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LEGISLATIVE amendments, DECISION making, and POLITICAL planning

The amendment process plays a prominent role in decision-making in the U.S. Senate. We examine factors that affect the chambers disposition of amendments, in order to understand which actors most successfully use amendments to affect policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ORGANIZATIONAL structure, COMMITTEES, and LEGISLATIVE bills

According to all theories of congressional organization, House committees exercise substantial discretion over bills within their jurisdictions. Studies of committees early in the House?s history, however, portray a diametrically opposite role for committees: they were agents of the floor, expected to draw up bills implementing prior floor decisions and to report back to the House any bill referred to them. Somewhat surprisingly, there is little work connecting these very different pictures to one another, or identifying the timing of the change. I address this puzzle by examining committee deference in the antebellum period. I find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that deference to committees emerged almost as soon as the standing committee system itself. I also examine the extent to which decisions on the floor conflicted with the wishes of majority and minority party committee contingents; I find that majority party contingents lost infrequently on the floor, while minority party contingents fared worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UNITED States political parties and UNITED States -- Politics & government -- 2001-2009

On May 24, 2001 United States Senator James Jeffords announced that he was switching from Republican to independent and would vote with Democrats on organizational matters, effectively giving majority party control of the Senate to the Democrats. When party control switched, there was no change in Senate membership or preferences; rather, the only thing that changed was majority party status. We take advantage of this controlled environment to test competing hypotheses derived from party- and preference-based theories of legislative organization (specifically, the cartel and pivot models). To conduct our test, we use ?event study? methodology to gauge the effect of the Jeffords switch on the asset values of Republican and Democratic ?constituent firms.? We show that Republican firms? stock prices fell upon hearing the news of the switch, while Democratic firms? stock prices rose. Our results thus provide evidence that majority party status in Congress confers benefits on party constituents; our results also cast doubt on non-partisan theories of congressional organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

POLITICAL parties, PARTY committees, LEGISLATIVE bodies, PARLIAMENTARY practice, and IDEOLOGY

In this paper, we examine the extent to which the majority party contingents on key committees were or were not representative of the party floor caucus in the antebellum House. We compare the majority party's proportion of seats on committees and on the floor. Using DW-NOMINATE scores, we also address whether party committee contingents were ideologically representative of party floor caucuses. We do so in two ways. First, we examine whether party committee means and medians differed significantly from party floor means and medians; second, we examine whether the spread of party committee preferences differed significantly from the spread of party floor preferences. We consistently find that the majority party over-represented itself on key committees, and find little evidence that majority party committee contingents' ideology differed significantly from majority party floor ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PLURALITY voting, DECISION making in political science, POLITICAL parties, and MAJORITY groups

Conventional wisdom holds that majority party influence over Senate decisions is difficult or impossible. In previous work (Den Hartog and Monroe 2007) we challenged this view, and developed a new theory of Senate agenda setting which focuses on the asymmetric-costs of legislative decision making. In this paper, we test that theory using data on Senate policy movement and outcomes. The results support the theory, and call into question partyless theories of Senate decision making. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COMMITTEES, PARTISANSHIP, WORKS councils, and POLITICAL action committees

Some committees in the House are privileged meaning that they can report directly to the floor. This paper explores whether the majority stacked privileged committees with loyal partisans in order to exercise negative agenda control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]