Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress, Volume 1: New Perspectives on the History of Congress (Social Science History) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804745714 ISBN 13: 9780804745710

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2002

Synopsis

In recent decades, political scientists have produced an enormous body of scholarship dealing with the U.S. Congress, and in particular congressional organization. However, most of this research has focused on Congress in the twentieth century―especially the post-New Deal era―and the long history of Congress has been largely neglected. The contributors to this book demonstrate that this inattention to congressional history has denied us many rich opportunities to more fully understand the evolution and functioning of the modern Congress.

In striking contrast to the modern era, which is marked by only modest partisan realignment and institutional change, the period preceding the New Deal was a time of rapid and substantial change in Congress. During the nation’s first 150 years, parties emerged, developed, and realigned; the standing rules of the House and Senate expanded and underwent profound changes; the workload of Congress increased dramatically; and both houses grew considerably in size.

Studying history is valuable in large part because it allows scholars to observe greater variation in many of the parameters of their theories, and to test their core assumptions. A historical approach pushes scholars to recognize and confront the limits of their theories, resulting in theories that have increased validity and broader applicability. Thus, incorporating history into political science gives us a more dynamic view of Congress than the relatively static picture that emerges from a strict focus on recent periods.

Each contributor engages one of three general questions that have animated the literature on congressional politics in recent years: What is the role of party organizations in policy making? In what ways have congressional process and procedure changed over the years? How does congressional process and procedure affect congressional politics and policy?

About this title

About the Author

David W. Brady is Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Among his books are Continuity and Change in House Elections (with John F. Cogan and Morris P. Fiorina, Stanford, 2000) and Critical Elections and Congressional Policy Making (Stanford, 1988). Mathew D. McCubbins is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His work on Congress includes Legislative Leviathan (with Gary W. Cox).

From the Back Cover

In recent decades, political scientists have produced an enormous body of scholarship dealing with the U.S. Congress, and in particular congressional organization. However, most of this research has focused on Congress in the twentieth century--especially the post-New Deal era--and the long history of Congress has been largely neglected. The contributors to this book demonstrate that this inattention to congressional history has denied us many rich opportunities to more fully understand the evolution and functioning of the modern Congress.
In striking contrast to the modern era, which is marked by only modest partisan realignment and institutional change, the period preceding the New Deal was a time of rapid and substantial change in Congress. During the nation's first 150 years, parties emerged, developed, and realigned; the standing rules of the House and Senate expanded and underwent profound changes; the workload of Congress increased dramatically; and both houses grew considerably in size.
Studying history is valuable in large part because it allows scholars to observe greater variation in many of the parameters of their theories, and to test their core assumptions. A historical approach pushes scholars to recognize and confront the limits of their theories, resulting in theories that have increased validity and broader applicability. Thus, incorporating history into political science gives us a more dynamic view of Congress than the relatively static picture that emerges from a strict focus on recent periods.
Each contributor engages one of three general questions that have animated the literature on congressional politics in recent years: What is the role of party organizations in policy making? In what ways have congressional process and procedure changed over the years? How does congressional process and procedure affect congressional politics and policy?

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PARTY, PROCESS, AND POLITICAL CHANGE IN CONGRESS

New Perspectives on the History of Congress

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2002 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4571-0

Contents

Contributors...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................ixTables.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................xvFigures....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................xixAcknowledgments............................................................................................................................................................................................................................xxii1. Party, Process, and Political Change: New Perspectives on the History of Congress DAVID W. BRADY AND MATHEW D. MCCUBBINS...............................................................................................................1PART I: PARTIES, COMMITTEES, AND POLITICAL CHANGE IN CONGRESS2. The Historical Variability in Conditional Party Government, 1877-1994 JOHN H. ALDRICH, MARK M. BERGER, AND DAVID W. ROHDE..............................................................................................................173. Do Parties Matter? BARBARA SINCLAIR....................................................................................................................................................................................................364. Party and Preference in Congressional Decision Making: Roll Call Voting in the House of Representatives, 1889-1999 JOSEPH COOPER AND GARRY YOUNG.......................................................................................645. Agenda Power in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1877-1986 GARY W. COX AND MATHEW D. MCCUBBINS.......................................................................................................................................1076. Agenda Power in the U.S. Senate, 1877-1986 ANDREA C. CAMPBELL, GARY W. COX, AND MATHEW D. MCCUBBINS....................................................................................................................................1467. Party Loyalty and Committee Leadership in the House, 1921-40 BRIAN R. SALA.............................................................................................................................................................166PART II: THE EVOLUTION AND CHOICE OF CONGRESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS8. Order from Chaos: The Transformation of the Committee System in the House, 1816-22 JEFFERY A. JENKINS AND CHARLES H. STEWART III.......................................................................................................1959. Leadership and Institutional Change in the Nineteenth-Century House RANDALL STRAHAN....................................................................................................................................................23710. Institutional Evolution and the Rise of the Tuesday-Thursday Club in the House of Representatives TIMOTHY P. NOKKEN AND BRIAN R. SALA.................................................................................................27011. Policy Leadership and the Development of the Modern Senate GERALD GAMM AND STEVEN S. SMITH............................................................................................................................................287PART III: POLICY CHOICE AND CONGRESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS12. Why Congress? What the Failure of the Confederation Congress and the Survival of the Federal Congress Tell Us About the New Institutionalism JOHN H. ALDRICH, CALVIN C. JILLSON, AND RICK K. WILSON...................................31513. Agenda Manipulation, Strategic Voting, and Legislative Details in the Compromise of 1850 SEAN M. THERIAULT AND BARRY R. WEINGAST......................................................................................................34314. Congress and the Territorial Expansion of the United States NOLAN MCCARTY, KEITH T. POOLE, AND HOWARD ROSENTHAL.......................................................................................................................39215. Representation of the Antebellum South in the House of Representatives: Measuring the Impact of the Three-Fifths Clause BRIAN D. HUMES, ELAINE K. SWIFT, RICHARD M. VALELLY, KENNETH FINEGOLD, AND EVELYN C. FINK.....................452Afterword: History as a Laboratory DAVID W. BRADY AND MATHEW D. MCCUBBINS.................................................................................................................................................................471Notes......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................473Works Cited................................................................................................................................................................................................................................501Name Index.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................525Subject Index..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................533

Chapter One

Party, Process, and Political Change: New Perspectives on the History of Congress

DAVID W. BRADY AND MATHEW D. MCCUBBINS

In recent decades, political scientists have produced an enormous body of scholarship dealing with the U.S. Congress and particularly with congressional organization. This wealth of scholarly work is quite diverse, spanning a wide range of theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and research questions. Yet to a great extent, contributions to this field share a common characteristic: they focus primarily on Congress in the twentieth century, often dealing only with the post-New Deal era. This modern emphasis is understandable-it is both sensible and unsurprising that our abilities and our interests are most keenly focused on our own times or the recent past. Our emphasis on only modern times, however, reduces our ken. While our theories of legislative institutions have substantial predictive power in the modern House and Senate, they say little about institutional or behavioral change. Our models tend to be static models of an unchanging time.

Many of the competing theories of legislative behavior and organization that are bandied about in the contemporary literature are found to be "observationally equivalent" over the range of behaviors that we observe in contemporary American politics. We find it difficult to test our static understandings with the data we have available, so we find it equally difficult to choose among the theories that compete for attention in our journal pages. But this need not be so. We can put these theories to the test and distinguish between those that are truly general and those that are time-bound. It is to this purpose that the contributors to this volume put their efforts.

Incorporating the history of the U.S. Congress into the tests of our theories allows the authors here to observe greater variation in their independent variables, thereby providing additional tests for their theories. Many features of Congress and American politics have not varied much in the postwar era but varied greatly in the past. To the extent that congressional theories involve parameters that do not vary in recent times but do vary in the past, a historical approach gives us opportunities for testing the importance and roles of such parameters-opportunities that are missed without looking at history.

A similar advantage of historical studies is that they can capture variation of a subtly different kind: many features of modern politics are constant across recent decades and so are not (explicitly) treated as variables; rather, they are modeled as exogenous and permanent institutional features of congressional politics. For example, we often take for granted the standing committee system, the existence of party leadership, or the two-party system. Yet these constant features of recent decades are not constant as one goes back through history; there have been times in the past when each of these "givens" was flatly false. In striking contrast to the modern era, which is marked by only modest partisan realignment and institutional change, the period preceding the New Deal was a time of tremendous partisan and institutional change. During the nation's first 150 years, parties emerged, developed, realigned, and disappeared; standing committees emerged and evolved; the standing rules of the House and Senate expanded and underwent many changes; Congress's workload increased dramatically; and both houses grew sharply in size. In short, the early House and Senate were so different from the contemporary House and Senate that they were in many ways more akin to the legislature of a foreign country than to the modern U.S. Congress. In a sense, then, this variation provides tests not only of explicitly modeled variables but also of many assumptions that go into our theories.

This suggests the second broad reason that testing our theories in the laboratory of American history is desirable: it holds great promise as an avenue toward theoretical advances. A historical approach pushes us to recognize and confront the limits of our theories and ideally to provide better theories as a result. By broadening our perspective and being forced to think more carefully about our assumptions, we stand to learn a great deal. Moreover, trying to understand the limits of our assumptions promises to raise interesting new research questions. In sum, incorporating history gives us a more dynamic view of Congress and its behavior than the relatively static picture that emerges from a strict focus on the recent past.

The chapters in this volume synthesize contemporary congressional organization scholarship and congressional history in a wide variety of ways. Each chapter addresses one of three general questions that have animated the literature on congressional politics in recent years: What is the role of party organizations in policymaking? In what ways have congressional processes and procedures changed? And how do congressional processes and procedures affect congressional politics and policy? Let us discuss each of these questions briefly.

The Role of Parties

Originally, of course, there were no political parties in the United States. The framers of the Constitution considered political parties an unwanted by-product of the governmental process, the deleterious effects of which they sought to control. Nonetheless, legislative factions amounting to proto-parties sprang up in the first Congress, and political parties have shaped American politics ever since. Throughout the nineteenth century, the American party system evolved steadily, from the first party system-Federalist versus Republican-Democrat-of the first three decades of the Republic to the Jacksonian Democrat-versus-Whig party system of the later antebellum period to the Democrat-versus-Republican alignment that emerged on the eve of the Civil War and has persisted ever since.

A great deal of research addresses the role of party organizations in policymaking. Essentially, most of it attempts to determine if political parties have an independent effect on congressional behavior and policy. In other words, does the majority party amount to more than just a set of likeminded legislators who present themselves to the electorate using the same label? Or does the concept of party add to our theoretical or empirical understandings of Congress? And in what ways, if any, do parties make Congress different from what it would be if there were no parties?

Typically, debate centers on two ways in which parties might alter the political landscape. First, parties may influence how their members vote in Congress. Voting divisions in Congress are rarely as neat and uniform as they are in Britain or Canada, where deviation from party-line voting rarely occurs (which explains the dearth of legislative voting studies on those countries). The fact that there is no strict party-line voting in the U.S. Congress allows scholars to study roll call votes to determine the level of party effect. Second, parties may exert influence by structuring the legislative process (for example, by controlling committees and the bills they propose, by implementing special rules, by structuring the standing rules, or by controlling the legislative agenda) in ways that bias congressional decisions in particular ways.

Interestingly, two major modern theories of congressional organization, the distributive and the informational, assume that parties are irrelevant to explanations of congressional organization. We will discuss these theories in greater detail shortly; for now, we focus on a third major theory, the partisan, which puts parties at the center of congressional organization. There are two overlapping yet distinctive versions of the partisan model, each of which figures prominently in recent debates. The first is the conditional party government (CPG) model (Cooper and Brady 1981; Rohde 1991; Aldrich and Rohde 1998, 2000a); the second is the partisan cartel model (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994a; see also Cox 1987; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991).

According to the CPG model, the House alternates between periods of strong parties and strong party government and periods of weak parties and committee government. The key variable that determines which type of government obtains is the extent to which the two parties are internally cohesive and in conflict with each other. When conditions favor party government (i.e., when both parties are highly cohesive internally and the parties have very different goals), committees still have important powers, but they are not autonomous fiefdoms. Committee chairs can be removed, legislation can be referred to multiple committees, and the majority leadership has significant say over who is awarded the most prized committee slots. Conversely, when there is significant dissonance within parties, the House will be organized more along committee government lines-that is, party leadership will be weak relative to committee leadership.

By contrast, the cartel model suggests that parties are always the principal organizing force in the House. Cox and McCubbins (1993, 1994a) argue that incumbents' probability of reelection is in part a function of their party's reputation among voters and that maintaining that reputation requires collective action by members of the party caucus. So party members delegate to party leaders the authority to enforce cooperation and maintain the party's "brand name." Toward this end, the majority party cartelizes the legislative process in the House-it uses its ability to make the rules to organize the House such that the structure and process favor the party's interests. It is through this capture of the rulemaking power, and in particular its control over the order of business and the legislative agenda, that the majority party influences policy outputs.

Regardless of their approach, most scholars of Congress see party as an important explanatory variable. This view of the centrality of parties does not go unchallenged, however. In a series of works, Krehbiel (1991, 1993, 1998) argues that legislators' preferences are the fundamental explanatory variable in determining congressional behavior and decisions. He argues that party is correlated with preferences and that on the basis of that correlation, we often attribute to party an effect that is more simply explained by preferences alone. He proposes a test of party strength in which, to prove that party has an independent effect, members would have to vote with their party's median voter, or adopt their leaders' position, rather than their own preferred position. Unless such a test can be met, the problem of observational equivalence (i.e., that party and preferences are highly correlated) cannot be solved; in other words, we will be unable to reject the hypothesis that party effects are in reality only preference effects. A number of chapters in this book address this problem.

The Evolution of Congressional Processes and Procedures

The structure and institutions of congressional politics have evolved dramatically over the course of U.S. history, especially in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the Republic, there were no party organizations, no standing committees, and only minimal standing rules to govern procedures in the two houses of Congress. In the House, there was a Speaker, but initially this was an unimportant and largely ceremonial position. Select agents of the president, whether cabinet members or members of the House, served as informal leaders of the majority party (Galloway 1976) until Henry Clay transformed the Speakership into the leadership position of the majority party following the War of 1812. Other House majority party leadership positions, such as majority leader and whip, did not emerge until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, respectively. In the Senate, as discussed in Chapter 11 of this book, there was no formal or informal leadership position until after the Civil War, and formal positions did not emerge until very late in the nineteenth century. Control over the order of business also evolved in both the House and the Senate, with major changes occurring at the turn of the twentieth century.

In its first two decades, the House relied almost exclusively on ad hoc select committees to draft bills-and even then, most work on bills was done on the floor, with specific instructions given to committees about how the floor wanted certain technical details ironed out. Not until the time of Henry Clay, twenty-five years into the Republic, did the system of permanent standing committees begin to emerge. In the Senate, creation of a standing committee system occurred virtually overnight in 1816 (Cooper 1970).

The most obvious question about changes in the processes and procedures of lawmaking is, What drives these changes? Presumably, changes represent attempts by members to achieve their goals ... but how do institutions help achieve goals? And what goals do they help achieve? Throughout the literature, congressional institutions are seen as solutions to social choice and collective action problems that threaten legislators' productivity and hence their electoral fortunes. Indeed, one of the key distinctions among the various theories of congressional organization is that they posit differing problems for which changes in congressional organization are seen as a solution.

The distributive perspective (Shepsle and Weingast 1987a; Weingast and Marshall 1988) sees the primary collective action problem as creating a stable policy distribution. From this viewpoint, the committee system is a solution to problems of collective action and collective choice instability described by early chaos theories. In the informational model (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1989; Krehbiel 1991, 1998), the collective action problem that drives organization is the production and dissemination of information about policy. Because acquiring policy expertise is costly but expertise is beneficial to all members, legislators face a collective action problem in trying to gain information about policy. The legislature therefore organizes the committee system in a manner that gives committees incentives to acquire expertise and pass it along to the legislature as a whole. The aforementioned partisan models are not inherently contradictory to the distributional and informational models on the topic of collective action problems; to some extent, they merely posit that it is members of the majority party, rather than the House as a whole, whose collective action problems are solved by congressional organization. Nonetheless, the partisan models emphasize particular goals of the majority. Aldrich (1995) argues that the majority has faced a series of collective action problems-beginning with social choice cycling problems in early Congresses, continuing with the need to win a majority in the electoral college in the later antebellum period, and later progressing to the need for extensive extralegislative organizations in order to win legislative majorities. As mentioned previously, Cox and McCubbins (1993) emphasize the problem of maintaining the party's electoral reputation, as well as coordinating the actions of copartisans, as the central goal of parties.

Another way in which the theories differ is in their implications about the identity of the key actor or actors involved in institutional change. The distributive theory suggests that institutional change should serve the interests of committees, the informational theory treats the member of the legislature with the median ideal point as the key actor, and the partisan model makes the majority party the driving force behind change.

A third way in which the theories differ is in the economic analogies that they employ. Each relies on an analogy in which congressional organization is an equilibrium resulting from some combination of supply and demand considerations faced by legislators (Shepsle and Weingast 1995). However, the different theories emphasize different aspects of this analogy. The distributive and conditional party government theories rely heavily on the "demand" aspect. So in the distributive model, the committee system results from legislators' desire to give constituents what they want-especially particularistic benefits. Similarly, under the CPG theory, the array of legislator preferences determines the strength or weakness of party government. In contrast, the informational and cartel theories emphasize supply as well as demand. In the former, committees facilitate production by providing legislators with better information about how to bring supply in line with demand; in the latter, the majority party acts as a cartel (or firm), internalizing many transactions that would otherwise inhibit or reduce production.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804745714
• ISBN 13: 9780804745710
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576
• Editor: Brady David W., McCubbins Mathew D.