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AbstractScholars and pundits have long noted the dominance of the American two‐party system, but we know relatively little about new, endogenous institutions that have emerged within the two major parties. I argue that ideological factions provide party sub‐brands, which allow legislators to more precisely define their partisan type and capture faction‐specific resources. To support this claim, I analyze new data on nine ideological factions in the House of Representatives (1995–2018). I find that (1) faction voting is distinct, suggesting a product ripe for party sub‐branding, and (2) joining a faction changes the ideological composition of a candidate's donor base—conditional on the strength of the faction's institutions. Party sub‐branding is effective only when factions possess organizational features that induce coordinated and disciplined position taking (e.g., whips, PACs, membership restrictions). These results suggest that, even within highly polarized parties, American political ideology is more than a dichotomous choice, and factions target niche markets of political donors as a means of blunting financial instruments of party power.

AbstractI analyse the relative influence of lawmakers before and after a watershed moment in the development of faction institutions: the abolition of legislative service organizations. Blocs of lawmakers in the House of Representatives were afforded official resources to advance their policy agendas between 1979 and 1995. In the wake of the "Republican Revolution," however, these groups were categorically dismantled. Using a difference-in-difference design, I estimate the individual-level effect of losing congressional resources on relative legislative effectiveness. The results inform our understanding of faction power, legislative bargaining and evolving congressional institutions.

AbstractMembers of the US Congress held over 25,000 town hall meetings over the last eight years, and yet we know very little about the role that these events play in American politics. In this article, we present new data on congressional town hall meetings held in the 114th to 117th Congresses (2015–2022) to explore why politicians hold such meetings. In short, we do not find consistent evidence that electoral vulnerability drives legislators to their districts. Nor do we find support for claims of a zero‐sum tradeoff between lawmaking and district representation. However, members of the president's opposition party clearly and consistently host more town hall meetings, suggesting that party messaging may be at the heart of this often‐overlooked congressional behavior.

Early American political leaders were tasked with sustaining a representative republic on a seemingly impossible scale. Their struggle to stave off political dissolution raises an important question for scholars of federalism. How can democratic governments integrate disparate political communities across a vast—and rapidly expanding—territory? We revisit the solution most often proposed by contemporary political leaders: a nationally directed system of internal improvements. Using a dataset of nineteenth-century appropriations, we find that patterns in internal improvement funding are consistent with a nation-building strategy. Congressional districts at the fringes of the republic received disproportionate support from the federal government, even after accounting for political preferences, positions of legislative authority, and sub-national spending patterns. Our research stands in contrast to existing work on internal improvements, which is primarily interested in testing theories of distributive politics, and contributes to a diverse body of research on federalism, nation-building, congressional politics, and American political development.

Abstract
We conduct a preliminary analysis of the first 200 days of the Donald Trump presidency, to determine who his principal allies in the US House have been. We build our analysis around three groups of Republicans, based on caucus affiliations: members of the Republican Main Street Partnership (RMSP), the Republican Study Committee (RSC), and the House Freedom Caucus (HFC). We find that House Republicans, regardless off caucus membership, broadly support President Trump and largely shared in the his electoral success. Yet, we also uncover suggestive evidence that the HFC is maneuvering into a position of influence with President Trump. Freedom Caucus members are more closely tied to his electoral performance than members of other conservative groups, and they appear to receive more time with the President relative to a comparable group of House Republicans. While these results are interesting, they are also initial and more time is needed to assess how President Trump builds a winning coalition with Republican House members.

Though considerable research focuses on formal institutions in Congress, scholars have long acknowledged that much of what guides legislative behavior is unwritten. To advance this area, we leverage a tool that allows appropriators to redirect billions of dollars from mandatory programs to discretionary projects. Changes in mandatory program spending—known as "CHIMPs"—show that existing institutions are often maintained by the strategic action of legislators. In the case of CHIMPs, we find their use is largely a response to formal constraints and that they are preserved through avoidance of minimum reform coalitions. This highlights that the legislative process—and budgetary outcomes in particular—cannot be understood without attention to procedures which remain "off the books."

Does joining a party faction in Congress enhance or undermine a member's lawmaking effectiveness? Prior research suggests that factions can help members electorally in signaling their distinct ideological positions to potential political supporters. By contrast, we examine the nine largest ideological caucuses over the past quarter century to test three hypotheses about the conditional lawmaking benefits of faction membership: (1) that benefits from faction membership are limited to those in the minority party; (2) that members of ideologically centrist factions gain the greatest benefits; and (3) that sizable factions exploit their pivotal positions to help their members achieve legislative victories. We find support for only the first of these three conjectures, consistent with the argument that factions offer valuable resources to those in the minority party and that majority-party leaders counter the proposals arising from their own party's factions. The fact that faction membership offers no significant lawmaking benefit to majority-party legislators challenges conventional wisdom.

AbstractWhile a number of studies in recent years explore the particularistic tendencies of presidents – targeting various benefits to districts and states that will help their and their party's electoral prospects – little work has explored how members of Congress react to such behavior. We take some initial steps in this regard by examining how members have responded to President Donald Trump's trade initiatives. We analyze congressional newsletter mentions of tariffs or trade as a means of exploring congressional reaction. We find a positive relationship between tariff/trade mentions and partisanship, as Republican members and members from states that Trump won in 2016 are more likely to refer to tariffs/trade in their newsletters. This represents, we argue, a different kind of credit claiming. These basic empirical patterns set the stage for more systematic analysis in the future.

Research on presidential distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on federal domestic spending. Yet, presidential influence on public policy extends well-beyond grant allocation. Since the early 20th Century, for example, the president has had substantial discretion to adjust tariff schedules and non-tariff barriers "with the stroke of a pen." These trade adjustments via presidential directive allow us to test the logic of presidential particularism in an area of policy understudied among presidency scholars. We examine unilateral adjustments to US trade policies between 1917 and 2006, with a detailed analysis of those made between 1986 and 2006, and find that presidents—in accordance with electoral incentives—strategically allocate trade protections to industries in politically valuable states. In general, states in which the president lacks a comfortable electoral majority are systematically more likely to receive protectionist unilateral orders. Overall, our results show that the president's distributive imperative extends into the realm of foreign affairs, an arena in which the president has substantial authority to influence public policy.