We examine congressional cue‐taking theory to determine its extent, conditionality, and various forms in the US Senate. Using a novel data‐collection technique (timed C‐SPAN footage), we focus on temporal dynamics via event history analysis. Examining the effects of senator characteristics across 16 votes from the 108th Congress, we find that committee leadership and seniority generally predict cue‐giving, while other types of characteristics predict cue‐giving on certain types of votes. Our results underscore the importance of considering the order and timing of voting when studying congressional behavior.
The ability of the minority party to influence legislation in Congress is debated. Most bills are passed with large bipartisan majorities, yet the House, where most legislation is developed, is seen as a majority‐party‐dominated institution. I develop a theory of House minority‐party influence at the committee markup stage as a result of the Senate’s institutional rules. An original data set of congressional committee votes shows that minority‐party support in House committees predicts House and Senate passage. During unified party control of the chambers, an increase in Senate majority‐party seats results in lower minority‐party support for the legislation in the House committee, while during divided party control of Congress, the House majority passes more extreme bills as the chambers polarize. Even in the majority‐party‐dominated House, the minority’s preferences are incorporated into legislation, and the Senate’s institutional rules moderate bills to a significant degree.
Few political institutions are as central to theories of lawmaking as the executive veto. Despite its importance, institutional continuity at the national level has precluded identification of empirical effects of the veto on legislative behavior. We address this limitation and present evidence from the states demonstrating how the veto affects the formation of legislative coalitions and, indirectly, executive influence over policymaking. We find consistent evidence that the presence and strength of gubernatorial veto powers affect the lawmaking behavior of state legislatures. Our analysis shows how institutional provisions condition executives' ability to affect policy outcomes in separation-of-powers systems.Following Alexander Hamilton's insistence in Federalist 73 that the presidential veto would guard against the tendency of the legislature to "invade the rights of the executive," the veto is the key mechanism supporting policy bargaining between the president and Congress (Cameron 2000;McCarty 2000). Veto power helps presidents and governors extract policy concessions from their legislatures by providing a constraint on the enactment of legislation.The framers of the federal Constitution had a keen intuition for how their specific grant of veto power (with a two-thirds override requirement, per Article 1, Section 7 of the US Constitution) would empower the president. Likewise, architects of state constitutions first clashed over the mere existence of the veto, then came to different and varying provisions of veto power than that given to the president. These practitioners of institutional design had different preferences regarding the balance of power between the branches and used veto rules to solidify these preferences.
“The ‘Palin Effect’ in the U.S. 2008 Presidential Election” analyzes the effect of Sarah Palin on presidential vote choice. Two of the substantive conclusions are (1) Palin cost McCain votes among independents and moderates, and (2) Palin had the largest effect on vote choice of any recent vice-presidential nominee. Our analysis shows that the data do not support these findings. We find that respondent evaluations of Palin have a positive effect on McCain vote choice, even among independents and moderates, and Palin’s effect on the election outcome is comparable with ten of the last fifteen vice-presidential nominees.
Bruce Rauner, a venture capitalist by trade and a political novice, made a strong run at the Illinois governorship in 2014, ultimately unseating incumbent Pat Quinn in the general election. After defeating a robust field of established candidates in a tightly contested GOP primary, Rauner set his sights not only on winning the general election, but also on fundamentally changing the office for which he contended. In addition to his personal campaign, Rauner worked to qualify ballot initiatives that would have introduced term limits to the General Assembly and increased the number of votes needed to override a gubernatorial veto from threefifths of each legislative chamber to two-thirds. These reform efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, for now, as Illinois courts deemed them unconstitutional. 1 Yet, Rauner insisted that he would pursue these reforms whether elected or not, citing vague concerns for "checks and balances." In this chapter, we provide a framework for considering the effects such an institutional change might bring to Illinois. More generally, we assess how the specifics of governors' veto powers condition their influence over the legislative process. Few political institutions are as consequential for lawmaking as the executive veto. All current governors share the president's prerogative to veto unfavorable legislation. The sequence is roughly the same for governors as for presidents-after each legislative chamber passes the same version of a bill, it goes to the executive for signature. A governor can assent, veto, or
We describe a hands-on teaching module on the redistricting process for use in undergraduate classes. Students engage in the process of strategically drawing district lines, which allows them to inductively understand gerrymandering and its consequences. The module also encourages students to consider the many factors that complicate eff orts to identify a "fair" approach to redistricting, focusing on communities of interest. We also discuss a number of extensions to the activity and provide examples of controversial districts that may be used to illustrate various redistricting concepts. David Doherty is an assistant professor in the department Many of the concepts at the heart of political science focus on how confl icts among competing interests can and should be resolved. In our experience, students often come to class harboring expectations that there is an objectively correct way to resolve these confl icts and structure political institutions. Indeed, research suggests that much of the public believes that many of the thorniest political problems could be solved if political actors would simply eschew their own self-interest, stop responding to special interests, and do "what we all know is right" (see, e.g., Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002).The process of redistricting off ers a straightforward way to engage students with the ambiguity involved in establishing fair political processes as well as to familiarize them with a salient and controversial component of the American political system. In this article, we present an in-class module that is suitable for use in classes on introductory American politics, Congress, campaigns and elections, and other related topics. The module proceeds in three stages and can be implemented in a 50-to 60-minute class period. It also may be extended in a variety of ways for longer class meetings, and we encourage instructors to customize their module depending on the needs of their particular class. The module is built around simple hands-on activities that provide a framework for students to refl ect on the strategic and normative considerations that shape debates about the redistricting process.Developing a curriculum that allows students to engage in experiential or "active" learning is important because it encourages classroom participation, promotes a deeper understanding of material, and "give[s] life and immediacy to the subject matter" (McCarthy and Anderson 2000). Furthermore, experiential learning is particularly useful in introductory courses that encompass a broad range of material and are geared toward a wide range of student interests and backgrounds (Montgomery, Brown, and Deery 1997). Instructors have an especially important obligation in American politics courses to encourage the development of students as active citizens in American democracy who can think critically about political issues and processes (Westheimer and Kahne 2004). Other than the pedagogical advantages of hands-on learning, activities that involve participation by students rather than rel...
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