Research shows that female legislators tend to support liberal, pacifistic approaches to foreign policy. But it remains unclear whether they are dovish because they seek to represent the dovish values of women generally or because they tend to represent mostly liberal voters. To answer this question, we examine all foreign policy votes cast in Congress over the last five decades to estimate the ideological locations of House and Senate members on a hawk-dove dimension. Once we control for partisan and constituency effects, we find only limited evidence that female legislators are more dovish than their male counterparts are.
Although scholars have examined committee rosters extensively, no study has considered the relationship between the ideological composition of panels and their participation in bill drafting. I thus ask: Which committees are frequently excluded from legislative deliberations? Does the composition of committees affect the degree to which they contribute to bill development? Using DW‐NOMINATE data, I calculate ideological scores for congressional panels between 1989 and 2010 to see whether certain committees are routinely bypassed. I find that moderate panels, polarized panels, and panels with moderate chairs are often excluded, while extreme committees in the majority direction tend to retain bill‐writing duties.
Advocacy of new forums for democratic deliberation should take into account the deliberative functions of the regular policymaking institutions of representative democracies. In view of the important consequences for citizens, research on institutional deliberation focuses mainly on the ability to produce intelligent decisions. It employs a wide range of approaches to assess that ability. We review diverse literatures on institutional deliberation, with attention to legislatures (especially the US Congress), chief executives, bureaucratic agencies, courts, and popular referendums. These institutions employ a variety of distinctive processes and routinely assess voluminous and detailed information. Deficiencies in institutional deliberation often arise from imbalanced or uninformed constituency pressures. Thus institutional deliberation appears to benefit from moderate insulation from public and interest-group demands. Popular referendums have mixed effects on the intelligence of policymaking. In some circumstances, regular policymaking institutions can create opportunity for more deliberative popular forums to play effective roles in policy development.
Congressional parties are commonly viewed as unified legislative teams, but recent intraparty battles have revealed serious ideological divisions within the House Republican caucus. Using annual ratings from nearly 300 interest groups, we estimate the ideological locations of Republican legislators in order to map their party's factional structure. Based on the distribution of interest‐group support from 2001 to 2012, we detect three Republican factions that we characterize as worker oriented, pro‐business, and ethno‐radical. We find that Republican leaders block bills by legislators in the worker and ethno‐radical subgroups and that they advance bills by members in the corporate faction.
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