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Although scholars have examined committee rosters extensively, no study has considered the relationship between the ideological composition of panels and their participation in bill drafting. I thus ask: Which committees are frequently excluded from legislative deliberations? Does the composition of committees affect the degree to which they contribute to bill development? Using DW‐NOMINATE data, I calculate ideological scores for congressional panels between 1989 and 2010 to see whether certain committees are routinely bypassed. I find that moderate panels, polarized panels, and panels with moderate chairs are often excluded, while extreme committees in the majority direction tend to retain bill‐writing duties.

Congressional parties are commonly viewed as unified legislative teams, but recent intraparty battles have revealed serious ideological divisions within the House Republican caucus. Using annual ratings from nearly 300 interest groups, we estimate the ideological locations of Republican legislators in order to map their party's factional structure. Based on the distribution of interest‐group support from 2001 to 2012, we detect three Republican factions that we characterize as worker oriented, pro‐business, and ethno‐radical. We find that Republican leaders block bills by legislators in the worker and ethno‐radical subgroups and that they advance bills by members in the corporate faction.

AbstractThe combination of partisan polarization and controversial military engagements has produced contentious debates over US foreign policy in Congress. Who has been winning these debates and exerting greater influence over the development of security and defense bills, hawkish or dovish legislators? The literature offers competing answers—on the one hand, arguing that hawks enjoy policy advantages because of Congress's commitment to US hegemony and, on the other, claiming that doves gain policy openings because of shifting partisan and security conditions. To determine the influence of hawkish versus dovish legislators, we examine congressional actions on all defense spending bills from 1971 to 2016. Specifically, we track roll call votes to see which legislators enjoy the greatest support for their measures. We find that hawks have disproportionate influence over the content of defense bills, whether Republicans or Democrats are in control, and whether the United States is at war or enjoying relative peace.

The combination of partisan polarization and controversial military engagements has produced contentious debates over US foreign policy in Congress. Who has been winning these debates and exerting greater influence over the development of security and defense bills, hawkish or dovish legislators? The literature offers competing answers—on the one hand, arguing that hawks enjoy policy advantages because of Congress's commitment to US hegemony and, on the other, claiming that doves gain policy openings because of shifting partisan and security conditions. To determine the influence of hawkish versus dovish legislators, we examine congressional actions on all defense spending bills from 1971 to 2016. Specifically, we track roll call votes to see which legislators enjoy the greatest support for their measures. We find that hawks have disproportionate influence over the content of defense bills, whether Republicans or Democrats are in control, and whether the United States is at war or enjoying relative peace.

Research shows that female legislators tend to support liberal, pacifistic approaches to foreign policy. But it remains unclear whether they are dovish because they seek to represent the dovish values of women generally or because they tend to represent mostly liberal voters. To answer this question, we examine all foreign policy votes cast in Congress over the last five decades to estimate the ideological locations of House and Senate members on a hawk-dove dimension. Once we control for partisan and constituency effects, we find only limited evidence that female legislators are more dovish than their male counterparts are.