Majority-Party Status and Gender: Understanding Productivity in the U.S. House of Representatives (original) (raw)
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Navigating Rough Waters: Modeling Member Effectiveness in the US House of Representatives
2001
This research addresses how individual member behavior and institutional variables affect legislavite success in the U.S. House of Representatives. Using a detailed data set with new measures of activity from the 103 rd Congress (1993-94), we employ a Negative Binomial Regression Model to model the influences of legislator behavior, institutional factors, and the interactions between them on the legislative success of individual legislators. We offer three important contributions. First, we find that a member's activity level encourages legislative success. These gains are limited, however, especially when members speak or sponsor too frequently. Second, we employ more appropriate modeling techniques-a count dependent variable and the NBRM to analyze it-for subsequent studies of legislative effectiveness. Finally, we provide a more nuanced picture of the role of legislative context and the relevance of institutions. These findings are important because they improve upon the extant literature and have strong normative consequences for the way public policy is made. 1 All data will be made available through ICPSR and the authors' web sites upon publication.
Determinants of legislative success in House committees
Public Choice, 1992
We examine the factors that are associated with whether a bill passes the committee stage in the U.S. House of Representatives. Probit results for the 97th and 98th Congresses show that a bill is more likely to pass (1) if the sponsor chairs the committee that considers the bill or a subcommittee of that committee; (2) the higher the number of Democratic cosponsors who sit on the committee; (3) if the bill has bipartisan cosponsorship from members who sit on the committee that considers the bill. However, in the multivariate probit model including the above mentioned variables, other variables previously found to be important, e.g., the total number of cosponsors, whether or not the sponsor sits on the committee that considers the bill, and the party affiliation of the sponsor, are not statistically significant. Also a variable related to a public choice model of committee behavior, the difference between the sponsor's ideology (as measured by ADA score) and the ideology of the committee's median member, has no effect on a bill's probability of committee passage.
Are Women Less Effective at Passing Bills? Exploring the Direct and Indirect Effects of Gender
Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2020
Are women as effective as men at passing legislation? What are the institutional pathways through which gender affects bill approval? I argue that gender does not have a direct effect on a legislator's ability to gain legislative approval. Instead, women are marginalized in their access to influential institutional positionscommittee leadership positions, influential committee assignment, and bill content-which may have consequences for bill approval. I examine these relationships using causal mediation analysis on bill data from Argentina from 1983 through 2007. I do not find a direct effect of gender on bill approval. Instead, women are negatively affected by their lack of access to committee leadership positions. While women do not experience legislative consequences directly, by virtue of being women, they do face indirect consequences through the positions they receive. This paper makes important methodological and substantive contributions to understanding relationships between gender and legislative outcomes.
Power and influence has long been an interesting aspect to study in order to determine the effects on political activities. In this paper, power is to be assessed in the legislative body of the Philippines through levels of perceived legislative effectiveness. This paper seeks to answer the question, “Is there a significant relationship between the number of bill authorship and/or coauthorship of the members of the house of representatives (HOR) of the 17th Congress of the Philippines and their perceived legislative effectiveness? Are there other determinants affecting the effectiveness ratings of a legislator?” It is particularly an interesting topic because it involves the measuring of the abilities of the legislators and the performance of legislators in terms of productivity and how it in turn affects their colleague’s perception of effectiveness. The main argument of this paper is that higher legislative productivity through the number of bill authorship and/or coauthorship result into higher legislative effectiveness ratings of legislators. The three-factor determinants given by Weissert (1991) are also taken into account as control variables in the study, however, it is slightly revised because of the peculiarity of the Philippine Congress. The data gathered are a compilation on the profiles of each of the members of the HOR 17th Congress that is gotten from either the website of the Congress or through their certificates of candidacy (COC) filed through the Commission on Elections (COMELEC). Also, members of the of HOR of the 17th Congress are also tasked to answer a survey seeking to rate their colleagues with 1 being not effective and 5 being very effective in order to measure legislative effectiveness. The methodology used is a multiple regression analysis involving ordinary least squares. Findings show that there is a significant positive relationship between bill authorship and legislative effectiveness ratings. Likewise, being a lawyer, being a member of the majority party, having a leadership position in the Congress, being a chairman in a committee also has a significant relationship with legislative effectiveness. However, bill coauthorship was found out to not have a significant relationship with legislative effectiveness since offices do not tend to tap those legislators which they seem to be effective but they do room-to-room visits on each offices to bring coauthorship request forms. A recommendation for future research is to include indicators such as attendance and net worth to test on legislative effectiveness. Later on, legislative effectiveness ratings may serve as the independent variable to test on reelection chances, and bill success.
Parties as Procedural Coalitions in Congress: An Examination of Differing Career Tracks
Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2005
We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predictions from the party cartel theory (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994, 2002). We gain leverage on the question of party influence in Congress by focusing on three types of House members: reelection seekers, higher-office seekers, and retiring members. We argue that retiring House members are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect source (when compared to higher-office seekers and reelection seekers) to determine the existence of party influence. Results from a pooled, cross-sectional analysis of the 94th through 105th Congresses (1975-98) suggest that party influence is indeed present in Congress, especially where the party cartel theory predicts: on procedural, rather than final-passage, votes. Moreover, we find that procedural party influence is almost exclusively the domain of the majority party. This latter finding is especially important in that most prior studies have been limited solely to investigating interparty influence. I. Introduction Research investigating party influence in Congress has exploded over the last decade. This 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, like measures of "party strength" or "party cohesion," as sufficient to make the case for strong party influence (or discipline) in Congress. Recently, however, Krehbiel (1993, 1999a, 2000) has taken these scholars to task. Developing a preference-based model of congressional behavior, he contends that the typical measures of party influence "increasingly … seem to be artifacts of preferences rather than evidence of party discipline, party cohesion, party strength, or party government" (Krehbiel 2000: 225). While Krehbiel's contentions have resonated with congressional scholars, they have not squelched efforts to uncover evidence of party influence in Congress. Moreover, the use of rollcall votes as the means of uncovering that evidence has not been viewed as problematic, as new and innovative roll-call based approaches have been developed in an effort to separate the effects of preferences and partisanship: examples include a "non-partisan" interest group score 1 (Binder, Lawrence, and Maltzman 1999), a "party pressure" measure 2 (Snyder and Groseclose 2000), partisan "roll rates" 3 (Cox 2001; Cox and McCubbins 2002), partisan "cut points" 4 (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001), and a "net" Rice index of party difference (Cox and Poole 2002). This paper fits in the aforementioned tradition, by searching for party influence in Congress using a different approach to the study of roll-call voting. Rather than developing and applying new methods to "tease out" party influence, however, we apply an existing research design in a different way to a new set of data.
The Keys to Legislative Success in the U.S. House of Representatives
Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2003
Our research addresses how individual member behavior and institutional variables affect legislative success in the U.S. House of Representatives. Using new measures of activity from the 103d Congress (1993-94), a count dependent variable, and negative binomial regression, our analysis assesses member effectiveness. We find that a member's activity level encourages legislative success, but gains are limited when members speak or sponsor too frequently. Our results provide a clearer picture of the role of legislative context and the relevance of institutions in determining a member's legislative successes and failures.
Legislator Success in Committee: Gatekeeping Authority and the Loss of Majority Control
American Journal of Political Science, 2011
In multiparty legislatures, the largest party or coalition may fall short of controlling a majority of plenary seats. However, plurality-led congresses generally endow the largest parties with extensive agenda-setting prerogatives, even when plenary majorities are lacking. In this article, we present a model and compelling evidence describing changes in the strategic behavior of committee chairs when majority control is lost. Using a dataset that includes all the bills proposed to the Argentine House in the last 25 years, we estimate success in committee in majority-and plurality-led congresses. We provide extensive evidence that the loss of majority control reduces the importance of the median voter of the plurality party while improving the success of the median committee voter. Gisela Sin, Andres Tow, the participants of the Latin American Workshop at the University of Houston, and three anonymous reviewers. 1 Data, code, and ancillary materials to replicate all analysis may be downloaded from http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/calvo/.
Narrowing the Gap or Closing the Door: What Kinds of Women Get Jobs as Legislators
Southeastern Political Review, 1996
Previous studies of the impact of gender upon legislatures have shown conflictingfindings regarding the backgrounds, quali3cations and types of men and women serving as legislators. Women appear to have narrowed the gap in terms of some of these background variables but still face significant obstacles. This study examines the impact of major institutional factors upon the roles of men and women. Survey and interview methodology compare two important aspects of institutionalization: The U.S. type legislature is compared with a major parliamentary system (Australia), and professionalized legislators are compared with the non-professionalized. The study finds that women have achieved parity with men in regard to education and employment history, regardless of the type of system. However, there are significant differences in incumbency, with women being relatively recent entrants into the Australian system. Moreover; women in Australian parliaments encounter more problems regarding child-care and marital responsibilities than their U.S. counterparts.
Gender and Roll Call Voting Behavior in Congress: A Cross-Chamber Analysis
American Review of Politics
Numerous studies have examined the roll call voting behavior of women in Congress. Much of this scholarship has focused on whether female legislators tend to be more liberal than their male colleagues. However, most of this research has examined whether gender differences exist within a specific legislative chamber. This paper seeks to build on this past research by exploring whether the relationship between the descriptive and substantive representation of women is contingent upon the institutional context in which female legislators serve. Using Common Space Scores which estimate the roll call voting behavior of U.S. Senators and U.S. House members on a scale that allows for comparisons across each chamber this study analyzes the voting records of Female Senators, Male Senators, Female House Members and Male House Members in the 109th-111th Congresses. The results show that in the contemporary Congress, gender exerts minimal influence on how legislators cast their votes with the exception of female Republican Senators who are noticeably more liberal than Republicans in both the House and Senate.