Winning Coalition Formation in the U.S. Senate: The Effects of Legislative Decision Rules and Agenda Change

Madonna, Anthony J.

doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2010.00491.x

Cited by 21 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Senate Rule 11 in 1820 specified, When a question is under debate, no motion shall be received but to adjourn, to lie on the table, to postpone indefinitely, to postpone to a day certain, to commit, or to amend; which several motions shall have precedence in the order they stand arranged, and the motion for adjournment shall always be in order, and be decided without debate. ( (Lynch & Madonna, 2013;Madonna, 2011), we remain confident that the universe of all tabling motions is not much greater than the number that appeared with a recorded vote. This is due to a combination of factors.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Regulating the Floor

Carson

Madonna

Owens

2015

American Politics Research

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The motion to table plays a prominent role in many scholarly accounts of policymaking in the Senate. Scholars have argued that it is used with several other motions to allow majority party leaders to bias policy outcomes on the chamber floor. Others maintain it provides bill managers with a means of more efficiently managing the floor. We examine how the motion was utilized both prior to and during the development of Senate floor leadership. Our evidence suggests that in the absence of such leaders, majority party members used the motion to defend the floor from both opposing and fellow party members.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Regulating the Floor

Carson

Madonna

Owens

2015

American Politics Research

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“…Multiple points of disconnect can occur as one moves from theorising (and hypothesis generation) to testing; that is, in constructing an empirical research design, a number of important decisions have to be made about data, the construction of measures and model specification 41 . To focus only on one of these decisions here, as Howell et al (2000), Madonna (2011), Jenkins and Monroe (2016) and others have shown, how variables are constructed – whether it be the dependent variable or the key independent variable(s) – can have a significant impact on the results recovered, and whether expectations are met. The empirical literature on Pivotal Politics, we believe, should also serve as a cautionary tale in this regard.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pivotal Politics and the ideological content of Landmark Laws

Gray¹,

Jenkins²

2017

J. Pub. Pol.

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The Pivotal Politics model (Krehbiel) has significantly influenced the study of American politics, but its core empirical prediction – that the size of the gridlock interval is negatively related to legislative productivity – has not found strong empirical support. We argue that previous research featured a disconnect between the exclusively ideological theory and tests that relied on outcome variables that were not purely ideological. We remedy this by dividing landmark laws (Mayhew) into two counts – those that invoke ideological preferences and those that do not – and uncover results consistent with Pivotal Politics’ core prediction: the size of the gridlock interval is negatively related to the production of ideological legislation. We also find that the size of the gridlock zone is positively related to the production of nonideological legislation. These results hold up in the face of various sensitivity analyses and robustness checks. We further show that Pivotal Politics explains variation in ideological legislation better than alternative theories based on partisan agenda control.

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“…To assess the behaviors of the senators we chose to use their roll-call votes [36], a popular choice for determining similarities, differences, and coalitions between political members [14,16,17,20]. We initially investigated the structure of the current Senate in the 116th Congress.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Split Senate

Chari

Pachter

2021

Preprint

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The theory of split systems provides a mathematical formalism for understanding and visualizing collections of partitions of sets into two parts. In particular, split networks, which generalize phylogenetic trees, are widely used in evolutionary biology. Here we show that these tools can be used to analyze and visualize voting patterns. As an example, we consider United States Senate votes, and we show that the Neighbor-Net algorithm, coupled to SplitsTree visualization, provides an effective exploratory data analysis framework for elucidating voting patterns among senators. We also introduce a statistical approach to identify voting patterns associated with specific groups of senators, and use it to study shifts in inter- and intra- party structures over time. The analyses we describe should be broadly applicable to visualizing and studying coalitions in any voting organization.

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Winning Coalition Formation in the U.S. Senate: The Effects of Legislative Decision Rules and Agenda Change

Cited by 21 publications

References 29 publications

Regulating the Floor

Regulating the Floor

Pivotal Politics and the ideological content of Landmark Laws

The Split Senate

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