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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]

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]

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]

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.