Suchergebnisse

While the U.S. House and Senate differ in many significant ways, perhaps the most important is the ability of House leaders to control the legislative process through the usage of special rules, which establish the terms of debate on a bill and can limit the number and content of amendments allowed. House members of both the majority and minority party have complained about their recent increased usage. In contrast, the Senate lacks a comparable tool and scholars have reported sharp increases in the number of floor amendments being proposed. In this paper, we examine the increase in proposed floor amendments in the Senate; arguing that, in addition to an increased value from electoral position-taking, the procedures employed in the House influence the floor behavior of senators. Specifically, we find that senators are more likely to offer amendments to bills that were passed under a restrictive rule in the House.

AbstractScholars of political parties frequently note that a party's candidates are aided by the presence of a consistent and favourable party brand name. We argue that partisan success in maintaining a consistent position on important policy issues hinges on how their role in the government motivates their strategies about public policy formation. Specifically, when parties share control of government institutions, parties need to balance their electoral interest in promoting a consistent brand name with the need to generate public policy that leads to effective governance. When control is held by one party, the costs and benefits of effective governance are born entirely by the majority, absolving both parties of the need to compromise on the substance of policy. By employing item response theory methods to assess patterns of party voting on deficit issues, we find strong support for these hypotheses.

Congressional votes are only recorded if a member formally requests a roll call vote, and that request is supported by one-fifth of those present. Many votes pass viva voce and are never recorded. We seek to examine changing patterns of unrecorded voting, analyze the causes of these changes, and consider the implications of these changes for congressional scholars. Using landmark legislation from the 39th (1865-1867) to the 104th Congress (1995-1996), we analyze whether bills receive a recorded or unrecorded final passage vote. We find that while the likelihood that a landmark law receives a recorded final passage vote fluctuates over time, electoral pressures consistently influence members' decisions to record their votes. We argue that studies of Congress must account for the roll call generating process when analyzing roll call data. Adapted from the source document.

ObjectiveCongressional votes are only recorded if a member formally requests a roll call vote, and that request is supported by one‐fifth of those present. Many votes pass viva voce and are never recorded. We seek to examine changing patterns of unrecorded voting, analyze the causes of these changes, and consider the implications of these changes for congressional scholars.MethodsUsing landmark legislation from the 39th (1865–1867) to the 104th Congress (1995–1996), we analyze whether bills receive a recorded or unrecorded final passage vote.ResultsWe find that while the likelihood that a landmark law receives a recorded final passage vote fluctuates over time, electoral pressures consistently influence members' decisions to record their votes.ConclusionsWe argue that studies of Congress must account for the roll call generating process when analyzing roll call data.

ObjectivesScholarship on the U.S. Senate has demonstrated the pivotal role the presiding officer can play when asked to interpret the chamber's rules and precedents. Therefore, our objective is to broadly evaluate how questions of order are arbitrated in the U.S. Senate.MethodsUsing a multinomial logistic regression, we estimate the effect of partisanship on adjudicating questions of order in the Senate before and after the institutionalization of the parliamentarian.ResultsOur results indicate that while short‐term partisan interests play an important role in determining how presiding officers interpret rules and precedents, the emergence of the Senate parliamentarian in the 1920s served to reduce uncertainty regarding procedural matters in the chamber.ConclusionsThis change has led to fewer instances of partisan rulings on questions of order and raised the costs of executing a drastic change in Senate procedure via unorthodox procedures. However, the introduction of the parliamentarian has not reduced the likelihood a ruling is overturned. As such, more narrow procedural changes have been used to support majorities over time.

All major legislation in the House necessitates a special rule from the Rules Committee before it can be brought to the chamber floor. These rules often strictly limit floor amendments to bills considered by the House. Scholars of political parties have argued that the House majority party can bias policy output away from the floor median through its usage of restrictive rules. In this article, we argue that in order to secure the passage of restrictive rules, the majority often makes concessions to centrist legislators through the amending process. We examine this theory using a newly collected data set that includes all amendments considered by the Rules Committee during the construction of structured rules in the 109th, 110th, and 111th Congresses (2005–2010). Our results are mixed, but they do suggest that moderate members of the majority party often receive concessions via amendments for their support of the majority party's agenda‐setting regime.