Dynamic Elite Partisanship: Party Loyalty and Agenda Setting in the US House

Abstract

Legislators and legislative parties must strike a balance between collective and member-level goals. While there are legislative and reputational returns to coordinated behavior, party loyalty has a detrimental effect on members' electoral success. We argue that members and parties navigate these competing forces by pursuing partisan legislation when the threat of electoral repercussions is relatively low -when elections are distant. We test our theory by examining House members' likelihood of casting a party vote over the election cycle, assessing whether members strategically alter their levels of party loyalty as elections approach. We also explore whether majority parties strategically structure the agenda according to variation in members' electoral constraints. Our approach allows elite partisanship to follow a dynamic process, which we term dynamic partisanship. We find that with increasing election proximity, members are less likely to cast party votes and parties are less inclined to schedule votes that divide the parties. * Please send all correspondence to Ryan J. Vander Wielen.

Ideology and strategic party disloyalty in the US house of representatives

“…Our results add to recent literature suggesting that parties and members of Congress alter their behavior in ways that are inconsistent with the standard story of stable patterns of spatial voting (e.g. Lindstädt and Vander Wielen, 2014;Minozzi and Volden, 2013). Like other recent work (e.g.…”

“…Thus, in the prior election, a measure of the lagged spending gap between a legislator and his or her challenger in the prior election, 27 and the lagged vote share of the presidential candidate from the legislator's party in that legislator's district. These controls come from both Carson et al (2010) and Lindstädt and Vander Wielen (2014). The models again include Congress-level intercepts and legislator-level intercepts to account for any unmeasured legislator-specific or Congress-specific variance unexplained by the covariates in the model.…”

Legislative Institutions as a Source of Party Leaders' Influence

“…As a result, they can rely less on leaders' preferences as a signal about what the optimal policy should be (Curry 2015;Krehbiel 1992;Mooney 2012). Second, when leaders can allocate resources that members care about, access to the agenda, financial resources, and committee assignments, members may preemptively incorporate leaders' preference into their own positions as a way to remain in favor with the leaders (Clucas 2001;Herron and Theodos 2004;Lebo, McGlynn, and Koger 2007;Lindst€ adt and Vander Wielen 2014;Mooney 2012Mooney , 2013. As a result, leaders may not have to actually twist arms; legislators may simply act in anticipation of leaders' power (Cameron 2000;Fox and Rothenberg 2011).…”

Agenda Control and Electoral Success in the US House

“…Our first set of alternative measures weights the roll-call votes according to their position in the electoral calendar following research by Lindstädt and Vander Wielen (2011, 2014) and several others. As there is no ‘natural’ or ‘built-in’ weighting scheme for factoring in proximity to elections, we calculate several variations and replicate our models with them.…”

“…These weighting schemes also produce null results. We also use Lindstädt and Vander Wielen’s (2014) findings on individual members’ willingness to take a party-line vote as a guide, and cut off the agenda at the point when this willingness begins to drop off steeply in anticipation of an election, about 180 days prior. The intuition is that, because this is when individual members are most conscientious about the appearance of their behavior, this is also the period in which voters are most attune to congressional outcomes.…”