In the struggle to control the federal bureaucracy, presidents have an overlooked but powerful tool: the recess appointment. By making recess appointments, presidents can fill vacancies without the advice and consent of the Senate. The authors delineate three conditions that define presidential unilateral powers and demonstrate how recess appointments fit within that paradigm. Presidents, the authors argue, should be more likely to make recess appointments to important policy-making positions, namely, major independent agencies. The authors compile a data set of every civilian nomination and recess appointment between 1987 and 2004. After controlling for other factors, the authors find strong support for their theory.

In 2007, the U.S. Senate moved into permanent session to stop President George W. Bush from making recess appointments. This article examines this episode. We argue that Congress is only able to effectively check presidential unilateral powers when the president's use of such powers creates high political costs for a sufficient number of members such that congressional collective action is possible. Using case studies and multivariate analysis, we show that Bush used recess appointments far more than his predecessors, creating high political costs for Senate Democrats and driving them to find an innovative way to check the power of the president.

Conflict within and beyond the United States Senate has refocused scholarly and public attention on "advice and consent," the constitutional provision that governs the Senate's 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 Senate's 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.

Objective 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. Methods 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. Results 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. Conclusions We argue that studies of Congress must account for the roll call generating process when analyzing roll call data.

Recent empirical work has brought a renewed attention to the effect congressional rules of procedure have on the size of winning coalitions. Specifically, scholars have posited that legislative success hinges on the support of legislators identified by institutionally defined decision rules. Under these theories, supermajority decision rules in the U.S. Senate lead to larger, more inclusive coalitions on final passage. In this article, I reevaluate these claims by controlling for changes in the legislative agenda and the roll-call voting record. I find that the aggregate size of winning coalitions is highly responsive to the underlying legislative agenda, the size of the Senate's majority party, and the manner in which researchers treat unrecorded votes. Further, my findings suggest that any connection between changes in the Senate's voting rules and the size of winning coalitions is spurious.

Recent studies have questioned the familiar characterization of Congress as unidimensional. We argue that agenda control, orchestrated through the House Rules Committee and other techniques, can make multidimensional congresses appear more unidimensional. We evaluate this argument by examining the relationship between measures of unidimensionality and various measures of party control for the House of Representatives from 1875 to 1997, at both the roll-call level and congress level. Our findings contribute to an expanding literature explaining why a single dimension could explain most of the variance in voting data, even if latent ideology is multidimensional.

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In this article, we take advantage of a new source of data providing updates from the Majority Leader's Office that signal the leadership's positions on floor votes. We offer a more nuanced explanation of voting in the U.S. House as our findings suggest that not all procedural votes are created equal. While the most liberal members of the party vote with the leadership on procedural votes at high rates and nearly 100 percent of the time when signaled by the majority leader, moderate members are significantly less likely to support the party and are not responsive to these signals.