The Influence of Governors on Veto Override Attempts: A Test of Pivotal Politics (original) (raw)

Why Do Governors Issue Vetoes? The Impact of Individual and Institutional Influences

Political Research Quarterly, 2008

Studies of presidential veto use advance two competing theoretical perspectives: the “president-centered” approach and the “presidency-centered” approach. We assess the applicability of these approaches to gubernatorial veto activity. Our analysis of forty-eight states between 1971 and 2002 provides strong support for the institutional perspective and less support for the individual perspective. The governor's formal powers, the partisan alignment of the legislature, and the electoral cycle all contribute to veto activity. The results suggest that conflict between the legislature and the governor is a product of systematic forces and that governors who face similar institutional constraints will behave in similar ways.

Who Blinks First? Legislative Patience and Bargaining with Governors

Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2009

When legislators and governors clash over the size of American state government, what strategic factors determine who wins? Efforts to address this question have traditionally relied upon setter models borrowed from the congressional literature and have predicted legislative dominance. We offer an alternative simplification of state budget negotiations that follows the "staring match" logic captured by dividethe-dollar games. Our model predicts that governors will often be powerful but that professional legislatures can stand up to the executives when long legislative sessions give them the patience to endure a protracted battle over the size of the budget. In this article, we present our analysis of an original dataset comprising gubernatorial budget proposals and legislative enactments in the states from 1989 through 2004. The results indicate strong empirical support for our predictions.

Party Power or Preferences? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from American State Legislatures

The Journal of Politics, 2010

Can majority parties control legislative outcomes by controlling the agenda, or are roll call patterns simply the product of legislators' preferences? We argue that, holding members' preferences constant, the majority party's ability to set the agenda gives it the power to influence legislative outcomes. We present the implications of this view of party power formally, and then explore them empirically in two quasi-experiments from American state legislatures. In both, agenda control varies while legislator preferences remain constant. Our consistent finding is that the majority party uses its control over the agenda to screen out bills that would split its own membership, devotes more floor time to bills that divide majority from minority party legislators, and ultimately uses agenda control to protect the policy interests of its members.

The influence of party: Evidence from the state legislatures

American Political Science Review, 2002

American legislative studies in recent years have been occupied to a large degree with the question of the effects of political parties on the policy behavior of elected legislators, with most of the research focusing on the US Congress. We undertake a comparative analysis of state legislatures for a window into the character and extent of party's effects. Specifically, we compare the impact of party on the partisan polarization and dimensionality of campaign issue stances and roll call voting in the Kansas Senate and the largely comparable, ...

Policy Representation in the State Legislatures

We develop an approach for estimating the spatial locations of voters, state legislators, governors, and state policy outcomes, on a common scale. We use our results to study electoral and legislative representation in the state legislatures and test theories of lawmaking. Our results indicate that while elections typically generate a legislative median who mirrors the median voter, the state legislature is typically far more polarized than the voting population in the state. We find support for theories of lawmaking that attribute negative agenda setting power to the majority party. We find that while electoral institutions (such as open primaries and Election Day registration) have little effect on representation, some legislative institutions—particularly those relating to committee and chamber leadership—have a significant effect on the quality of representation.

Broad Bills or Particularistic Policy? Historical Patterns in American State Legislatures

American Political Science Review, 2010

When do lawmakers craft broad policies, and when do they focus on narrow legislation tailored to a local interest? We investigate this question by exploring historical variation in the types of bills produced by American state legislatures. Drawing on a new database of 165,000 bills—covering sessions over 120 years in thirteen different states—we demonstrate the surprising prominence of particularistic bills affecting a specific legislator's district. We then develop and test a theory linking the goals of legislators to their propensity to introduce district bills rather than broad legislation. We find that, consistent with our predictions, politicians are more likely to craft policies targeted to a particular local interest when a legislature is dominated by one party or when it pays its members relatively high salaries. These findings provide empirical support for Key's (1949) thesis that one-party politics descends into factionalism and undermines the making of broad publ...

The Power of American Governors: Winning on Budgets and Losing on Policy

2012

Winning on Budgets and Losing on Policy With limited authority over state lawmaking, but ultimate responsibility for the performance of government, how effective are governors in moving their programs through the legislature? This book advances a new theory about what makes chief executives most successful and explores this theory through original data. Thad Kousser and Justin H. Phillips argue that negotiations over the budget, on one hand, and policy bills, on the other, are driven by fundamentally different dynamics. They capture these dynamics in models informed by interviews with gubernatorial advisors, cabinet members, press secretaries, and governors themselves. Through a series of novel empirical analyses and rich case studies, the authors demonstrate that governors can be powerful actors in the lawmaking process but that whether they are bargaining over the budget or policy shapes both how they play the game and how often they can win it. In addition to assessing the power of American governors, this book contributes broadly to our understanding of the determinants of executive power.

Toward a New Typology of Vetoes and Overrides

Political Research Quarterly, 2001

This research develops a typology of vetoes and overrides based on the nature of the coalition that originally passed the legislation. We posit that both legislative and non-legislative objectives inform the strategies of the President and congressional leaders. The implications for measures of presidential and congressional power are considerable. Using veto and override data for the period 1969-98, we show that vote-switching between the passage of legislation and veto overrides is likely to occur only for a specific subset of legislation.

Unpacking pivotal politics: exploring the differential effects of the filibuster and veto pivots

Public Choice, 2017

Formal models of politics regularly combine assumptions about a variety of actors and institutions to produce equilibrium expectations, which serve as the primary target for empirical testing. Yet the underlying assumptions can vary in their accuracy among actors and across time and context. We focus on the pivotal politics model of lawmaking and argue that a full evaluation of the theory requires a granular analysis of its two primary components: the filibuster and veto ''pivots'' in Congress. We show that both types of pivots contribute to the success of pivotal politics in explaining postwar lawmaking, but that the relevance of each varies based on institution-specific contexts. Specifically, the filibuster pivot has little explanatory power before the 1970s, when norms of filibuster use were quite restrictive, while the veto pivot's explanatory power is limited to situations in which the president has sufficient public backing to be a force in the legislative process. Keywords Pivotal politics Á Lawmaking Á Congress 1 Introduction Formal models of lawmaking typically combine a multitude of actors and a series of procedural events that extend over months or years into a single, flat picture. Starting conditions-the spatial preferences of members-yield a particular set of equilibrium