The Republican Revolution and the House Appropriations Committee

Abstract

This study applies the theory of "conditional party government" to the interaction between the Republican party and the Appropriations Committee in the 104th House, seen in the context of developments since the 96th Congress. As expected by the theory, we find that the relatively homogenous preferences of the Republican contingent in the House led them to adopt new institutional arrangements to enhance the powers of their leaders, which in turn were used to advance the party's policy goals. Given that the leadership decided to use Appropriations as one of the vehicles of major policy change, they and the Conference sought to monitor the committee's actions, and to influence it to behave as they wanted. The leaders used their enhanced powers over incentives and with regard to the agenda to advance the party cause. Both leaders and the Conference sought to block policy shifts away from what they wanted, but facilitated changes in the desired direction. Finally, we expected to see evidence of the increasing applicability of the theory over time, culminating in the developments of the 104th Congress, and this expectation was borne out. This analysis is part of an ongoing effort to understand the nature of institutional politics and of policy selection in legislative institutions, particularly in the U.S. House of Representatives. The project's focus is on the relationship between party structures in the House and the committee system, over time and especially in the 104th House after the Republicans took majority control for the first time in 40 years. The subject of this analysis is the interaction between the Republican party and the Appropriations Committee in the 104th House, seen in the context of developments since the 96th Congress.

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

“…This seems to fly in the face of received wisdom about the partisan House and indicates that some caution in accepting the results may be in order. It might, however, be consistent with the centralization of power in the hands of Republican leaders (Aldrich and Rohde 2000). 37 This would have led all but a select few legislators to believe that their legislative efforts were almost certain to fail (thus eliminating the differences in positive proposal power between observed agenda positions).…”

Delaying the Buck: Timing and Strategic Advantages in Executive-Legislative Bargaining over Appropriations

“…To the extent that party and ideology are correlated, our ideological distance measures will control for some effects of partisanship on budgetary outcomes and delay. But parties are more than a collection of individuals with shared ideological interests (Aldrich and Rohde 2000). Scholars also see congressional parties as organizations that work to promote a collective brand name (Cox and McCubbins 2005).…”

The Influence of Congressional Preferences on Legislative Overrides of Supreme Court Decisions

“…Of particular interest to us, previous studies either (1) apply theoretical models that assume legislators respond to Court decisions based on their preferences over them (e.g., Gely and Spiller 1990;Segal 1997) or (2) explicitly hypothesize that ideological disagreement with Court decisions causes Congress to pass legislation overriding them (Eskridge 1991a(Eskridge , 1991bHettinger and Zorn 2005;Ignagni, Meernik, and King 1998;Staudt, Lindstadt, and O'Connor 2007). This perspective seems reasonable in light of the centrality of policy preferences in contemporary explanations of congressional decisionmaking (Aldrich and Rohde 2000;McCubbins 2005, 2007;Krehbiel 1991Krehbiel , 1998. Indeed, the congressional literature offers convincing empirical evidence that ideology plays a key role in explaining Members' votes on bills and the passage of legislation (e.g., Poole and Rosenthal 2007).…”

“…First, the chamber median model (Krehbiel 1991(Krehbiel , 1998 contends that the medians of the respective chambers determine the LP and RP actors. Second, the party gatekeeping model (Aldrich and Rohde 2000;McCubbins 2005, 2007) argues that the pivotal actors are the left-most and right-most players among the majority party medians, chamber medians, and the president. As with the party gatekeeping model, the veto filibuster model emphasizes the importance of political parties; and in contrast to the former model, it takes into recognition the possibility of a Senate filibuster and a possible override of a president's veto.…”