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While Republicans enjoyed unified control of the national government during the 1920s, scandals involving executive patronage and GOP state bosses in the South dogged the national party throughout the decade. The Republican Party in the South had been a set of "rotten boroughs" for decades, used by national politicians—especially presidents—for the sole purpose of controlling delegates at the Republican National Convention. This patronage-for-delegates arrangement was generally understood among political elites, but the murder-suicide involving a U.S. postmaster in Georgia in April 1928 brought the Southern GOP's patronage practices to national light. This forced Republican leaders in an election year to call for a Senate investigation. Chaired by Sen. Smith W. Brookhart (R-IA), the committee investigation lasted for eighteen months, covered portions of two Republican presidential administrations, and showed how state GOP leaders in Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas engaged in office selling. The fallout would be a thorn in the side of President Herbert Hoover, who tried to clean up the corrupt GOP organizations in the South—and build an electorally-viable Republican Party in the ex-Confederate states—but largely failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on congressional decision-making has largely ignored the influence of the minority party in the legislative process. This follows from the widely held belief that the majority party dominates the agenda-setting process. Though the minority party rarely achieves major policy success in Congress, we argue that the minority has significantly more influence over the legislative agenda than is commonly believed. We posit that, under some conditions, the minority has enough bargaining leverage to get floor votes on their proposals, in the form of both amendments and bills. We test our theoretical expectations with a novel design utilizing whip count data from the House and show that when a whip count on a bill occurs, the likelihood of a minority amendment disappointment and a majority amendment roll increases, respectively. This suggests that the more leverage the minority party has, the more we see their legislative proposals on the floor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Many recorded roll calls in Congress each year are votes on bills that have no chance of becoming law, or are purely symbolic, or are procedural without policy content. Yet models of voting and measurement models of member preferences make assumptions that vote choices are largely about utility derived from policies. We consider the possibility that votes plausibly connected to policy and votes not plausibly connected to policy may have different data-generating processes and rely on different utility functions. Substantively, similarity across different contexts for policy change implies an importance of messaging over policy. Methodologically, similarity across these contexts is necessary to avoid biasing estimates of member preferences. We find that members' voting patterns are highly stable across contexts in which policy change is credible and not credible. This indicates that existing measures of ideal points are likely not dramatically biased by the inclusion of policy-irrelevant votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After overseeing the adoption of two landmark civil rights proposals in 1964 and 1965, the Johnson administration and its allies in Congress sought to implement the third item of its broader agenda: a legal prohibition on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. Enacting fair housing legislation, however, proved to be a vexing process. Advocates had to win support from northern White Democrats skeptical of the policy, as well as Republicans who were often (and increasingly) unreliable allies. Fair housing legislation failed in 1966 (89th Congress) but passed two years later, during the 90th Congress. We provide a legislative policy history detailing how, after three tumultuous years, Congress came to enact the fair housing provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Overall, the battle to enact fair housing legislation presaged a dynamic that would take hold as the Great Society gave way to the Nixon years: once federal civil rights policies started to bear directly on the lives of White northerners, they became much harder to pass and implement. It also showcased the moment at which the Republican Party in Congress first moved to the right on civil rights and explicitly adopted a position of racial conservatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on presidential power delineates between a modern era of relative autonomy and an earlier period of congressional dominance. What drove this change? Unlike prior arguments about presidential entrepreneurship and the rise of the United States as a global power, we attribute the emergence of the modern presidency partially to an institutional change—the adoption of direct election of senators that culminated in the 17th Amendment. With direct election, senators were selected by individual voters rather than state legislators. These senators answered to a new principal—the general public—that was (in the aggregate) less informed and less interested in foreign policy. As a result, senators had less incentive to constrain presidential foreign policy preferences. We find evidence for this shift in the relationship between the piecemeal adoption of direct election and senate votes to delegate foreign policy authority to the executive. The implication is that the direct election of senators played an underappreciated role in the emergence of the modern presidency. [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]

Through the 1880s, Senator Henry Blair (R-NH) spearheaded an effort to erode local control of education by turning Congress into a source of funds and oversight for state-level primary and secondary schools. The Blair Bill won support from an interregional, interracial, bipartisan coalition. It passed in the Senate on three separate occasions, was endorsed by presidents, and was a frequent topic of discussion among party elites. Yet in 1890 the bill failed for the last time, and local control would go largely unchanged until the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In this article we explore the decade-long battle surrounding Blair's proposal. Our analysis focuses on this lost opportunity as a way of highlighting the coalitional and institutional dynamics that work to prevent reform in an otherwise favorable environment. In this way, we contribute to a large literature on the uneven course of American state development. [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]

In the post-Reconstruction South, two Republican factions vied for control of state party organizations. The Black-and-Tans sought to keep the party inclusive and integrated, while the Lily-Whites worked to turn the GOP into a whites-only party. The Lily-Whites ultimately emerged victorious, as they took over most state parties by the early twentieth century. Yet no comprehensive data exist to measure how the conflict played out in each state. To fill this void, we present original data that track the racial composition of Republican National Convention delegations from the South between 1868 and 1952. We then use these data in a set of statistical analyses to show that, once disfranchising laws were put into place, the "whitening" of the GOP in the South led to a significant increase in the Republican Party's vote totals in the region. Overall, our results suggest that the Lily-White takeover of the Southern GOP was a necessary step in the Republican Party's reemergence—and eventual dominance—in the region during the second half of the twentieth century. [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]

The Pivotal Politics model (Krehbiel) has significantly influenced the study of American politics, but its core empirical prediction – that the size of the gridlock interval is negatively related to legislative productivity – has not found strong empirical support. We argue that previous research featured a disconnect between the exclusively ideological theory and tests that relied on outcome variables that were not purely ideological. We remedy this by dividing landmark laws (Mayhew) into two counts – those that invoke ideological preferences and those that do not – and uncover results consistent with Pivotal Politics' core prediction: the size of the gridlock interval is negatively related to the production of ideological legislation. We also find that the size of the gridlock zone is positively related to the production of nonideological legislation. These results hold up in the face of various sensitivity analyses and robustness checks. We further show that Pivotal Politics explains variation in ideological legislation better than alternative theories based on partisan agenda control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits Nelson Polsby's classic article "The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives" fifty years after its publication, to examine whether the empirical trends that Polsby identified have continued. This empirical exploration allows us to place Polsby's findings in broader historical context and to assess whether the House has continued along the "institutionalization course"—using metrics that quantify the degree to which the House has erected impermeable boundaries with other institutions, created a complex institution, and adopted universalistic decision-making criteria. We empirically document that careerism plateaued right at the point Polsby wrote "Institutionalization," and that the extension of the careerism trend has affected Democrats more than Republicans. The House remains complex, but lateral movement between the committee and party leadership systems began to reestablish itself a decade after "Institutionalization" was published. Finally, the seniority system as a mechanism for selecting committee chairs—the primary measure of universalistic decision-making criteria—has been almost thoroughly demolished. Thus, most of the trends Polsby identified have moderated, but have not been overturned. We conclude by considering the larger set of interpretive issues that our empirical investigation poses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State by Robert Harrison. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 310pp. $75.00. In this book, Robert Harrison makes a significant addition to the [...]

by E. Scott Adler. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002. 264 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $19.00. Over the last two decades, students of Congress have spent a good deal of [...]