a measure that assesses legislative output in proportion to the policy agenda. Using newspaper editorials to identify every salient legislative issue between 1947 and 1996, I generate Congress-by-Congress gridlock scores and use them to test competing explanations. The results suggest that intrabranch conflict—perhaps more than interbranch rivalry—is critical in shaping deadlock in American politics.

Senatorial Delay in Confirming Federal Judges, 1947-1998

presidential appointees to the lower federal bench. Here, we focus on the duration of the confirmation process for presidential appointees to the United States Circuit Courts of Appeal between 1947 and 1998 and explain the variation over time in the length of the confirmation process. With newly collected data on the fate of all appellate nominees during that period, we show how ideological incentives and institutional opportunities combine to affect the timing of Senate confirma? tion of judicial appointees.

The Partisan Basis of Procedural Choice: Allocating Parliamentary Rights in the House, 1789-1990

Conventional accounts of the institutional development of Congress suggest that expansion of the size and workload of the House led members to distribute parliamentary rights narrowly: Majority party leaders accrued strong procedural powers while minority parties lost many of their parliamentary rights. I offer an alternative, partisan basis of procedural choice. Using an original data set of changes in House rules, I present a statistical model to assess the influence of partisan and nonpartisan factors on changes in minority procedural rights in the House between 1789 and 1990. I find that short-term partisan goals—constrained by inherited rules—shape both the creation and suppression of rights for partisan and political minorities. Collective institutional concerns and longer-term calculations about future parliamentary needs have little impact on changes in minority rights. The findings have important theoretical implications for explaining both the development of Congress and the nature of institutional change more generally.

Going Nuclear, Senate Style

Conflict within and beyond the United States Senate has refocused scholarly and public attention on “advice and consent,” the constitutional provision that governs the Senates role in confirming presidential appointments. Despite intense and salient partisan and ideological disputes about the rules of the game that govern the Senate confirmation process for judicial appointees, reformers have had little success in limiting the ability of a minority to block contentious nominees. In this paper, we explore the Senates brush with the so-called “nuclear option” that would eliminate filibusters of judicial nominees, and evaluate competing accounts of why the Senate appears to be so impervious to significant institutional reform. The past and present politics of the nuclear option, we conclude, have broad implications for how we construct theories of institutional change. Sarah A. Binder is Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution (sbinder@brookings.edu). Anthony Madonna is a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University (ajmadonn@wustl.edu). Steven S. Smith is the Kate M. Gregg Professor of Social Sciences, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Weidenbaum Center, Washington University (smith@wustl.edu). The authors thank Stanley Bach, Richard Baker, Greg Koger, Forrest Maltzman, Elizabeth Rybicki, Eric Schickler, and Greg Wawro for helpful comments and advice.

Parties and Institutional Choice Revisited

Scholars of institutional change in Congress offer competing theoretical accounts of the accrual of procedural rights by House majority parties. One camp posits that the interests and capacities of political parties drive procedural change that affects agenda control. An alternative perspective offers a nonpartisan, median-voter account. I explore these two accounts, survey challenges involved in testing them, and determine the fit of the accounts to the history of procedural change in the House. I find that no single perspective accounts best for the pattern of rule changes affecting agenda control and that the median-voter model may be time-bound to the twentieth century�after partisan majorities had constructed the core partisan procedural regime of the House.

Tracking the Filibuster, 1917 to 1996

Scholars and observers of the U.S. Senate have noted an appreciable rise in the use of the filibuster over the course of the 20th century. Although numerous explanations have been offered, alternative accounts have never been pitted against each other in a multivariate fashion. In this article, we survey and test these multiple accounts, using data on filibusters launched between 1917 and 1996. Our findings suggest that the incentive to filibuster is predictably shaped by both partisan preferences and institutional opportunity, findings that hold even before the marked rise in partisanship evident at late century.

Partisanship and Procedural Choice: Institutional Change in the Early Congress, 1789–1823

Conventional accounts of institutional change in the early House of Representatives suggest that increases in the size and workload of the chamber led members to adopt rules restricting the procedural rights of its members. In this article, I argue that this conventional explanation understates the influence of partisanship in dictating early procedural choice. Specifically, I use the Houses adoption of the previous question rule in 1811 to test competing workload and partisan explanations of institutional change. Analyzing changes in congressional workload and partisanship from 1789 to 1823, I find that the polarization of partisan preferences strongly directed procedural choices in the early House. Moreover, I argue that procedural choices in both the House and Senate outlasted the voting alignments that first shaped them. The findings suggest the power of a partisan theory of institutional change to account for the timing and direction of congressional development and interchamber differences.

Where Do Institutions Come From? Exploring the Origins of the Senate Blue Slip

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Senates practice of advice and consent today is the deference accorded home state senators in reviewing presidential appointments to the federal bench. Although the Constitution calls for the advice and consent of the Senate body, informal norms of the Senate provide home state senators with a potential veto of nominations to fill federal judgeships within their states. One norm—senatorial courtesy—historically ensured that senators would defer to the views of the home state senator from the presidents party. Another practice—the Senate “blue slip”—allocates special procedural rights to both home state senators regardless of political party. A single objection from a home state senator from either party has historically been considered sufficient to defeat confirmation of a nominee. The blue slip also allows home state senators to influence the course of nominations prospectively—encouraging presidents to heed the preferences of home state senators in selecting new federal judges.

The Impact of Party Cues on Citizen Evaluations of Senators

Students of Congress highlight the connections that legislators cultivate with constituents, bonds that help to secure voters’ trust and incumbents’ reelection. We revisit the forces that shape citizens’ evaluations of their senators, embedding a survey experiment in the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to test for the impact of party labels. We show that citizens think more highly of senators from the opposite party when prompted with that senators party label, results that are consistent with the psychological theory of “reference group effects.” The theory and results help explain how senators maintain favorable reputations from cross-partisans in periods of partisan voting.

Dodging the Rules in Trump’s Republican Congress

The election of President Donald Trump in 2016 ushered in the first Republican Congress and White House in a decade. Despite unified party control in the 115th Congress (2017–18), House and Senate GOP majorities struggled to legislate: GOP fissures and an undisciplined, unpopular president frequently undermined the Republican agenda. Most notably, clashes within and between the two parties strained old ways of doing business. In response, Republicans dodged, bent, or reinterpreted several institutional constraints in pursuit of their party’s legislative priorities. In this article, I explore the conditions that drive majority parties to find ways to dodge the rules of the game—taking steps to circumvent institutional constraints, short of formally changing the rules. I focus in particular on Republican efforts in Trump’s first Congress to empower majorities in the Senate—identifying potential political and institutional forces that propel majorities to confront parliamentary constraints in the contemporary Congress.