David Mayhew's Divided We Govern(1991) sparked an industry of scholars who alternately challenge or confirm the work on theoretical and empirical grounds. Still, we lack a definitive account of the proportions and causes of legislative gridlock. I revisit the effects of elections and institutions on policy outcomes to propose an alternative theory of gridlock: The distribution of policy preferences within the parties, between the two chambers, and across Congress more broadly is central to explaining the dynamics of gridlock. To test the model, I construct a measure that assesses legislative output in proportion to the policy agenda. Using newspaper editorials to identify every salient legislative issue between 1947 and 1996, I generate Congress-by-Congress gridlock scores and use them to test competing explanations. The results suggest that intrabranch conflict—perhaps more than interbranch rivalry—is critical in shaping deadlock in American politics.
Conventional accounts of the institutional development of Congress suggest that expansion of the size and workload of the House led members to distribute parliamentary rights narrowly: Majority party leaders accrued strong procedural powers while minority parties lost many of their parliamentary rights. I offer an alternative, partisan basis of procedural choice. Using an original data set of changes in House rules, I present a statistical model to assess the influence of partisan and nonpartisan factors on changes in minority procedural rights in the House between 1789 and 1990. I find that short-term partisan goals—constrained by inherited rules—shape both the creation and suppression of rights for partisan and political minorities. Collective institutional concerns and longer-term calculations about future parliamentary needs have little impact on changes in minority rights. The findings have important theoretical implications for explaining both the development of Congress and the nature of institutional change more generally.
S tudents of American politics have applied considerable energy in recent years to explaining the politics of advice and consent under the U.S. Constitution. Spatial models of advice and consent have offered an analytically precise way to think about the impact of senators' and presidents' policy preferences on the selection and confirmation of presidential appointees.1 For those studies that examine appointments to the federal courts, most models treat the Senate as a unitary actor governed by the Senate median or focus on a particular veto player within the chamber.2 These studies often find that accounting for the preferences of an additional pivot beyond the Senate median can be consequential for our understanding of confirmation outcomes.Formal Senate rules and informal practices, however, extend blocking authority to a wide range of senators beyond the Senate median and a single other pivotal senator. When the Senate considers nominations to the The authors wish to thank Shelly Goldman, Eric Lawrence, Keith Krehbiel, Larry Rothenberg, and Chuck Shipan for comments and advice, and Matt Jacobsmeier, Alan Murphy, and Molly Reynolds for research assistance. 2 Studies that highlight the Senate median include Krehbiel (2007) and Moraski and Shipan (1999). Studies that isolate the impact of a particular veto point include Wright (1998), Cameron, Cover, andSegal (1990) federal bench, formal and informal rules dictate that nominees must secure the consent of multiple potential veto players-including committee and party medians, as well as home-state senators for the court vacancy and the senators capable of sustaining a filibuster against confirmation. In this article, we seek a richer theoretical understanding of the forces that shape confirmation contests, elaborating competing spatial models that incorporate the preferences of pivotal players in isolation as well as in different combinations. We apply the lessons of our theoretical findings to confirmation outcomes for the U.S. Courts of Appeals and the U.S. District Courts between 1975 and 2006. We find that rules and practices that endow majority parties with agenda-setting advantages in executive session and that require supermajorities to cut off debate are most consequential for explaining patterns of confirmation outcomes over the past three decades. These veto powers typically outstrip the informal
Is the US Congress dysfunctional? The American public thinks so: In the summer of 2014, just 7% approved strongly of Congress (Riffkin 2014). Still, legislative scholars disagree about the severity of Congress's legislative challenges. Is legislative deadlock a sign that Congress can no longer identify and resolve major public problems? Or are Congress's difficulties temporary and correctable? In this article, I review theoretical and empirical literatures on the dynamics of lawmaking and evaluate alternative methods for testing lawmaking theories. Finally, I draw on recent research to put contemporary stalemate into historical perspective. I argue that even when Congress and the president have reached agreement on the big issues of the day, Congress's problem-solving capacity appears to have fallen to new lows in recent years. Whether and how well our political system can or will self-correct in the coming years remains an open question. 7.1
Scholars and observers of the U.S. Senate have noted an appreciable rise in the use of the filibuster over the course of the 20th century. Although numerous explanations have been offered, alternative accounts have never been pitted against each other in a multivariate fashion. In this article, we survey and test these multiple accounts, using data on filibusters launched between 1917 and 1996. Our findings suggest that the incentive to filibuster is predictably shaped by both partisan preferences and institutional opportunity, findings that hold even before the marked rise in partisanship evident at late century.
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