Vincent G. Moscardelli

Measuring legislative collaboration: The Senate press events network

Abstract Scholarship regarding the causes and consequences of legislative collaboration has drawn several insights through the application of network analysis. Previously used measures of legislative relationships may be heavily driven by non-relational factors such as ideological or policy-area preferences. We introduce participation in joint press events held by U.S. Senators as records of collaboration and the networks they comprise. This measure captures intentional relationships between legislators along the full timeline of collaboration. We show that there is substantial community structure underlying press event networks that goes beyond political party affiliation, and that press event collaboration predicts overlap in roll call voting.

Party Building through Campaign Finance Reform: Conditional Party Government in the 104th Congress

During this century, the electoral fortunes of members of Congress have become less a function of party affiliation, and more a function of personal relationships with their constituencies. With the Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1996, House Republican leaders sought to reinvigorate the role of the national parties in financing congressional campaigns. Guided by Conditional Party Government theory, we explore reasons a member of Congress might have for supporting such legislation. We find that a members likelihood of supporting this party-strengthening bill is highly sensitive to his or her ideological distance to the right or left of the party leadership.

Campaign Finance Reform as Institutional Choice: Party Difference in the Vote to Ban Soft Money

If the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002 banned the use of soft money—the only source of funds in which Democrats approached parity with Republicans—why did the Republican congressional leadership revile the bill and the Democratic congressional leadership embrace it? We address this puzzle by modeling competing electoral, partisan, and policy motives that guided members’ decision making on the vote for final passage of this bill. Our solution lies in the fact that members believed that BCRA would reduce the role of the national parties in congressional elections. Although the parties may behave similarly under a fixed electoral regime, we find that the BCRA vote is consistent with two parties that prefer different sets of electoral rules. Specifically, Democrats appear more sympathetic to changes that enhance the role of candidates and outside groups, whereas Republicans appear to prefer stronger national parties.

Reform in the Canadian Parliament and the US Congress: Institutional Choices and Member Power

A spate of recent work on the Canadian Parliament highlights the importance of constituency pressures in understanding the legislative behavior of individual Members of Parliament (MPs). In light of this renaissance, we reexamine decisions by Canadian Liberal Party MPs to defy Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his cabinet by supporting party-weakening reform in 2002. More specifically, we model votes on the question of selecting committee chairs through secret ballot as a function of factors both internal and external to the Parliament. While we find some evidence of exogenous, constituency-based forces, we find that support for reform was largely driven by internal party power dynamics. We gain additional insight into our findings by comparing this reform to analogous reforms in the US Congress. The patterns we uncover highlight the stark difference between the “double monopoly of power” held by party leaders in Westminster-style legislatures and the lack of such a monopoly in Congress. We conclude by advocating for more such comparisons, arguing that careful efforts to synthesize these and other similar reforms can improve our understanding of both legislatures despite the obvious and important differences between them.

A Review of “Filibustering in the U.S. Senate”

relevance to the most important and longstanding debates in the field. For example, from a public administration perspective, Joyce could make the argument that CBO’s organizational consistency challenges cynical assumptions of the lifecycle of agencies (Downs 1967). From a public policy perspective, Joyce’s cases offer new perspectives on information streams in agenda setting and alternative generation (Kingdon 2002). And the multiple rounds of deficit reduction and health care debates can be seen as exercises in policy framing and leveraging failure for political purposes (Stone 2001). Instead of placing these analytical burdens on the author, interested readers could include The Congressional Budget Office in the syllabus for a variety of courses and challenge the students to make scholarly connections. And whether or not one teaches and researches the federal budget, it is a citizenship imperative to be literate in budget politics, policies, and processes. Joyce’s book is an excellent one-stop resource on all of these issues, which together form the core of governance.

Introduction from the Guest Editors

This project began in the early spring of 2008 when Congress and the Presidency: A Journal of Capital Studies issued a Call for Papers for its special 25th Anniversary issue evaluating the state of inter-branch relations at the end of the George W. Bush presidency. The Call posed a simple question: what is the state of inter-branch relations at the end of the George W. Bush presidency and what does the future likely hold? In this special issue, the first retrospective on the Bush presidency comprised entirely of peer-reviewed research, the contributors tackle this simple, but important question from several analytic perspectives. Although arguments about what the future holds are necessarily speculative, the papers that appear in this issue focus on many of the most important intersections among the branches and many of the defining events of the George W. Bush administration: 9/11, the increased use of presidential signing statements, the role of “new media,” presidential success in Congress, highly controversial nominations/confirmations and the impact of political polarization on presidential-congressional relations. In the lead article, Jon R. Bond, Richard Fleisher, and Glen S. Krutz expand their previous work on nominations and confirmations. They document a transformation in the strategies used by opponents of presidential nominees to both judicial and executive posts from active opposition to what they term “malign neglect.” Where opponents traditionally worked to mobilize opposition by expanding conflict over nominees beyond the confines of the U.S. Senate, the now-commonplace strategy of malign neglect involves containing the scope of political conflict, thus keeping it below the radar of many interested actors (most notably interest groups and the media). For Supreme Court nominees, this strategy would seem to have limited utility due to the salience of these nominations; but for the vast majority of judicial and executive branch nominations, which tend to receive little public attention, the authors show that the strategy is remarkably successful. Furthermore, because it relies on exploiting the Senate’s much-discussed, but still little understood “hold” procedure, the strategy of malign neglect has the additional advantage of requiring very little in the way of effort by those employing it. Building on a causal argument first proposed by Donald Matthews in his classic book U.S. Senators and Their World, Bond, Fleisher, and Krutz assert that in a polarized Senate, the benefits of winning on policy (by defeating the nominee) outweigh any negative social costs senators might incur from asserting their right to unlimited debate.