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We examine the composition, background, and voting behavior of Republican members of Congress from the ex-Confederate states in the 1952–1980 period—a time during which Southern GOP membership in Congress began to increase steadily. We find that this new generation of Southern Republicans were often born in the South, came from the private sector—where they previously worked in business like much of the non-Southern wing of the Republican Party—and had few meaningful prior connections to the Democratic Party. In terms of voting behavior, Southern Republicans behaved similarly to non-Southern Republicans—generally voting with their party, and more conservatively on most issues than the Southern Democrats they replaced. However, we find that Southern Republicans and Democrats voted alike in one important way: against civil rights legislation. This latter finding of racial conservatism is consistent with other recent work arguing that the Southern GOP had to become a "White party" to win elections in the former Confederacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research investigating whether natural disasters help or hurt politicians' electoral fortunes has produced conflicting results. Some find that voters punish elected officials indiscriminately in the wake of a natural disaster (i.e. 'blind retrospection'). Others find that voters instead incorporate elected officials' subsequent relief efforts in their assessment (i.e. 'attentive retrospection'). We argue that an additional consideration affects voters' response to natural disasters: the elected official's partisan affiliation. We contend that whether voters reward or punish incumbents following a disaster is influenced by whether or not the official is a co-partisan. We look for evidence of such 'partisan retrospection' by examining the effects of Hurricane Sandy on the 2012 presidential election, and find that voters' reactions to disaster damage were strongly conditioned by pre-existing partisanship, with counties that previously supported Obama reacting far more positively to disaster damage than those that had earlier opposed him. We then use existing data to investigate the relationship between disasters and presidential elections between 1972 and 2004. We find that incumbent-party candidates performed no worse in disaster-affected co-partisan counties than in non-affected co-partisan counties, but that they underperformed in disaster-affected counties safely in the opposing party column. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We examine the relationship between the Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), from the agency's inception in the mid‐1960s to the present. The NEA has seen its fortunes rise and fall over time, as congressional appropriations and scrutiny have fluctuated with ideological and partisan change in the House and Senate. Methods: We use Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and logistic regression models to examine the politics of the NEA systematically. Results: We find that while the NEA has enjoyed some bipartisan support throughout its tenure, assistance for the agency has been more likely to come from more liberal members and Democrats, respectively. We also uncover some evidence that particular states and districts benefit more of less from NEA grants. Conclusion: Overall, states and districts represented by Democrats do better in terms of both grants and grant dollars than states and districts represented by Republicans, with the most liberal Democratic House members doing especially well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most common‐space estimations rely upon members who served in both the House and Senate as "bridges" to scale the remaining members, this assumes that these "bridge members" do not change their preferences when they change chambers. Such an assumption conflicts with standard notions of representation, that is, that legislators' votes reflect (at least to some degree) the wishes of their constituents. We examine the constancy of this common‐space voting assumption by focusing on a subset of House members who move to the Senate: those who come from statewide House districts. Using these members as the bridge actors—and thus bridging by constituency explicitly—in a one‐dimensional item response theory model, we find that the standard assumption of chamber switchers in common‐space estimations is technically, but immaterially, false. While there are statistically distinguishable differences in House and Senate voting records for chamber switchers, they are not sufficiently large to meaningfully undermine bridging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a number of studies in recent years explore the particularistic tendencies of presidents – targeting various benefits to districts and states that will help their and their party's electoral prospects – little work has explored how members of Congress react to such behavior. We take some initial steps in this regard by examining how members have responded to President Donald Trump's trade initiatives. We analyze congressional newsletter mentions of tariffs or trade as a means of exploring congressional reaction. We find a positive relationship between tariff/trade mentions and partisanship, as Republican members and members from states that Trump won in 2016 are more likely to refer to tariffs/trade in their newsletters. This represents, we argue, a different kind of credit claiming. These basic empirical patterns set the stage for more systematic analysis in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a government policy regulating the timing of daylight during the summer months. While DST's existence is taken for granted in modern American life, the adoption and expansion of the policy was heavily debated, with strong opposition that persists to the present day—a full century after its inception as a World War I energy‐efficiency program. After reviewing the history of DST, we analyze the political economy of congressional vote choice on DST policy. Method: We analyze votes of members of Congress on all DST‐specific roll calls between 1918 and 1985, assessing whether members voted to expand or reduce DST. Results: We find that ideology, party, geographic location, and the portion of a constituency made up by farmers all strongly predict member support for adopting and expanding DST—and that each of these effects is durable over time. Digging deeper, we find significant evidence for local representation on DST votes, as constituency‐specific factors are more strongly associated with congressional vote choice than partisanship or general ideological preferences. Conclusion: Overall, our results provide an original empirical assessment of the factors that drove the adoption and revision of a contentious and significant government policy that endures today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conduct a preliminary analysis of the first 200 days of the Donald Trump presidency, to determine who his principal allies in the US House have been. We build our analysis around three groups of Republicans, based on caucus affiliations: members of the Republican Main Street Partnership (RMSP), the Republican Study Committee (RSC), and the House Freedom Caucus (HFC). We find that House Republicans, regardless off caucus membership, broadly support President Trump and largely shared in the his electoral success. Yet, we also uncover suggestive evidence that the HFC is maneuvering into a position of influence with President Trump. Freedom Caucus members are more closely tied to his electoral performance than members of other conservative groups, and they appear to receive more time with the President relative to a comparable group of House Republicans. While these results are interesting, they are also initial and more time is needed to assess how President Trump builds a winning coalition with Republican House members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a number of studies have examined the politics of tariff decision-making in the United States, little work has examined the subsequent political effects of tariff policy. We help fill this gap in the literature by analyzing—both theoretically and empirically—the electoral implications of tariff revision. Specifically, we investigate the veracity of the Cannon Thesis—the proposition advanced by Speaker Joe Cannon in 1910 that the majority party in the U.S. House was punished when it made major revisions to the tariff. We find that from 1877 to 1934 major tariff revisions were, on average, associated with a significant loss of votes for majority-party members—both regionally and nationally—that translated into a loss of House seats. We find support for the notion that major tariff revisions generated inordinate uncertainty among various business interests, which the opposition party could then use (by leveraging fear and market instability) to mobilize its base and gain ground in the following election. Our results provide a new explanation for the delegation of tariff policymaking to the executive branch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature on partisan agenda setting in Congress focuses on the majority's ability to exercise negative agenda control. As a result, the empirical emphasis has been on "rolls," or how often the majority of the majority party opposes legislation that nonetheless passes. Although interesting, rolls are only one source of majority party failure. The other source, largely unexplored in the literature, is when the majority of the majority party supports legislation that is subsequently defeated. These cases represent "disappointments," and are a means to determine how effective the majority party is at exercising positive agenda control. Making some basic modifications to a standard spatial model of agenda setting, we articulate why and where we might expect the majority party to fail to exercise positive agenda control effectively. We then derive hypotheses regarding (1) which members should vote "no" on roll calls that result in a disappointment and (2) why disappointments vary on a Congress-by-Congress basis across time, and test them using a dataset of final-passage votes on House bills in the post-Reconstruction era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the rise of federal military pensions in the antebellum US Congress to examine whether key aspects of the contemporary electoral connection were present in earlier historical eras. Overall, the political responses of members of Congress to pressures for military service pensions reveal that the quest for credit-claiming opportunities significantly shaped the adoption and evolution of this type of distributive legislation. Analyzing key legislative activity from 1818 to 1832, we find that members’ electoral interests gave rise to a particularistic and often inefficient system of benefits. Specifically, what began as a relatively simple program to provide for disabled Revolutionary War veterans grew into a broader entitlement-style program based on military service that legislators carefully cultivated in order to maximize their prospects for subsequent political advantage. Our analysis thus reveals that crucial features of the electoral connection were indeed present in the antebellum-era Congress, a finding that broadens our collective understanding of the early foundations of American political development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is widely believed that a “conservative coalition” of Southern Democrats and Republicans sometimes formed on floor votes in the mid-twentieth-century House to block liberal policy initiatives, a fully fleshed-out picture of what the coalition was and how it operated is lacking. In this article, we investigate whether the conservative coalition wielded negative agenda control, that is, whether it used positions of power in the House to block bills from floor consideration that would have harmed a majority of its members. We find that the likelihood that the conservative coalition was rolled increased significantly after the Rules Committee packing in 1961—especially for bills that came from standing committees chaired by nonsoutherners. These results are consistent with the notion that Rules systematically protected the conservative coalition from unfavorable floor votes and that southern committee chairs continued to offer some blocking power after the Rules packing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While a number of scholars have focused on the importance of partisan agenda control in the US House, few have examined its uneven consequences within the majority party. In this paper, we explore ‘counterfactual’ utility distributions within the majority party, by comparing policy outcomes under a party-less median voter model to policy outcomes under party-based positive and negative agenda control models. We show that the distribution of policy losses and benefits resulting from agenda control are quite similar for both the positive and negative varieties. In both cases, moderate majority-party members are made worse off by the exercise of partisan agenda control, while those to the extreme side of the majority-party median benefit disproportionately. We also consider the benefit of agenda control for the party as a whole, by looking at the way changes in majority-party homogeneity affect the summed utility across members. Interestingly, we find that when the distance between the floor and majority-party medians decreases, the overall value of positive and negative agenda control diminishes. However, we also find support for the ‘conditional party government’ notion that, as majority-party members’ preferences become more similar, they have an increased incentive to grant agenda-setting power to their leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors examine how institutional context affects political decision making in Congress by investigating party leaders’ agenda construction strategies and members’ roll-call participation across regular and lame-duck sessions in the pre-Twentieth Amendment House (1877-1933). The authors find evidence to suggest that party leaders pursued relatively more partisan agendas in lame-duck sessions and did so successfully. Next, we investigate the effects such agendas had on roll-call participation. The authors find that returning (reelected) members significantly decreased their abstention levels, while departing (defeated and retiring) members significantly increased their abstention levels. Yet the authors also find that departing members could be drawn to participate on certain types of roll-call votes even in the face of strong incentives to shirk. Party leaders rely on the generally higher levels of participation by returning members as well as the selective participation of departing members to overcome “participatory agency loss” and pass surprisingly partisan lame-duck agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

thesis regarding the ''electoral connection'' and its impact on legislative behavior has become the theoretical foundation for much of the research on the contemporary U.S. Congress. Recently, scholar To assess these claims more systematically, we consider four conditions that serve as the bus have begun to suggest that the Mayhewian electoral incentive may apply to politics in earlier congressional eras as well. To assess these claims more systematically, we consider four conditions that serve as the building blocks of the electoral connection--ambition, autonomy, responsiveness, and accountability. Through a detailed review of the literature on electoral politics in Congress, we discover that all four conditions were present in a strict sense as far back as the Progressive Era. Moreover, considerable evidence suggests that a weaker, less formalized version of the electoral connection existed even earlier in American history. We conclude by briefly discussing the implications of these findings on the rapidly growing literature examining the historical and institutional evolution of Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have examined the incidence of killer amendments in Congress, but most of these studies have been either case specific, focusing on the legislative maneuverings around a single issue or bill, or temporally limited, focusing on strategic activity in only one or two Congresses. In this article, we present the beginning of a comprehensive research agenda for the systematic study of killer amendments. Using roll-call data from the 83d through the 108th U.S. House (1953-2004), we identified those bills that (a) were successfully amended and (b) subsequently went down to defeat, a necessary condition for the existence of a killer amendment. We then examined these cases in greater detail, using both spatial analyses and case studies. Our analysis uncovered five cases, four of which are new, that appear to have the characteristics of true killer amendments, thus setting the stage for future analyses across time and legislative chambers and bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We disentangle constituent and partisan influences in Congress by taking advantage of a largely unexamined institutional setting¿lame-duck sessions. Lame-duck sessions of Congress are comprised of exiting members, who are freed from both constituency and party constraints, and returning members, who face a significantly reduced constituency constraint but a still strong party constraint. Comparing exiting and returning House members thus provides meaningful leverage in assessing the constraining influence of party. In the regularly occurring lame-duck sessions between 1877 and 1933, exiting House members exhibited greater movement away from the median party position than did returning members, consistent with expectations regarding party influence. In addition, party leaders' ability to apply pressure was significantly reduced in lame-duck sessions due to the presence of a large group of exiting members. Finally, majority-party leaders were able to exercise negative agenda control in lame-duck sessions when their party maintained control of the next Congress, but they often acted to roll their own party members (an occurrence we dub a "strategic roll") when their party lost control of the next Congress, as a way to minimize policy loss. In the post-1933 era, after the passage of the 20th Amendment, lame-duck sessions (those portions of the second session that stretch beyond the November elections) are more accurately characterized as extensions of regular sessions, with party leaders' ability to pressure members and exercise negative agenda control remaining virtually constant across sessions. Lower levels of turnover in the modern era appear to contribute to an enhanced ability of majority-party leaders to wield influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present evidence suggesting that the majority party in the U.S. Senate exercises significant negative agenda control. Furthermore, this majority party negative agenda control in the Senate is very similar, in empirical terms, to negative agenda control exercised by the majority party in the U.S. House of Representatives. This evidence comes from comparisons of majority party roll rates across legislative vehicles (S bills, confirmation votes, and conference reports) and across chambers of Congress. Majority party roll rates respond to disagreement with other political actors as if the Senate majority party does restrict agenda access. Moreover, the response of majority party roll rates to disagreement with other political actors is very similar across the two chambers. Given that explanations of majority party negative agenda control in the House are often predicated on chamber-specific factors with no clear analogues in the Senate, the results reveal a striking cross-chamber similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the politics of the "Salary Grab" of 1873, legislation that increased congressional salaries retroactively by 50 percent. A group of New England and Midwestern elites opposed the Salary Grab, along with congressional franking and patronage-based civil service appointments, as part of a reform effort to reshape "who should govern Congress." Our analyses of congressional voting confirm the existence of this nonparty elite coalition. Although these elites lost many legislative battles in the short run, their efforts kept reform on the legislative agenda throughout the late nineteenth century and ultimately set the stage for the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: One important catalyst for the onset of the Civil War was the Presidential Election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Lincoln, competing against three other candidates, won the election with the smallest percentage of the popular vote in American history. Given the circumstances, a slightly different electoral slate might have engineered his defeat. We examine this possibility by focusing on the candidacy of John C. Breckinridge, the final entrant into the race. Historians disagree over the rationale behind Breckinridge''s candidacy. Some argue that it was a desperate effort to defeat Lincoln; others suggest that it was designed to insure Lincoln''s victory. Using election counterfactuals and applying spatial voting theory, we examine these arguments. Our evidence suggests that Breckinridge had no reasonable chance to win. Support for Breckinridge''s candidacy was only reasonable if the intention were to elect Lincoln. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article focuses on the influence of political parties on the U.S. Congress. Research investigating party influence in Congress has exploded over the last decade. This trend has been due, in part, to concerns raised about what constitutes evidence of party influence. Traditionally, congressional scholars have viewed roll-call-based measures of partisanship, such as measures of party strength or party cohesion, as sufficient to make the case for strong party influence in Congress. In effect, majority party members delegate authority to central agents, who structure the legislative agenda to foster the success of the party. This is done in two ways. First, policy logrolls are constructed, with individual party members extracting district-specific benefits while supporting the partisan agenda as a whole. Second, gatekeeping is employed at the committee level, so that policies opposed by a party majority are not referred to the floor. To prevent defection from the partisan agenda, majority party leaders wield various "carrots and sticks" that can affect members' electoral fortunes. For example, prime committee assignments and privileged positions on the legislative calendar can be bestowed or taken away, depending upon the degree of partisan loyalty that members exhibit. At the extreme, members can be kicked out of the caucus.

We analyze the constituency bases of the congressional parties from 1857 through 1913 by focusing on two key concepts: party homogeneity and party polarization. With a few notable exceptions, prior efforts to assess these concepts have relied upon measures based on members' roll call votes. This is potentially problematic, as such measures are likely endogenous: They reflect the party's actual level of success as much as the party's underlying homogeneity. To address this problem, we construct measures for party homogeneity and polarization that are based on constituency characteristics, using economic-based census data and presidential voting data as proxies. We then examine how these "exogenous" measures compare to roll call-based measures. We find that changes in party unity on roll call votes track shifts in constituency characteristics fairly closely. Substantively, we find that the congressional parties went through three distinct phases during these 56 years: first, a period of extremely high overlap and low party homogeneity during the Civil War and Reconstruction, followed by a period of moderate polarization and homogeneity from the mid-1870s through the early 1890s, and concluding with a period of sharp polarization and high homogeneity, which coincided with the realignment of 1894-96. While the status of the 1894-96 elections as a critical turning point remains controversial in the historical and political science literatures, our results suggest that these elections did lead to a substantial change in the underlying characteristics of the congressional parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the decision of the U.S. House of representatives in 1839 to stop electing its Speaker by secret ballot. Reasons behind the decision of U.S. Representatives; Comparison of the procedures for electing Speaker of the House before and after 1839; Assessment of consequences of electing Speakers without secret ballot.

While much empirical research has been devoted to the study of “killer amendments” in recent years, few studies have explicitly examined the theoretical foundations of the phenomenon. The goal of this paper is to investigate why some killer amendment attempts are successful, when theory suggests that they should always fail. More specifically, we examine the practical political constraints on legislators’ abilities to neutralize the imminent threat of killer amendments through sophisticated voting. We also present two new cases, both occurring during the Reconstruction era, in which killer amendments were used successfully. In the end, our findings support previous research on all successful killer amendments detailed in the congressional literature: race was the issue under consideration at the amendment stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the Republican Party's origins at the institutional level in the 34th U.S. House of Representatives. Application of the spatial theory of voting to the House balloting for Speaker; Determinant of vote choice throughout the two-month speakership battle; Impact of nativism on members' votes for speaker.

Focuses on the rights on properties and the emergence of standing committee dominance in the nineteenth-century U.S. House. Heterogeneity of the Jeffersonian coalition; Machinations of the House Speaker; Production of an institutional change serving the needs of all major parties in the House.

Objective. Recent studies of race-based salary discrimination in professional basketball have found that black players are paid less than white players for similar levels of performance. This paper reexamines the question using an alternate method of sample selection. Methods. Rather than use annual salaries for all players from a given season, this analysis will focus on free-agent salaries over a 12-year period. In much of the literature annual wage figures for players are measured against performance that was conducted long after their multi-year contracts, and the prevailing salaries used in the samples, were negotiated. By focusing solely on players who have recently negotiated new contracts, a better fit between salary and past performance is achieved. Results. Controlling for performance and other explanatory effects, regression results indicate that no significant salary shortfall exists for black players. This null finding is supported by an accompanying Chow test, which shows that the return in the form of salary to higher performance levels is the same for both races. Conclusions. This study analyzes whether race-based salary discrimination exists in the NBA after measurement error prevalent in other analyses is reduced. Findings from a less noisy sample indicate that race is not a factor in determining salary. This suggests that, at least with regard to veteran free agents, the NBA is a level playing field for players of both races. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the changes in the editorial board and publication of "The Journal of Politics." Topics discussed include the start of the author's four-year term as the journal's editor-in-chief as well as serving as the American Institutions field editor, some of the field editors including Elisabeth Ellis, Sean Gailmard and Lanny Martin and the journal's participation in the disciplinary effort to establish best practices for the dissemination of replication files.

An abstract of the article "Extra-osseous talotarsal stabilization and sinus tarsi impingement syndrome: Case report" by Jeffery L. Jenkins is presented.