Issues and Institutions: “Winnowing” in the U.S. Congress

Abstract

Winnowing" is the pre-floor process by which Congress determines the small percentage of bills that will receive committee attention. The vast majority of proposals languish in this vital agenda-setting stage, yet our understanding of winnowing is nascent. Why do some bills move forward while most fail? I examine that question here by developing and testing a theoretical framework of winnowing grounded in bounded rationality, which includes institutional and sponsor cues and also incorporates the unique issue milieu. A heteroskedastic probit model is utilized to analyze the winnowing fate of all bills introduced across five issue areas in the House and Senate from 1991 to 1998. The findings counter much received wisdom and suggest that the process is indeed cue based. The majority party helps structure this critical process in both chambers, though party effects appear stronger in the House. Contrary to recent work on the rise of Senate individualism, the seniority of the sponsor has significant effects in both the Senate and House, but again exhibits a stronger effect in the House. Surprisingly, presidential proposals are no more likely to survive than typical bills. The findings further suggest that the entrepreneurial efforts of bill sponsors breathe life into this process.

Political geography and stock returns: The value and risk implications of proximity to political power

“…nnn And n indicate significance at the 1% and 10% level, respectively. legislation that eventually may become law is greater for majority party politicians (Anderson, Box-Steffensmeier, and Sinclair-Chapman, 2003;Krutz, 2005), our evidence implies that policy uncertainty that emanates from legislative activity is greater in the areas of the political map that are more closely aligned with the government. Finally, in Panels C and D we provide the results of asset pricing tests of the interplay of PAI and legislative activity.…”

“…2 We posit that uncertainty regarding the impact of future policies on firms rises with the difficulty in assessing the set of preferred policies and with the likelihood that new policies can be targeted toward industries and geographic areas where firms operate. Furthermore, since both the range of possible future policies (Fowler, 2006;Füss and Bechtel, 2008) and the capacity of sponsoring, drafting, and passing new legislation (Anderson, Box-Steffensmeier, and Sinclair-Chapman, 2003;Krutz, 2005) are functions of partisanship, policy risk at the state level will vary with the degree of the state's political alignment with the President's party. 3 Fowler (2006) shows that divided government mitigates policy risk by reducing the uncertainty associated with large policy changes because divided government forces the parties to negotiate and limits the range of policy changes that would be possible under unified government when one party has full control.…”

“…Thus, legislative interference in markets can create uncertainty that causes underinvestment, which in turn can generate the perception of higher risk among investors. In sum, since the capacity to draft and introduce legislation that eventually may become law is greater for majority party politicians (Anderson, Box-Steffensmeier, and Sinclair-Chapman, 2003;Krutz, 2005), we hypothesize that policy uncertainty that emanates from legislative activity is greater in the areas of the political map that are more closely aligned with the government. Besides policy risk implications, political geography also entails connectedness implications.…”

Bill Sponsorship in Congress: The Moderating Effect of Agenda Positions on Legislative Proposals

“…Related research has also examined how much effort or participation is devoted to legislative entrepreneurship (Bratton and Haynie 1999;Matthews 1960;Schiller 1995;Sinclair 1989;Walker 1977;Wawro 2000) but not how that effort is spent on shaping proposals. Similarly, previous research studies how bill content or sponsor characteristics affect legislative success (Ainsworth and Hanson 1996;Anderson, Box-Steffensmeier, and Sinclair-Chapman 2003;Frantzich 1979;Krutz 2005; Moore and Thomas 1990) but does not take the next step to examine how bill content was chosen in the first place.…”

Subjective Well-Being, Income and Relative Concerns in the UK

“…Such a method should avert potential heteroskedasticity to bias our results. Heteroskedastic models like this one have been frequently used to explore heterogenous behaviors (Alvarez and Brehm, 1997, 1998Busch and Reinhardt, 1999;Gabel, 1998;Lee, 2002;Krutz, 2005). So far, heteroskedastic probit and heteroskedastic ordered probit models are the most used tools in investigating discrete heterogenous choices.…”