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INCOME distribution, PARTISANSHIP, and UNITED States legislators

Over the past twenty years, there has been much discussion about two of the most important recent trends in American politics: the increase in income inequality in the United States and the increase in ideological and partisan polarization, particularly in the U.S. House. These two national-level trends are commonly thought to be positively related. But, there are few tested theoretical connections between them, and it is potentially problematic to infer individual-level behavior from these aggregate-level trends. In fact, an examination of the literature reveals, at least, three different theoretical outcomes for district-level income inequality on voter and congressional ideological positions. I explore these district-level theoretical and empirical possibilities as well as test them over decades with three different measures of income inequality. I argue and demonstrate that higher district levels of income inequality are related to higher levels of ideological liberalism in the U.S. House. This stands in contrast to the national-level trends, but it tracks closely to traditional understandings of congressional behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BUDGET reconciliation, RECONCILIATION, and CHICKENS

Since its early uses in the early 1980s, the budget reconciliation process has played an important role in how the U.S. Congress legislates. Because the procedures protect certain legislation from a filibuster in the Senate, the reconciliation rules both shape, and are shaped by, the upper chamber in significant ways. After providing a brief overview of the process, I discuss first how partisanship in the Senate has affected the use of the reconciliation procedures. Next, I describe two sets of consequences of the contemporary reconciliation process, on negotiation and on policy design. I conclude with some observations about the relationship of reconciliation to the prospects for broader procedural change in the Senate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GAY rights, EQUALITY, POLARIZATION (Social sciences), DEMOCRATS' attitudes, REPUBLICANS, and LGBTQ+ people

The U.S. Supreme Court's recent application of employment protections to gays and lesbians in Bostock v. Clayton County highlights the striking absence of policy produced by the U.S. Congress despite two decades of increased public support for gay rights. With the notable exceptions of allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military, and passing hate crimes legislation, every other federal policy advancing gay rights over the last three decades has been the product of a Supreme Court ruling or Executive Order. To better understand the reasons for this inaction, we examine the changing preferences of members of Congress on LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) issues. Examining scores from the Human Rights Campaign from 1989 to 2019, we find a striking polarization by the parties on LGBTQ issues, as Democrats have become much more supportive and Republicans even more opposed to gay rights. This change has been driven not by gerrymandering, mass opinion polarization, or elite backlash, but among Republicans by a mix of both conversion and replacement, and among Democrats primarily of replacement of more moderate members. The result is a striking lack of collective representation that leaves members of the LGBTQ community at risk to the whims of presidents and jurists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

POLARIZATION (Social sciences), POLICY sciences, RUNOFF elections, ELECTIONS, MAJORITIES, PARTISANSHIP, and PRESIDENTIAL candidates

The dramatic Democratic victories in the 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate runoffs handed Democrats their first majority since 2015 and, with this, unified Democratic control of Washington for the first time since 2011. While Democratic Leaders and President Joe Biden crafted their agenda, any hope of policy passage rested on complete unity in a 50–50 Senate and a narrow majority in the U.S. House. Against this backdrop, the 117th Senate is the most polarized since direct-election began in 1914 and, by popular accounts, the least deliberative in a generation. In this article, we examine the implications of partisan polarization for policymaking in the U.S. Senate throughout the direct-election era. First, we show that greater polarization coincides with more partisan Senate election outcomes, congruent with recent trends in the House. Today, over 90% of Senators represent states carried by their party's presidential nominee. Secondly, we show that polarization coincides with higher levels of observable obstruction, conflict, partisan unity, and narrower majorities. Lastly, we show that this polarization coincides with lower levels of deliberation in the form of consideration of floor amendments and committee meetings. Taken together, we paint a picture of a polarized Senate that is more partisan, more obstructionist, and less deliberative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

VOTER turnout, PARTISANSHIP, ELECTIONS, and GERRYMANDERING

Objective: Partisan bias occurs when votes are distributed across districts in such a way that even if the vote between two parties were equal, one party would win more seats than the other. Gerrymandering is a well‐established cause of partisan bias, but it is not the only one. In this article, we ask whether the decline of voter turnout can also influence partisan bias. Methods: We modified the Gelman–King partisan symmetry measure to make it sensitive to turnout differences across U.S. House elections from 1972 to 2018. Results: We found that turnout variation has caused partisan bias in U.S. House elections in the Democratic Party's favor since at least 1972, though turnout bias has gotten weaker in recent elections. Conclusion: While turnout bias can buffer the impact of turnout reductions, it has the potential to dramatically increase the number of seats a party loses when its supporters fail to vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PUBLIC officers, ACTIONS & defenses (Law), PROBLEM solving, and MENTAL representation

This article examines the relationship between demand for expert information from members of the US Congress and increased issue salience in the public. As problems become salient, policymakers should seek out expert information to define problems and identify effective policy solutions to address those problems. Previous work on elite mass public representation and government problem solving has relied on public actions by elected officials to evaluate this relationship. We rely instead on new data on the policy content of privately requested reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) from 1997 to 2017. We find strong evidence that members consult experts when issues become salient, even when controlling for legislative agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BUREAUCRACY, POLICY sciences, SEPARATION of powers, GOVERNMENT policy, GOVERNMENT agencies, and POLARIZATION (Social sciences)

Increasing ideological polarization and dysfunction in Congress raise questions about whether and how Congress remains capable of constraining the activities of other actors in the separation of powers system. In this article, I argue Congress uses nonstatutory policymaking tools to overcome the burdens of legislative gridlock in an increasingly polarized time to constrain executive branch actors. I leverage a new data set of committee reports issued by the House and Senate appropriations committees from fiscal years 1923 through 2019 to empirically explore these dynamics and evaluate my argument. Traditionally, these reports are a primary vehicle through which Congress directs agency policymaking in the appropriations process. Committees increasingly turn to them when passing legislation is most difficult and interbranch agency problems are most pronounced. In this way, nonstatutory mechanisms may help maintain the balance of power across branches, even when Congress faces gridlock‐induced incapacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AGENDA setting theory (Communication) and LEGISLATIVE voting

The study of agenda power has largely been the study of negative agenda power. But standard measures of negative agenda power are insufficient to measure the majority's agenda choices: they only consider a small proportion of bills, only detail how often negative agenda power fails (rather than succeeds), and cannot help us understand positive agenda power. To understand the incentives and strategies of agenda decision-making, then, we must know about members' preferences on all bills. I develop an approach to estimate members' preferences on all bills, by generating quantitative characterizations of the policy content in each bill. I use the resulting estimates to examine both positive and negative agenda power using all bills and to directly compare levels of agenda power between chambers of the US Congress. While I find similarly strong negative agenda control in both chambers, I find substantially stronger positive agenda control in the House than the Senate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ECONOMIC sanctions, PRESIDENTS, INTERNATIONAL relations, and PARTIES

This article explores whether party polarisation in the American Congress affects the length of legislated sanctions. While Congress can enact sanctions, it usually authorises the president to waive, suspend or terminate them. However, Congress can prevent the president from ending a sanction if both parties can cooperate to block the presidential proposal or pass a sanction bill challenging the presidential preference. Borrowing from moderate polarisation argument that both parties can cooperate only when they are moderately polarised, I argue that the probability of sanction termination declines if Congress is moderately polarised but increases when Congress is either least or extremely polarised. This is because only under moderately polarised Congress can both parties cooperate to stop the sanction termination. I test this argument using TIES data (1945–2005) and find support for this expectation. This research contributes to our knowledge on the role of congressional dynamics in shaping American foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]