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This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

Party Leaders and the House Rules Committee: The
Endogenous Effects of Partisanship on Special Rules
and Cross-Chamber Legislative Outcomes

presented by

Bryan W. Marshall

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for

doctorate degree in Wcience

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PARTY LEADERS AND THE HOUSE RULES COMMITTEE: THE ENDOGENOUS
EFFECTS OF PARTISANSHIP ON SPECIAL RULES AND CROSS-CHAMBER
LEGISLATIVE OUTCOMES
By

Bryan W. Marshall

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Political Science

1999

ABSTRACT
PARTY LEADERS AND THE HOUSE RULES COMMITTEE: THE ENDOGENOUS
EFFECTS OF PARTISANSHIP ON SPECIAL RULES AND CROSS-CHAMEBER
LEGISLATIVE OUTCOMES
By

Bryan W. Marshall

This dissertation develops a principal-agent theory to analyze one facet of a
broader literature that seeks to explain the strengthening of party leadership organizations
within Congress and their signiﬁcance for understanding congressional politics (see
Cooper and Brady 1981; Rohde and Shepsle 1987; Rohde 1991; Sinclair 1992). In
particular, Chapters 1 and 2 apply the principal-agent framework to understand better the
dynamic changes in Rules Committee behavior and the role of special rules over time. In
sum, I argue that the increasing homogeneity of the majority party increased the
incentives for members to coordinate their actions, especially their choices regarding the
strengthening of leadership institutions. One key component of majority party
coordination was the institutionalization of an agency relationship with the Rules
Committee. Indeed, the principal-agent perspective between the majority party and the
Rules Committee offers theoretical leverage in understanding both the institutional
changes and the policy consequences of this institutional relationship.

The design of each empirical chapter investigates one of three broad aspects of the
theoretical claims regarding the Signiﬁcance of the Rules Committee and the leadership’s
use of special rules in affecting congressional politics. Chapter 4 begins the empirical

analysis by examining the factors leading to the establishment of the principal-agent

relationship between the majority party and the Rules Committee over time. Here I ﬁnd
that the Rules Committee became less likely over time to deny legislative committee
requests for special rules and infer that this change in behavior reﬂects on the institutional
reforms during the 19703 that greatly contributed to the Rules Committee’s role as agent
for the majority party. In addition, the signiﬁcant trends in the time series of majority
party support on amendments and special rule votes provide empirical conﬁrmation that
members were becoming more willing to enhance leadership institutions over time.

The analysis in Chapter 5 directly tests between the empirical claims of the
contemporary organizational theories of Congress regarding the role of special rules (see
Gilligan and Krehbiel 1990; Krehbiel 1991; Weingast and Marshall 1988; Aldrich and
Rohde 1996a; Sinclair 1995b and 1999). The empirical ﬁndings from the 97‘“, 98‘“, 104‘“,
and 105th Congresses largely dispel the majoritarian argument that restrictive rules are
used as informational devices, and instead, supports a partisan rationale which asserts that
the choice of restrictive rules has become increasingly determined by and reﬂective of the
policy ends of the majority party. Chapter 6 explores the policy consequences of the
agency arrangement between the Rules Committee and the majority party. Despite the
Senate’s more consensus oriented institutional structure, the patterns of partisan conﬂict
over policies considered under special rules varied systematically across both chambers
demonstrating that the choice of restrictive ﬂoor procedures has signiﬁcant partisan

consequences for the policy making process.

BRYAN WILLIAM MARSHALL
1999

For my Mother and Father

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Certainly, institutional context can go a long way in explaining human behavior
and development. But individuals are the key ingredient that make up institutions and
there have been many contributing to my development here at Michigan State. Dave
Rohde is the ﬁrst on my list. I interacted with Dave as a fellow of the Political
Institutions and Public Choice program. This research institute provided me with the
opportunity to pursue my research interests. Dave served as my chair, but I would like to
thank him for much more. Dave was my mentor. He has so many qualities as a
professional scholar that I found invaluable and I felt inspired to emulate these qualities
in myself. A work, I might add, that is always in progress. Dave has a remarkable
energy and keen insight for the study of politics which be freely shared with me. Once
more, being around Dave sparks considerable intellectual creativity. We have completed
several projects together and will hopefully undertake many more. I know that I am a
better scholar because of my relationship with Dave. Thanks Dave.

I would like to thank the rest of my committee members for their role in my
development: Jim Granato, Darren Davis, and Ken Williams. My committee members
provided guidance in many areas of my studies. Once more, they always challenged me
and this will greatly beneﬁt my future work. Jim was also a mentor and teacher. I
pushed myself to learn methods in part because of my deep respect for Jim. Darren was
also a great teacher and was always free with his time to answer questions and give me
advice.

Other faculty have contributed to my work and development at MSU as well. For

that, I would like to thank Brian Silver, Carol Weissert, Scott Gates, Mark Jones, Tom

vi

 

Hammond, Larry Heimann, , Warner Dannhauser, Arthur Melzer, Dennis Patterson,
Reggie Sheehan, Robert Lowry, and Paul Abramson.

I am very fortunate to have a close friend like Brandon Prins. He is both, an
excellent ﬁiend and scholar. We have completed many research projects together and
have many more to look forward to. His friendship has contributed a great deal to my
growth as a scholar. I would also like to thank the rest of my friends who continually
offered their support: Erick ‘Duke’ Duchesne, Roger Moiles, Bill Hixon, Mathew
Kleiman, Mark Hurwitz, Chris Butler, Renee Agress, and Malia Reddick.

Finally, I would like to say a special thanks to my family members: Mom, Dad,
Grandma, Grandpa, Chris, Steve, and especially to my loving and beautiful wife
Candace. She was my refuge. I would like to thank my mother and father-in law as they
have been very supportive of my academic endeavors. Thanks also to my dog Duke
(named aﬁer my ﬁiend Erick ‘Duke’ Duchesne). He was always happy to see me no

matter what mood I brought home.

vii

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................ xi
LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................... xii
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1
Party Leaders and Congressional Politics ........................................................... 1
Leadership Strategies and the Endogenous Sources of Partisanship ................... 3
Dissertation Outline ............................................................................................. 6
CHAPTER 1
PARTY LEADERS, PRINCIPALS, AND THE INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN
CONTROVERSY OVER THE ROLE OF SPECIAL RULES .................................... 9
The Foundations of Principal-Agent Models ....................................................... 9
Leadership Performance in the Agency Context ..................................... 11
The Rules Committee as a Leadership Institution ............................................... 19
The Costs of Employing Leaders as Agents ............................................ 22
Reducing Agency Costs ........................................................................... 26
Congressional Leadership and Special Rules .......................................... 31
Theories of Legislative Organization and the Controversy Over Special Rules . 33
The Role of Special Rules ........................................................................ 33
CHAPTER 2

THE DELEGATION OF INSTITUTIONAL POWER AND THE PARTISAN
IMPLICATIONS OF SPECIAL RULES IN THE US. HOUSE OF

REPRESENTATIVES .................................................................................................. 42
Introduction .......................................................................................................... 42
Theoretical Questions and Empirical Implications: Summary ............... 47
Theoretical Issues: The Textbook Congress, Institutional Change, and the
Resurgence of Strong Parties in the House .......................................................... 49
The Early Beginnings: Ebb and Flow of Leadership Power and the House
Rules Committee ...................................................................................... 49
Collective Incentives and the Delegation of Institutional Power ......................... 56
Institutional Solutions to Agency Problems: Rules Committee Reforms ........... 60
The Institutionalization of an Agency Relationship ................................ 6O
Hypotheses ........................................................................................................... 71
Empirical Predictions from the Principal-Agent Framework .................. 71
CHAPTER 3
DATA AND METHODS ............................................................................................. 83
Data and Methodological Issues .......................................................................... 84
Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 84

viii

 

Chapter 5 .................................................................................................. 86
Chapter 6 .................................................................................................. 97
Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 98
CHAPTER 4
POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE COORDINATION FOR COLLECTIVE
ACTION ....................................................................................................................... 104
The Role of Party Leadership .............................................................................. 104
Empirical Analysis ............................................................................................... 107
Rules Committee Behavior ...................................................................... 108
Temporal Change: Procedural and Policy Partisanship .......................... 109
Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 117
CHAPTER 5
EXPLAINING RESTRICTIVE RULES IN THE POSTREFORM HOUSE ............... 125
Theories of Legislative Organization: Testing Expectations of Procedural
Choice .................................................................................................................. 127
Informational Theory Predictions ............................................................ 128
Distributive Theory Predictions ............................................................... 130
Partisan Theory Predictions ..................................................................... 131
Empirical Results: Logit Analysis ...................................................................... 134
Informational Theory Results .................................................................. 134
Distributive Theory Results ..................................................................... 136
Partisan Theory Results ........................................................................... 137
Diagnostics ........................................................................................................... 141
Robust Estimation .................................................................................... 141
Multinomial Models ................................................................................ I42
Outlier Analysis ....................................................................................... 144
Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 146
CHAPTER 6
THE POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF LEADERSHIP STRATEGIES: EVIDENCE
FROM THE HOUSE AND SENATE .......................................................................... 160
Introduction .......................................................................................................... 160
A Few Thoughts on Party Leadership in the Senate Context .............................. 162
Empirical Analysis: Procedural Choice and Policy Consequences .................... 166
Bills That Become Law Under Special Rules: 97‘“, 98"“, 104‘“, and 105‘“
Congresses ............................................................................................... 1 66
Aggregate Voting Analysis: Legislation Considered Under Special
Rules ........................................................................................................ 171
Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 1 76
CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 1 84
Summary of Empirical Results ............................................................................ 185

ix

Future Extensions ................................................................................................. 193

APPENDIX A
Exogenous Variables Used in the Logit Analysis .......................................................... 198
APPENDIX B
Party Median Variable ................................................................................................... 200
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................. 202

TABLE 1:

TABLE 2:

TABLE 3:

TABLE 4:

TABLE 5:

TABLE 6:

TABLE 7:

TABLE 8:

TABLE 9:

TABLE 10:

TABLE 11:

TABLE 12:

TABLE 13:

TABLE 14

TABLE 15

LIST OF TABLES

Institutionalizing a Principal-Agent Relationship Between the Majority
Party and the House Rules Committee ................................................ 81

Empirical Research and Exogenous Variables Explaining Rule Choice
................................................................................................................ 1 00

Summary Statistics For Independent Variables Predicting Rule Choice

................................................................................................................ 101
Changes in the Proportion of Special Rules Not Granted, 96"'—104th
Congresses ............................................................................................ 120
Overview of Research Explaining the Occurrence of Restrictive Rules
................................................................................................................ 151
Theories of Legislative Organization and Expectations Regarding
Restrictive Rules .................................................................................. 152
Logit Models 97" and 98th Congresses (1981-1984) ............................ 153
Logit Models 104’11 and 105th Congresses (1995-1998) ........................ 154
Marginal Effects on Changes in the Probability of a Bill Receiving a
Restrictive Rule, 97", 98", 104‘“, and 105‘“ Congresses ....................... 155
Multinomial Logit Model 104th Congress (1995—1996) ........................ 156
Multinomial Logit Model 105‘h Congress (1997-1998) ........................ 157

Distribution of Bills Considered Under Special Rules by Final Outcomes
97'”, 98'“, 104*, and 105th Congresses ................................................... 179

Distribution of Final Legislative Outcomes Controlling for Rule Type 97",
98'“, 104‘”, and 105th Congresses ........................................................... 180

: Distribution of Bills That Passed Both Chambers by Final Disposition 97‘”,

98", 104*, and 105'’1 Congresses ........................................................... 181

: Average Party Support for Bills Becoming Law in the House and Senate

Controlling for Rule Type 97'“, 98‘", 104‘“, and 105th Congresses ........ 182

xi

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1: Static vs. Dynamic Agency Models .................................................... 17
FIGURE 2: Summary ............................................................................................. 82
FIGURE 3: Distribution of Special Rules, 97‘”, 98‘“, 104‘“, and 105‘h Congresses 102

FIGURE 4: Distribution of Special Rules (Collapsed Categorization), 97‘“, 98‘", 104‘“,

and 105“I Congresses .............................................................................. 103
FIGURE 5: Average Party Support on First-Degree Amendments, 83"’-105‘h
Congresses ........................................................................................... 121
FIGURE 6: Average Party Support on Special Rules, 83“’-105“‘ Congresses ......... 122
FIGURE 7: Percentage of Majority Favored Amendments Controlling for Rule Type,
97‘“, 98‘“, 104‘“, and 105‘h Congresses .................................................. 123
FIGURE 8: Average Partisanship on Special Rules Controlling for the Restrictiveness
of Rules ................................................................................................ 124
FIGURE 9: Outlier Analysis Model 104b (104"‘ Congress) .................................... 158
FIGURE 10: Outlier Analysis Model 105b (105"‘ Congress) ................................... 159

FIGURE 11: Distribution of Final Passage Votes Across Chambers Controlling for Rule
Type and Levels of Partisanship, 97"‘-98‘h and 104"‘-105‘h Congresses. 183

xii

INTRODUCTION
“If followers fail to cohere, then a leader who nevertheless pursues a party policy line
does so at his peri ” (Rohde and Shepsle 198 7: 11 7).

Party Leaders and Congressional Politics

The one factor that was as important as any other factor(s) leading to Gingrich’s
demise in 1998 was really beyond his control as Speaker (or was it?) This factor was the
growing cleavage within the tenuously small GOP majority between moderates and
conservatives. The leadership’s initiatives that once successfully highlighted interparty
differences during the ﬁrst 100 days of the 104“‘ Congress were called into question
during the government shutdown of (1995-1996), and for much of the 105"l Congress,
were plagued by intraparty policy disputes. In terms of leadership strategy, this condition
posed a serious dilemma on many policy fronts. By pursuing objectives for one faction,
the leadership necessarily provoked the alienation of the other faction. For example,
during the 105‘h Congress, conservatives clamored against their party leadership when
strategies sought to “soft-pedal” partisan policy objectives and thus cater to the moderate
wing of the party (see Marshall, Prins, and Rohde 1998: 30). These patterns of intraparty
conﬂict not only caused considerable problems for policy making within Congress, but
had potentially graver implications because they fostered the public’s perception that the
GOP was unable to govern.

Indeed, intraparty strife appears to be a persistent problem for the ruling GOP

majority. Looking ahead to the 106“I Congress, one GOP strategist said: “We don ’t just

have a leadership problem, we have a followership problem too” (CO, 11/14/98: 3052).
One possible institutional solution to this recurring problem, embraced by House
conservatives, would grant the new Speaker the power to punish members that buck the
party-line on procedural votes (e.g. rules votes) (CO 11/21/98: pg. 3165). In fact,
Majority Whip Tom DeLay (TX) has been outspoken in his attempts to convince the
GOP conference that it should demand the leadership should take off the gloves and
punish the few recalcitrant members, who stand in the way of the party’s collective
objectives (Roll Call, 6/22/98: 32).

And now, the leadership’s decision to force an up or down vote on impeachment
articles in the House left members from moderate districts between the proverbial ‘rock
and a hardplace’. House managers subsequently tried to frame their arguments in a
similar manner, but moderate Senate Republicans would not face the same constraints
that House leaders had earlier placed on their fellow partisans. The in-ﬁghting that
initiated within the House GOP has now traversed between the majority parties of both
chambers to malign their legislative effectiveness, their opportunity as majority party to
assert a clear policy agenda, and perhaps threatens the very maintenance of their majority
status in 2000.

Leadership strategies as illustrated by the dramatic events during the 104"‘-105‘h
and into the 106‘’1 Congress have proven to be incredibly important (sometimes
devastatingly so!) to the achievement of collective goals in Congress. The study of
leadership strategies, then, represents an integral component to understanding party
organization and congressional politics more generally. Of speciﬁc interest in this

dissertation is how congressional politics can be affected by party leadership and

strategies that employ special rules. As suggested by the ongoing difﬁculties of the
Republican majority, party leadership in Congress is a two-way street. An integral
dynamic to understand about this relationship is that party leaders sometimes follow, and
party followers sometimes lead. The signiﬁcance of leadership strategies in affecting
partisan outcomes is conditioned on the cooperation of the party membership. Indeed,
this dissertation addresses the efforts of members to empower leaders with the ability to

use special rules and the partisan consequences that this action has facilitated.

Leadership Strategies and the Endogenous Sources of Partisanship

Within the US. House of Representatives, members of the majority party are in a
formidable position relative to the members of the minority party to coordinate with
fellow partisans in pursuit of individual and collective ends. One of the most critical
aspects of this coordination is the choice to delegate leadership powers in pursuit of
collective objectives (Rohde 1991; Sinclair 1992). Cox and McCubbins (1993) have
asserted that majority party members coordinate in the organization of the House to usurp
its institutional powers (especially legislative committees) for the purpose of producing
collective goods.I Rohde (1991) has argued that when members of the majority party
agree upon collective ends, they have an incentive to grant party leaders powers in their

pursuit. Moreover, the transfer of institutional powers to the party leadership can have

 

‘ Basically, the collective characteristics of party reputation provide a common good valued by individual
members in pursuit of reelection (Cox and McCubbins 1993: 109).

 

the intended affect of pulling policy outcomes away from the ﬂoor median and toward the
central preferences of the party caucus (Aldrich and Rohde 1996b).2

The membership’s incentive to delegate institutional authority to party leaders is a
function of how much their goals overlap with their fellow partisans and the degree to
which they are at odds with the goals of the minority party. Member goals and/or
preferences are largely the result of exogenous electoral forces, but these too can be
inﬂuenced through leadership strategies. Leaders can use their powers of agenda-control
to impose constraints on member preferences along certain dimensions. For example,
Special rules allow leaders to structure choices, not to necessarily change member
preferences directly (although this can happen too) but to emphasize the importance of
certain dimensions over others in making particular decisions. The ability to structure
choices in this manner has non-trivial implications because party leaders can use this
strategy to pass policies that are valued by the majority party. As Aldrich and Rohde
(1998a) have illustrated, the median outcome can’t be achieved if it is never allowed to
be considered in the ﬁrst place.

Exogenously-driven preferences then, don’t freely determine member choices, but
are induced to some extent by leadership strategies. Leaders pursue certain objectives,
and do so through an array of institutional mechanisms that may vary over time.
Leadership objectives and strategies are in turn shaped by the leaders own goals, those of

the party membership, and the set of institutional tools available for pursuing them. Thus,

 

2 Although policies are a primary staple of the legislative process, this does not suggest that members of
Congress are driven solely by policy considerations. Indeed, I assume that members and their leaders are
motivated by multiple considerations (policy, reelection, and institutional power -- Fenno 1973).

 

the relationship between followers and leaders in Congress depends not only on
exogenous conditions (e. g. congressional elections) but also on the choices leaders make.

Special rules have evolved over time into an extremely important institutional
mechanism for leaders to shape policy choices. This change in leadership strategy does
not represent some idiosyncratic variation in congressional politics, but rather reﬂects a
broader phenomenon that dramatically changed the institutional face of Congress over
time. Leadership strategies became increasingly important to, and driven by, the
cooperation among majority party members to achieve collective ends (Rohde 1991;
Sinclair 1992).

The intent, and certainly, the effect of institutional changes to the Rules
Committee during the reform era solidiﬁed the committee’s power into the hands of party
leaders (Oppenheimer 1977; Rohde 1991; Sinclair 1995a; Maltzrrran 1997). Since the
reforms, the Rules Committee has become an integral part of the leadership team, and
thus an agent of the majority party. The agency relationship resulted from the majority
party caucus deliberately delegating greater institutional authority to its leadership for the
purpose of providing collective advantage. Indeed, the growing partisanship associated
with special rules represents more than just conﬂict over mundane procedure, but is
evidence of a deeper cleavage between the majority and minority party that has serious
ramifications for congressional politics.

Certainly, the growing cleavage between the parties emanates largely from the
changing conditions in congressional elections. Still, endogenous factors like leadership
strategies not only affect partisanship within the House directly, but also can affect the

Conditions external to Congress as well. I would argue that the “exogeneity” of

congressional elections serves theoretical tractability well, but has oversimpliﬁed a more
complicated dynamic between what goes on inside Congress (e.g. congressional politics)
and the causal effects on external conditions that Shape partisanship within individual
congressional districts. Thus, the study of leadership strategies is incredibly important to

our understanding of party organization and congressional politics more generally.

Dissertation Outline

This dissertation makes two main theoretical contributions to the study of
congressional politics. First, the theory applies a principal-agent framework to the study
of the Rules Committee. Chapter 1 introduces some groundwork on principal-agent
theory and its relevance to the study of congressional leadership. Then consideration is
given to how features of the Rules Committee and special rules (as a leadership tool) can
affect the principal-agent relationship between party members and their leaders.
Secondly, the partisan theory developed here speaks to the changing role of special rules
in the legislature. Indeed, Chapter 1 also discusses the empirical claims between
competing theories of legislative organization.

In Chapter 2, the dissertation addresses the transformation of the Rules
Committee into a responsive leadership institution for the majority party. This
institutional transformation is viewed from the perspective of principal-agent theory.
Testable implications are then derived from the premise that the Rules Committee acts as
the agent of the majority party. Based on this framework, I make hypotheses about: (1)
Rules Committee behavior over time, (2) Majority and Minority party voting patterns

over time, and (3) Factors affecting the likelihood a bill will receive a restrictive rule.

Chapter 3 lays out the data used to empirically test the implications of the theory.
I discuss the selection and operationalization of the data and how it applies to the speciﬁc
hypotheses derived from the theory. Here, I defend and justify the selection of the 96‘“-
97“‘ and lO4“‘-105"‘ Congresses that are used for testing propositions regarding rule
choice. I also present some basic descriptive statistics that highlight the changing
distribution of restrictive rules over time.

In Chapter 4, I present evidence that reﬂects on the temporal hypotheses
regarding the Rules Committee behavior and majority and minority party member voting
patterns. In terms of the Rules Committee’s behavior, I focus on how the agency
relationship of Rules has decreased its proclivity to use negative institutional powers to
block majority party priorities. In terms of majority and minority member behavior, I
focus on the costs and beneﬁts associated with empowering leaders with greater control
over the Rules Committee and how this coordination among majority party members has
been translated into support on special rules.

Chapter 5 presents logistic models on rule choice for the 97“‘-98‘h and 104“‘-105‘h
Congresses. Here, I provide a partial test between competing theories of legislative
organization regarding the role of special rules in the legislative process. The model
speciﬁcations incorporate independent variables that are central to claims made by
informational, distributive, and my own partisan theory. A full array of diagnostics are
discussed, including outlier analysis. The signiﬁcance of variables in these speciﬁcations
and their effects on the likelihood a bill receives a restrictive rule are important on their
own, but changes over time from one speciﬁcation to another may also shed light on the

dynamic component of this theoretical argument.

Chapter 6 is the last, of three empirical chapters, that really speaks to the policy
implications of having a Rules Committee in the House that is responsive to majority
party initiatives. Here I provide evidence illustrating the systematic linkage between
special rules and enacted public policies. I look at member behavior in the House on
special rules and ﬁnal passage votes during the 97“’—98‘h and 104‘“-105“’ Congresses. I
also follow these policies to the Senate. I brieﬂy discuss key institutional differences in
the Senate regarding party leadership and how this may be reﬂected in senate voting
patterns on policies that were considered under special rules in the House.

Chapter 7 concludes the dissertation. I summarize my ﬁndings and their
implications for understanding congressional politics. I take a moment to step back and
note the shortcomings of my work, how these may be addressed in the future, and

speciﬁc research projects that may evolve from the work I have done.

 

CHAPTER 1
PARTY LEADERS, PRINCIPALS, AND THE INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN
CONTROVERSY OVER THE ROLE OF SPECIAL RULES

This chapter sets out to do three things. First, I establish a principal-agent
framework for the study of congressional leadership. I answer the question, why is it
useﬁd to study congressional leadership from an agency perspective? Here, I address
some important considerations of principal-agent models and their application to party
leaders in Congress. Then, I focus the discussion on the House Rules Committee as a
leadership institution and point to some of its roles that may affect the relationship
between party leaders and followers. Leaders as agents, I argue, may take various
institutional forms and affect the dynamics of the principal-agent relationship differently.
Therefore, the variation in leadership arrangements must be taken into account in order to
develop a principal-agent theory. Lastly, I discuss the ongoing controversy over the role
of special rules in the legislative process. Here, I review the relevant literature and
contrast the implications of my partisan agency model‘ with those of the competing

theories of legislative organization.

The Foundations of Principal-Agent Models

An agent’s power is conditioned upon the acquiescence of her principal(s).
Principals can choose, and sometimes refuse, to be led. The choice of whether to employ
a common agent and for what purpose depends in large part on the coherence or

agreement in goals among principals. Still, an agent’s behavior (e.g. strategies) and the

 

subsequent linkage to outcomes can affect the very choices made by principal(s). That is
to suggest, an agent’s power is not solely determined by factors outside her control. In
addition, the principal(s) may ﬁnd it more advantageous to employ agents under certain
conditions and contexts more so than at other times. These features make the relationship
between a principal and her agent inherently dynamic. The same features are important
in affecting the relationship between leaders and followers in Congress. Understanding
the conditions and dynamics involved in shaping the principal-agent framework is
particularly important for developing a theory of congressional leadership.2

Traditionally, agency performance is assessed based on the rules of the game
established by, and for the beneﬁt of, the principal. The problem for the principal is one
of institutional design. According to Moe the dilemma is that, “The agent has his own
interests at heart, and is induced to pursue the principal ’s objectives only to the extent
that the incentive structure imposed in their contract renders such behavior
advantageous” (1984: 757). Typically, the principal(s) choose an institutional
arrangement within which the agent seeks to maximize her payoff (McCubbins and Page
1986). The agent makes a choice within some feasible action space, a" e A, under
conditions of uncertainty (e.g. random state of nature). These choices involve the
commitment of services by the agent that produce mutually beneﬁcial payoffs for both
the agent and the principal. The payoff to each is a function of some state of nature (iii
66), Si unknown to the agent when the action, ai is chosen. The typical principal-agent

model is set up so that initial conditions like the state of nature and the contractual

 

' The model I develop views the Rules Committee as the agent of the majority party.

10

arrangement in the model are taken as given. Agents then, do the best they can under

these exogenous constraints (McCubbins and Page 1986).

LealdershiD Performance in the Agency C onﬂ

Certainly, many features of the principal-agent model are analogous to party
followers and leaders in Congress. Other features are less so, and as I will discuss later,
require a more dynamic approach. The application of agency theory to party leaders in
Congress is nothing new (Jones 1968; Cooper and Brady 1981; Rohde and Shepsle 1987;
Calvert 1987; F iorina and Shepsle 1989; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991; Cox and
McCubbins 1993). My theoretical contribution differs in that I make explicit some of the
endogenous effects involved with leadership strategies. By doing so, the theoretical
model is more complete for understanding the dynamic nature of congressional

leadership.

Agency Incentives

To begin drawing some parallels, the logic for employing an agent is similar to
that of a leader. The basis of agency theory revolves around mutual need (Eggertsson
1990; Maltzrnan 1997). Principals choose to use agents, and likewise, agents choose to
be used by principals because it serves some advantage.3 According to Fiorina and

Shepsle (1989: 20), “leadership is an institutional arrangement” created by the principal

 

2 Party followers and leaders in the legislative context are viewed analogously to principals and agents

respectively.
3 The ﬁrst-generation principal-agent models were developed initially by economists (see Holmstrom
1979; Grossman and Hart 1983).

ll

 

to obtain goals more effectively and with a higher probability than what the principal
could gain “without the coordination and enhanced productivity provided by the
leadership institution.” Similarly, Sinclair (1992 and 1998) has argued that leaders—in
their role as agents—solve collective action problems for members of the majority party.
Principal(s) may even delegate to their agents the power to punish fellow principals so as
to prevent shirking (Shepsle and Bonchek 1997). Party leaders then, provide services or
collective beneﬁts to party members and for their efforts receive some form of payment.4
Principals can tie an agent’s performance to their [the principal(s)’] own interests
through a contractual obligation. For example, party members in Congress have an
institutionalized incentive system for Shaping leadership performance. Ultimately, party
members have the power to nullify the principal-agent contract. That is, leaders must
stand for reelection at the beginning of every Congress. Leaders are not irreplaceable.’ A
leader’s status in the future is contingent upon his performance in the present. The
possibility of competition for leadership seats reinforces the leader’s incentive to be

responsive to the interests of the party organization.

Institutional Arrangements and the Coherence of Principals

The party membership then, develops institutional arrangements to constrain
leadership behavior, much like a contractual arrangement between a principal and her
agent. Moreover, party members can modify or alter the institutional arrangements to

better suit their goals as conditions relevant to the agency relationship change. According

 

‘ Party leaders receive institutional power and prestige which may be reward by itself. Alternatively, a

leader’s power can be used to pursue other objectives like passing personal policy initiatives or seeking
higher elective office.

[2

to Rohde and Shepsle (1987: 117), “It is the partisans who set the terms and establish
the conditions of leadership: they giveth and they can taketh away. ” Clearly, the
conditions of leadership that Rohde and Shepsle refer to are the institutional arrangements
within the legislature which are controlled by the majority party. Rohde and Shepsle go
on to say, “Members can alter the party and chamber rules that govern the distribution of
power within the House and hence the relationship between leaders and followers”
(1987: 120). From this perspective, institutional stability suggests that an equilibrium
relationship exists between principals and agents.

Contracts can be designed by principals to be highly selective in the recruitment
of agents. Similarly, institutionalized mechanisms are used by the party for the
recruitment of leaders in order to reduce problems associated with adverse selection. For
example, Hinckley’s (1970) comparative leadership analysis illustrates two parallel
institutional arrangements for the selection of congressional leaders. Here, she ﬁnds that
two distinct selection systems existed during the prereform era. The one for committee
chairs was based on seniority and the one for party leadership positions was based on the
party caucus. Interestingly, although different selection arrangements existed, each drew
leaders disproportionately from southern congressional districts. According to Hinkley,
the institutional mechanism for choosing party leaders was undeniably selective:
“Indeed, to name the congressmen who in the past two decades [1947-1969] have
ﬁdfilled the dual requirements of being (1 ) senior and Southern and yet (2) non-

conservative is virtually to give the list of Democratic party leaders” (1970: 284).

 

5 Maltzman (1997: 10) notes that in a principal-agent model, if one is completely dependent on the other
then the model breaks down.

Coherence in member goals is another important feature determining the
relationship between principals and agents. When agreement on goals among principals
is low, agency performance tends to be suboptimal. For example, Shepsle and Hume
(1984) change the traditional principal-agent dilemma into a strategic game between
heterogeneous competing principals. The principal’s problem here is more complex
because the institutional design needs to take into account, not only the agent, but also the
anticipated strategy of other principals. And as F erejohn (1986) illustrates in his model,
when the homogeneity condition of principals is relaxed the agent has the greatest level
of independence and can use one principal or faction against the other. Likewise, under
conditions of heterogeneity, leaders would not be inclined to pursue collective policy
objectives with the same frequency as they would under homogeneous conditions. If they
did choose to do so, leaders would likely alienate a subset of the party and risk their

future reelection as leaders (Cooper and Brady 1981; Rohde and Shepsle 1987).

Leadership Strategies and the Endogenous Conditions of Agency Performance

One important difference though, is that the “conditions” determining the
relationship between leaders and followers in Congress is more complex than the
traditional principal-agent model would suggest. Here, I argue that leadership behavior is
not simply a function of their preferences and the institutional arrangements designed by
the party.6 But instead, leadership actions have reciprocal effects on the conditions of

agency. Speciﬁcally, the conditions of agency that can be affected by leadership

 

° Hypothetically, if during the 104‘h Congress we could choose another GOP leader with the same ideal
point and institutional constraints, would we expect the same performance and outcomes to result?

14

 

strategies include the level of partisan coherence, institutional arrangements, and
congressional elections. Rohde and Shepsle touch on this point nicely, “institutional
arrangements are not independent of leadership motivations and strategies” (1987: 114).

A major shortcoming of the traditional agency model is in the assumption that
actions inﬂuence the principal-agent relationship only through their affect on the payoff
structure (Ross 1973: 134). The conditions that constrain agents under the traditional
model are exogenously determined. But, for party leaders in Congress, the conditions of
agency (e.g. institutional arrangements and coherence of the majority party) are really
partly determined by leaders themselves and so are endogenized.

For example, GOP leaders have been intensely concerned with the affects of
leadership strategy on the upcoming 2000 elections. At a recent GOP retreat,
Representative Thomas Davis (R-VA), Chairman of the National Republican
Congressional Committee “warned colleagues they need to accomplish some important
policy goals in the next two years or remain known as the party of impeachment” (LSJ,
2/20/99, 1A). The principal-agent relationship in Congress can be affected by leadership
strategies. These strategies, in turn, affect conditions within and external to Congress that
shape the relationship between the party and leaders (Cox and McCubbins 1993). Thus,
understanding leaders and followers through a principal-agent framework requires a

somewhat more dynamic approach.

Toward a Dynamic Model of Party Leadership
Ideally, Moe asserts that principals want an arrangement that “prompts the agent

to behave as the principal himself would under whatever conditions might prevail”

lS

(1984: 757). In this, I have argued that there exists at least one critical departure from
the traditional principal-agent model for the study of congressional leadership. Namely,
party leaders as agents of the majority party can affect the initial “conditions” that Moe
describes above. Moreover, party leaders are not totally constrained by institutional
arrangements and can to some extent shape the very structure in which they pursue
various objectives (Rohde and Shepsle 1987). The fact that leadership strategies can
affect these factors is where the endogenous aspect of leadership power comes into play.
The causal arrow of party leadership in Congress is not one way (see Figure 1 on the
following page). More speciﬁcally, the conditions of agency, or analogously, the
constraints imposed on congressional leaders cannot be viewed as strictly exogenous.
Figure 1 contrasts a static principal-agent model with that of a dynamic
congressional leadership model. In the agency framework, leaders don’t just operate
within exogenously determined constraints, but their actions can also affect the future
conditions that Shape the principal-agent relationship. The basis of leadership power then,
is conditioned on the principal-agent relationship and therein subject to certain
constraints. Some are imposed by principals, like institutional arrangements. Other
constraints are primarily exogenous, like the affects of congressional elections on the
distribution of member preferences.7 Still, leadership strategies can affect these

constraints, endogenizing the conditions for strong leadership in Congress.

 

7 Initial conditions for strong leadership are primarily driven by congressional elections (e.g. exogenous

forces) while the maintenance of a strong leadership organization may be a mixture of both exogenous and
endogenous sources.

16

FIGURE 1: Static vs. Dynamic Agency Models

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Static Principal/Agent
Model
PRINCIPAL
NATURE ,,
(Exogenous
it
AGENT
Dynamic Congressional
Leadership Model
MAJORITY
/ PARTY
A
v
N
ELECTIO S INSTITUTIONAL
ARRANGEMENTS
A
II
PARTY

LEADERSHIP

 

 

 

 

 

 

For example, Cooper and Brady (1981) argued that members of the majority party
played a critical role in determining the level of strength characteristic of party leaders
during the era of Speaker Reed and Cannon. They asserted, “For the Speaker to have the
power involved in Czar rule, a majority of the House members had to agree to bestow
such power. Since the House is organized on the basis of party and since during this
period the Republicans were usually in the majority, it was their potential for group
cohesion and loyalty that established the conditions for centralized leadership” (1981:
414). Certainly, cohesion among principals is an important component of the principal-
agent relationship, but as I have suggested previously, leadership strategies can affect the
dynamics of this relationship. It was Speaker Reed’s and Speaker Cannon’s subsequent
actions that largely determined the extent that they could maintain their powers
Similarly, Jones (1968) argued that Speaker Cannon could have prevented his own
demise. In drawing parallels between Speaker Joe Cannon (R-IL 1903-1911) and
Chairman Howard “Judge” Smith (D-VA) of the House Rules Committee, Jones asserted
that these two leaders could have preserved their powers in the long run by taking
different actions in the short run (1968: 645-646). Jones argued that leaders need to
protect their procedural majorities by giving in at times to the preferences of substantive
majorities.9

A more dynamic principal-agent model is needed to capture the partially

endogenous nature of congressional leadership. Much different than the relationship

 

‘ Indeed, as I discuss in Chapter 2, it was Cannon’s decision to use his powers in an arbitrary fashion that
eventually led to his downfall.

9 Jones suggested that Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-TX 1940-1947 and 1956-1961) was uniquely proﬁcient
at balancing procedural and substantive majorities-the ideal “middle-man” leader (1968: 646).

18

between a principal and his agent, party leaders in the House have the ability to affect
their own basis of strength. Explaining how these exogenous and endogenous causal
forces interact in affecting principal-agent relations is essential to understanding party
strength and the distribution of power in the House. That is, leadership strength depends
on how much power members choose to delegate, the choices and strategies leaders
themselves make in employing their powers, and how these choices actually affect, or are
perceived to affect, member goals (e.g. policy, reelection, power). The choices leaders
make condition member expectations that shape the future delegation of power or
conversely the extent that legislators will choose to constrain or reform leadership
powers.

Given the importance of structural arrangements to the relationship between
leaders and followers in Congress, it will be useful to next address some of the speciﬁc
institutional considerations of the Rules Committee as a leadership organization. First, I
will argue that the Rules Committee does function as a leadership institution. Then I will
discuss how these leadership roles and institutional features of the Committee relate to

the principal-agent framework.

The Rules Committee as a Leadership Institution

Forty years after the House rebuffed Cannonism by delegating agenda-setting
powers to the members of Rules, the House once again grappled with the issue of agency
control. The major organizational debates involving the Committee have been over
whether Rules should “act as a clearing house and agenda-making group, as the agent of

the leadership of the majority party, or as an agent of the Whole House that would

19

intuitively feel the ‘pulse of the House’ and review and edit the work of the legislative
committees” (Robinson 1963: 71; see also 57).

The institutional reforms coupled with the growing homogeneity of the majority
party caucus largely determined the outcome of this debate. Indeed, many of the
institutional changes to the House were designed for the enhancement and responsiveness
of leadership authority (Rohde 1991). This does not deny the possibility that the
institutional functions of the Rules Committee may continue to be inﬂuenced by multiple
principals. Still the Committee’s role as a leadership institution and the factors that shape
them have solidiﬁed its agency responsibilities to the majority party.

During the 1960’s, the Committee was like a proverbial “thorn in the side” of the
House Democratic leadership, but by the 1970’s it [the committee] was one of the
leadership’s strongest institutional allies (Oppenheimer 1977: 96). In the 94‘h Congress
(1975-1976), one staff member commented on the reforms’ effects on the Committee,
“The diﬁirrence now is that Bolling and the House Democratic leadership rarely lose in
the Rules Committee” (Oppenheimer 1977: 102). By the 106‘h Congress (1999-2000),
the role of the Committee as a leadership institution is even more clear. In response to a
reporter’s inquiry regarding the implications of prior policy disagreements between the
new Chairman of Rules‘0 and the GOP leadership, the member said: “None of that really
makes any difference... Whoever is the top member on Rules executes whatever the
party ’s game plan [is]. That’s what the job is all about” (RC 4/30/98: 32).

The members of Rules provide leadership services for their respective party. In

most instances, when tension arises between their own policy preferences and those of the

20

party, they are expected to tow the line. In fact, problems associated with adverse
selection (hiring the right agent) have been reduced because institutional arrangements
reinforce the loyalty of Rules Committee members to the party. For example, the
reduction in the number of seats on Rules between the 97‘h (1981-1982) and 98‘h (1983-
1984) Congress may have been done to intentionally strengthen the leadership
organization. According to Rohde and Shepsle (1987) the number of seats on Rules was
reduced because not enough members could be found that were willing to sit on the
committee exclusively (see also Erenhalt 1983). As an exclusive committee, leaders
would not have to worry that members on Rules would have their loyalties pulled toward
competing committee interests. In addition, the leadership could reduce the number of
seats because they were no longer threatened by a conservative coalition on the
Committee voting to block the party’s initiatives.”

The Committee serves as part of the leadership organization, working to achieve
partisan goals, and to better facilitate the linkage between leaders and the party
membership. According to Chairman Bolling: “In my judgment, the Rules Committee
should exercise the power on behalf of the leadership to forward bills, stop bills, give
bills an advantage or give them disadvantages. In other words, it ’s [Rules] an arm of the
leadership to forward the proposals of the party” (Matsunaga and Chen 1976: 7).
Certainly, these anecdotal examples support the conventional wisdom that the Rules
Committee is the ‘arm of the party leadership’ (Oppenheimer 1977; Rohde 1991; Sinclair

1995b; Aldrich and Rohde 1996a). Moreover, the empirical evidence supports the

 

‘° Rep. Dreier (R-Cal) replaced Gerald Solomon (R-NY) as Chairman of Rules in the 106‘‘1 Congress.

21

contention that the majority party members of Rules over time have become increasingly
responsive to the interests of party leaders and the majority party (see for example
Matsunaga and Chen 1976: 61-66; Cox and McCubbins 1993: 188-229; Maltzrnan

1997)

The Costs of Employing Leaders as Agents

An inherent by-product of the principal-agent relationship is the principal’s
incentive to reduce costs. The costs to principals result from the agent’s advantage in
information. The costs from information asymmetry take two speciﬁc forms: adverse
selection; and moral hazard. In this context, the former refers to the principal’s inability
to observe information regarding the agent’s ability and/or preferences from which the
agent’s decisions are based.12 The costs associated with the latter arise from the
principal’s inability to observe information that can discern whether or not the agent’s
efforts are in the principal’s best interest (Moe 1984: 751-755; Downs and Rocke 1995:
40; Brehm and Gates 1997: 25-26). Institutional solutions are designed to minimize
these costs by: selecting the right agents; structuring the incentive system to coerce
desired agency performance; and by establishing mechanisms for monitoring (Maltzman
1997). Issues of agency in relation to speciﬁc Rules Committee reforms are addressed in

Chapter 2.

 

” Indeed, Maltzrnan (1997: 172) presents evidence that at least partially conﬁrms the Committee’s
increased loyalty to the majority party caucus after the number of seats were reduced (1983-1984).

‘2 Principals lack information about agents because it may simply be unobservable or the costs of
obtaining information may be prohibitively high.

22

In general terms, costs to the party membership may be associated with issues of
moral hazard—the party’s inability to know whether or not the leader’s actions are in
their best interest. As the party grants more institutional resources to the leadership,
achieving partisan ends becomes more likely, but leaders are also in a position to exploit
gains. That is, the institutional powers that were originally granted to leaders to beneﬁt
the membership can also be turned against the membership. Moreover, when
confrontation between members and leaders does take place, the membership or a subset
thereof faces the potential retaliation of the leadership. Here, there also exists the
possibility of collective costs to the party’s reputation resulting from the electorate’s
perception that the party is internally divided and ineffective. Depending on the
leadership’s goals (e.g. maintaining majority party status) the leadership may have an
incentive to use their institutional resources in controlling the agenda via special rules to

selectively prevent the consideration of divisive policies.

Information, Agenda Control, and Legislative Opportunity

In the principal-agent context, the majority party caucus delegates powers (e.g.
agenda-control) to the Rules Committee.'3 As principals, party members face a similar
set of problems in that delegating rights involves risk. The majority party members want
to minimize the costs associated with using leaders as agents. By empowering the Rules
Committee with agenda-control powers, members create a situation in which leaders can

beneﬁt at the expense of the majority party. Often times, the advantage is an

 

‘3 Institutional powers can be thought of in the same sense that ‘user rights’ over some resource is granted
to an agent (Eggertsson 1990).

23

informational one. This may take speciﬁc forms like procedural or policy expertise. For
example, in the former, Rules Committee members may work closely with legislative
committees to devise strategies to improve legislative success (e.g. rules and coalition
building), while in the latter, Rules may play an intimate role in determining the
substantive components of legislation to be considered on the ﬂoor (e.g. amendments).
In either scenario, Rules Committee members have considerably greater information
regarding policies and their likelihood of success than most members of the majority
DENY-’4

Another potential cost for the rank-and-ﬁle associated with moral hazard may
result from the leadership’s control over the agenda and informational advantages. If
leaders act as poor agents, the membership risks that certain legislative opportunities that
the membership favors over others are not acted upon. Or worse, leaders might not make
the potential legislative opportunities known to the rest of the party. In addition, leaders
can use their informational advantage to manipulate members’ perceptions relating to the
linkage between strategies and goals (Jones 1989).

For example, in the early stages of the legislative process, especially during the
rules hearings, the Rules Committee can acquire signiﬁcant informational advantages
over much of the membership regarding the feasibility of policy alternatives. Here, the
membership at large does not have information about all possible policy options, but only

those options that are agreed upon by the Rules Committee and the pertinent legislative

 

14

According to Oppenheimer (1977: 109) House members expect that Rules members know the
likelihood of a bill being granted, speciﬁc legislative proposals, the likelihood of passage, and the
amendments that will be offered.

24

 

committee via the special rule." In this scenario, the narrowing of choices through
agenda control by the leadership inhibits the rank-and-ﬁle’s ability to assess the costs and
beneﬁts of those policy options that may be excluded. On this point, Riker (1988) asserts
that agenda control can dramatically reduce the likelihood of achieving equilibrium in
majority choice Situations (given one exists) when leaders have the ability to narrow
down the subset of alternatives. “Even if a given proﬁle over a larger Y does have an
equilibrium outcome, leaders still can manipulate the agenda to prevent its adoption if
voters do not know this outcome exists” (1988: 172).

The leadership’s control over the agenda and its ability to prohibit certain
alternatives could place members of the majority party in a Situation where they would
have preferred a particular alternative to that introduced by the party leadership, if they
were presented with a different set of choices. In sum then, granting institutional
authority can carry costs for the membership resulting from leaders taking advantage of
the rank-and-ﬁle’s inferior sources of information about potential legislative

opportunities.

Compensating Leaders
In return for performing valued leadership service, the Rules Committee members
are granted considerable inﬂuence in the House (Fenno 1973). Leadership rewards take

different forms. Policy initiatives introduced by Rules members may get preferential

 

'5 Bach and Smith (1988: III) argue that, “What happens between the end of committee markup and the
beginning of floor debate has become more important than ever before. What happens during this time—
during the oﬂ-stage negotiations and the Rules Committee 's formal meetings that follow—can have as
much eﬂect on the ﬁnal shape of legislation as anything that has happened already or will happen
thereafter”.

25

treatment. For example, during the 105‘“ Congress Chairman Solomon (R-N.Y.) of Rules
was allowed to propose an amendment to a transportation bill. Solomon’s amendment
was given special consideration by the Chairman of the legislative committee during
conference negotiations with the Senate.” When asked why Solomon’s controversial
amendment was going to be considered, Chairman Shuster (R-PA) replied, “Because
Solomon wants it, and he’s the chairman of the Rules Committee. Okay?” (WP, 5/22/98:
A19). Leaders may also receive reward from side payments that target policy beneﬁts in

their own congressional districts (see for example CQ 10/31/98: 2936-2937).

Reducing Agengy Costs

The Rules Committee: Temporal Change

In employing party leaders in an agency relationship, the rank-and-ﬁle are
naturally inclined to minimize agency costs. To reduce costs, the party membership has
largely relied upon the development of leadership institutions and changing the
institutional arrangements within Congress. Scholars have asserted that the institutional
reforms in general, and the over time changes to the Rules Committee in particular, have
facilitated the reduction of costs associated with the uncertainty17 of the legislative
process (Bach and Smith 1988; Sinclair 1997; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991; Maltzrnan

1997). This has been especially true for members of the majority party. Certainly, in

 

‘6 In fact, Solomon’s proposal was not reﬂected in either the House or Senate passed versions of the

highway bill and was therefore in violation of the Chamber’s standing rules (WP, 5/22/98: A19).

'7 The view of uncertainty as used here is the result of incomplete infonnation—a lack of knowledge about
preferences and/or strategies of other actors and how these would affect the passage of policy (Bach and
Smith 1988; Fiorina and Shepsle 1989).

26

choosing to reform, the rank-and-ﬁle considered the costs associated with leaving the
Committee alone to operate as an independent power center vs. subjugating it [the
committee] to a subserviant status. The reforms directed toward the Rules Committee
decreased this type of uncertainty because the ability to affect policy through agenda

control was taken out of the hands of conservative members.

Coordination for Collective Action

The institutional changes that occurred during the 19605-19705 were in effect a
collective choice by the majority party caucus to provide party leaders with power over
the Rules Committee. In order to build party coalitions within the decentralized power
structures of the post-reform House, one means adopted by the majority party was the
“strategy of inclusion” (Sinclair 1995a). This refers to an explicit attempt to get as many
majority party members involved in the coalition-building process as possible. Granting
the Speaker control over majority seats on Rules was part of this expansion. According
to Sinclair: “In sum, Rules Committee Democrats may have lost their independence of the
Speaker, but in return, those who are interested have become part of the leadership”
(1989: 144).

Similarly, the co-optation of Rules into the leadership organization serves another
means to reduce costs, especially in terms of coordination. By incorporating the
Committee into the leadership, the party leaders have the ability to use carefully
constructed rules to structure ﬂoor choices. Indeed, Sinclair (1989: 146) argues that the

power to structure choices can be used as “a means of coercing members collectively.”

27

The Committee’s evolving ﬁrnctions have increasingly provided services for the
rank-and-ﬁle members of the majority party. One of these roles is known as the “heat
shield” in which the Committee takes the blame for controversial policies instead of the
party leadership or membership more generally (Oppenheimer 1977; see also Matsunaga
and Chen 1976: 29-31).” In essence, the Committee is in a position to absorb
institutional blame for issues that may be internally divisive for the party membership.
The Committee can protect the party membership because through special rules it
controls the alternatives that reach the ﬂoor, the timing, and often times the context in
which decisions are cast.

For example, during the 105‘h Congress the leadership brought forward a
conference rule—characterized as unprecedented in its “heavy-handedness”—that would
likely strip away food stamps for legal immigrants, thus likely killing the Agriculture
Reauthorization bill (SR. 1150) and sending frenzied farm state voters to the polls with
an ax to grind (WP, 5/23/98: A10). Despite the leadership’s efforts, the rule was
trounced with the help of a large number of Republicans and a nearly uniﬁed minority
party.l9 Hoping that leadership wounds would heal quickly, the Rules Committee
Chairman Gerald Solomon (R-N.Y.) was left to publicly defend the rule and in effect the
leadership’s conservative position saying that, “it [the rule] was necessary to prevent a

retreat ﬁom the 1996 welfare reform bill, new costs to state and local governments and

egregious violations of House rules” (WP 5/23//98: A10).

 

" A quote by Rules member B.F. Sisk (D-Calif) emphasizes this point, “Because of pressures, you want
to try to protect your leadership, so the Rules Committee takes the heat” (Matsunaga and Chen 1976: 31).
'9 The conference report mle—HRes 446—was rejected by a vote of 120 to 289. Democrats voted 2 to
190 against the rule and Republicans voted 118 to 98 in support (CQ 5/30/98: 1474).

28

 

1F. ’7'! -1-1- n .r.‘

In addition, Oppenheimer (1977) argues that the committee fulﬁlls the role of
“ﬁeld commander” for party leaders. Majority party members of the committee
performing this role have taken on the responsibility to act as extensions of the party
leadership. A senior Rules Committee member described the ﬁeld commander role in the
following manner: “Intelligence comes from us to the leadership. Our responsibility is
to inform, advise, and execute....At times you make leadership decisions for leadership”
(Oppenheimer 1977: 104). In sum then, the ﬁeld commander role of the majority party
members on Rules provide a valuable service in collecting and relaying information as

well as executing leadership strategies.

Monitoring

Extending the leadership circle also enhanced the party’s ability to monitor its
agents, and thus reduce the costs associated with moral hazard issues (e.g. maverick
committee chairs). The monitoring capacity of the Rules Committee is especially relevant
to reducing the majority party’s information costs regarding the committee system. The
role(s) shifted after the Democratic reforms put in place institutional mechanisms
promoting the panel’s responsiveness to the majority party rank-and-ﬁle. Take for
example, the Committee’s role as “trafﬁc cop”. Before the reforms, Rules ensured that
committee legislation met perceived expectations of the chamber, if not, the committee
prevented policies from reaching the ﬂoor (Robinson 1963; Matsunaga and Chen 1976;
Oppenheimer 1977: 102). After the reforms, the panel’s agency role was more inclined

to serve the interests of the majority party (Oppenheimer 1977: 103). Instead of a

29

legislative cemetery, the Committee now proactively monitors and coordinates majority
party initiatives within the committee system.

Indeed, the Rules Committee became part of the leadership’s institutionalized
monitoring system over legislative committees (Maltzrnan 1997: 76). The monitoring
ﬁrnction of Rules is quite inclusive because nearly two-thirds of the House’s major
legislation brought to the ﬂoor must ﬁrst request and receive a special rule from the
Committee (Sinclair 1997). The Rules Committee can substantially reduce the costs of
monitoring committee behavior because it is at the center of the legislative process,
between the committee’s proposal and ﬂoor consideration. Maltzrnan (1997: 76) notes
that: “House leaders, like the Rules Committee, serve on behalf of their caucus as an
external monitor or auditor of committee performance.”

Special rules may also be vital for communicating information to the
noncommittee members in both political parties. According to Chairman Bolling, special
rules are used to ensure that the leadership’s policy position (if one is taken) is translated
into policy choices (Oppenheimer 1977). Often times, members not on the committee of
jurisdiction don’t have time to consider legislation until the rule is proposed on the ﬂoor
(Bach and Smith 1988). During rules debates on the ﬂoor, Rules Committee members
routinely discuss the details of the rule, policy, amendments, waivers and the process in
which the legislation has been handled. Often times, the ranking minority member of
Rules expresses concern to the membership whether or not the rule and/or bill is in the
minority party’s interest. The length of the debates in the congressional record and by
inference the concerns expressed by minority party members have dramatically increased

over the last twenty years. If the committee’s proposal doesn’t conform to the

30

expectations of the majority party contingent on Rules, the Committee can block or tailor

the special rule to advantage the leadership’s position.

CongressionaL Leadership and Special Rules

Wilson’s (1885) famous work, “Congressional Government” viewed partisan
conﬂict in Congress as the result of powerless leadership institutions. According to him,
weak leaders were to blame for the institutions failure to develop bipartisan policy
agreement. Conversely, Rohde and Shepsle maintained that partisan coalitions are the
consequence of strong leaders. That is, strong leaders can use their powers to achieve
partisan policy objectives, so according to them, Wilson had “reversed cause and effect”
(1987: 111).

Similarly, I have argued that there exists a dynamic element to leadership powers.
When leadership institutions are strong, the endogenous inﬂuence of strategies in pursuit
of collective objectives can often times contribute to partisan conﬂict within the
legislature (Marshall, Prins, and Rohde 1998; Hixon and Marshall 1999). The changes
occurring to Rules are an excellent example of this dynamic in congressional politics.
Party members granted the leadership control over the Rules Committee so that its
powers (e.g. special rules) could be added to the leadership’s arsenal of tools to pursue
partisan objectives. The increasing levels of partisan conﬂict over special rules then, has
been driven by conditions conducive to strong leadership institutions and the leader’s
capacity to exercise these powers for the beneﬁt of the majority party.

Conditions of leadership within Congress have been dramatically shaped in the

past several decades by congressional elections. The transformation that has taken place

31

in congressional elections has signiﬁcantly changed the distribution of member
preferences within and between the political parties in Congress (Poole and Rosenthal
1997; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 1997). These changes increased member
incentives for intra-party cooperation and the strengthening of party institutions
generally. As I have suggested, the changes in the homogeneity of policy preferences
within the majority party caucus has important repercussions for the centralization of
leadership powers and how these powers are used in the legislative process. In particular,
the party’s delegation of powers to its leaders has facilitated greater control over the
Rules Committee and heightened the leadership’s procedural and agenda setting powers.
Thus special rules have become an important leadership tool employed to achieve
partisan objectives (Sinclair 1999).

Up to this point, I have argued that the principal-agent model can offer valuable
insight into the relationship between leaders and followers in Congress. However, I have
also pointed out some of the Shortcomings of the traditional agency model as applied to
congressional leadership. Here, I have suggested that a dynamic theoretical model is
needed to capture the ‘endogenized’ conditions for leadership. In particular, I have
emphasized the linkage between leadership strategies and partisan coherence and
institutional arrangements. In the second part of this chapter, I discussed the changing
institutional role of the Rules Committee and special rules. I addressed how the
committee’s institutional functions reduce agency costs and produce desired services to
members of the majority party. In this last section I want to address the implications of
this institutionalized agency relationship for the controversy over the role of special rules

in the House.

32

Theories of Legislative Organization and the Controversy Over Special Rules
Theories of legislative organization seek to explain how institutional resources are
allocated within legislatures and their implications for collective policy making (see for
example Weingast and Marshall 1988; Baron and Ferejohn 1989; Krehbiel 1991; Aldrich
1995). The challenge is to better understand how members balance the pursuit of
multiple individual goals—like good public policy, reelection, and institutional power—
with the need to cooperate for the provision of collective and institutional goods (F enno
1973). It is commonly agreed that organizational structures are important to collective
choice processes. However, congressional theories tend to differ regarding the role of
institutions in affecting public policies (see Groseclose and King 1997). In this debate,
informational, distributive, and partisan theories make theoretical and empirical claims
regarding the relevance of institutional features on public policies that are oﬁen times
contradictory. The controversy over special rules represents one of the central

institutional features that differentiates the competing theories.

The Role of Special Rules

The study of special rules is inherently important because of the linkage to the
understanding of political outcomes. In fact, scholars seem to agree that special rules are
not neutral in their effect—they always advantage some outcome(s) over a feasible set of
possible policy outcomes (Bach and Smith 1988; Krehbiel 1988; Sinclair 1995b: 147).
In this regard, special rules may serve multiple purposes depending on the goals and the

legislative context that the membership faces.

33

Informational Theory

The informational perspective offered by Gilligan and Krehbiel (1987; 1990) and
Krehbiel (1987; 1990; 1991; 1993; 1997a) represents one of the most extensive and
notable theories that departs from the orthodox lore regarding the role of institutions in
affecting legislative policies. Krehbiel’s neo—institutional approach challenges scholars to
show that organizational arrangements like the committee system, political parties, and
intra-institutional procedures are relevant, independent of majoritarian processes, in
shaping the direction and/or content of legislation. Certainly, this challenge has greatly
contributed to the empirical and theoretical development that has been amassed in
relation to this debate (see for example Shepsle and Weingast 1995).

Krehbiel’s (1991) informational theory is based on two fundamental ideas,
uncertainty and majoritarianism. The former reﬂects the inherent uncertainty between
policies that members choose and their consequences. The latter, which is particularly
relevant here is that majority rule processes govern the properties of the entire
institution.20 In effect, the majoritarian design of legislatures, determines both the policy
and procedural realm of collective decision making. This majoritarian feature ensures
that ﬁnal legislative products are representative of the Chamber’s interest. Institutions
then, have no exclusive relevance in affecting policy outcomes independent of
majoritarian features which are determined by the central preferences of the chamber

majority.

 

2° Majority rule features are applied ex ante—the election of members by plurality vote, and ex post—

ﬁnal disposition of any question in the legislature requires a simple majority choosing between some
alternative and the status quo.

34

From the informational perspective, special rules are an example of optimal
institutional devices designed to extract information from committees in order to promote
pareto policies, cooperative behavior, and policy stability (Krehbiel 1989: 165 and 1991:
191). According to this view, special rules are used by the legislature to structure an
underlying incentive for committees to produce information (e.g. gains-from-
specialization). This information is then shared with the chamber and reduces collective
uncertainty surrounding policy outcomes. More speciﬁcally, the chamber exchanges
restrictive rules to facilitate the passage of policies developed by heterogeneous
committees in return for the committee’s production of information." From the
committee’s perspective, the marginal beneﬁts that may result from the procedural
advantage of a restrictive rule is greater than the costs of specialization.

Restrictive rules then, induce the committees to invest in specialization and share
their expert resources with the chamber, so that the legislature is able to make the most
informed collective choices possible. Gilligan and Krehbiel’s (1987) formal model
suggests restrictive procedures result in policy outcomes that are more frequently
mutually beneﬁcial to the committee and parent chamber than those yielded via open
rules. The expectation is that when the chamber provides a restrictive rule to a particular
policy, that adopted policy won’t diverge much from the preferences of the median
legislator.

The informational model offered by Gilligan and Krehbiel 1987 and Krehbiel

1991 makes several predictions regarding rule choice. To summarize the empirical

 

2‘ In contrast, outlying or homogeneous committees contribute relatively less informational advantages
and produce policies divergent from the chamber median. These policies may receive open rules so that

35

predictions: (1) Legislation from committees with heterogeneous memberships should be
increasing in the likelihood of receiving restrictive rules. (2) In contrast, legislation from
committees with homogeneous memberships (e.g. high demanders or committee outliers)
should be decreasing in the likelihood of receiving restrictive rules. (3) Legislation
requiring high investment costs in terms of Specialization should be increasing in the
likelihood of receiving restrictive rules. These predictions of rule choice summarized at

the end of each theoretical rationale will be addressed empirically in Chapter 5.

Distributive Theory

According to the distributive rationale, the organization of Congress reﬂects the
membership’s desire for reelection (Mayhew 1974). Institutions are used by the
legislature to facilitate cooperation so that individual reelection-related gains-from-trade
can be realized (Weingast and Marshall 1988). The committee system provides the
membership with an exchange mechanism so that individual legislators can trade
inﬂuence. Legislative trading is possible because the inﬂuence a member gives up in
policy areas of low interest does not exceed the gains in inﬂuence a member receives
from those policy areas of high interest. In this fashion, a coalition of minorities (a
willing majority) through cooperation and institutional mechanisms are able to fashion
support for policies that serve the particularistic interests of a small number of members
(Aldrich and Rohde 1997-1998).

From this perspective, special rules may be used to protect legislative agreements

that allocate speciﬁc constituent-related beneﬁts through the committee system. In the

 

they can then be changed on the ﬂoor (Krehbiel 1991).

36

gains-from-trade context, restrictive rules tend to be used on distributive policies that
concentrate beneﬁts to committee members and allocate the costs to the rest of the
chamber membership (Weingast and Marshall 1988; Baron and Ferejohn 1989). Baron
(1991) argues that some distributive policies will be granted open rules to eliminate the
most inefficient policies.

The predictions for rule choice made by the distributive framework are somewhat
less precise. Most distributive arguments assert that (see Shepsle and Weingast 1995;
Krehbiel 1991; Baron and Ferejohn 1989): (1) policies that concentrate beneﬁts on a
limited number of congressional districts and spread the costs to the rest of the

membership should be increasing in the likelihood of receiving restrictive rules.

Partisan Theory

The partisan perspective emphasizes the centrality of political parties as a key
feature in legislatures. Parties can provide collective beneﬁts for party members within
the legislative and electoral arenas. For example, Cox and McCubbins (1993) assert that
through the creation of a valuable reputation with the electorate, political parties produce
reelection beneﬁts for individual members. Party leaders utilize their institutional powers
to provide policy beneﬁts that may disproportionately favor the interests of the majority
party (Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991; Rohde 1991; Aldrich and Rohde 1997-1998;
Sinclair 1992 and 1998). For example, a leader’s ability to affect policy varies across
issues, but on issues salient to the party’s legislative agenda, their powers can be used to
coordinate the passage of policies that are more in line with the interests of the majority

party (Rohde 1992b; 1995b).

37

Similarly, there exists a conditional element in how party leaders apply special
rules. To be clear, the extent that party leaders use special rules as a partisan tool varies
across issues and contexts. The restrictiveness of a rule doesn’t necessarily imply that the
procedure is designed to advantage partisan interests, although this has been an
increasingly common occurrence over time. In addition, partisan beneﬁts from the use of
special rules may accumulate from less visible procedural victories over the course of a
Congress by successfully protecting a section of a bill from amendments, waiving points
of order regarding a controversial violation of House procedure, or even just by giving
the leadership a mechanism to regulate precious ﬂoor time.

More importantly, party leaders may use special rules to control the agenda and
frame member choices in such a way that inter-party differences are magniﬁed (Sinclair
1995b). Indeed, this would be an example of the way in which leadership strategies
endogenize the degree of partisan agreement among the membership. For example,
special rules that allow for the consideration of a minority substitute proposal but prohibit
narrower policy alterations (e.g. amendments) can be used by leaders to exacerbate or
focus partisan differences on certain issue dimensions. In this fashion, rules are perceived
as fair because the minority is granted the opportunity to propose a policy alternative, but
are viewed strictly in partisan terms and therefore dominated by partisan conﬂict (Bach
and Smith 1988; Sinclair 1995b: 220). In various degrees then, depending on the
leadership’s objectives, party leaders can pursue certain strategies that may enhance or
mitigate partisan division over policy within the institution.

Partisan policy divisions in the electorate that can mobilize member support

within Congress represents a central feature for predictions of rule choice in partisan

38

theories. According to Aldrich and Rohde (1996a), when the majority party is cohesive
on issues that are central to partisan divisions in the electorate, then the partisan rationale
suggests that special rules would be used to advantage policies on the party’s agenda that
are reﬂective of these divisions. Sinclair’s (1992; 1995b; 1998; 1999) partisan rationale
suggests that the partisan division over policy and leadership involvement in the
legislative process are both important predictors of restrictive rules. According to her,
leadership involvement indicates an overriding partisan interest and the potential
vulnerability of the policy from coordinated opposition by the minority party. Sinclair’s
ﬁndings support her over time claims that important correlates of restrictive rules include
leadership involvement, policy vulnerability, and the major policies on the party’s agenda
(e.g. omnibus legislation).

In addition, Dion and Huber (1996) have also developed a formal model that adds
to the debate on special rules. In their model, the preferences of the members from the
Rules Committee in relation to the legislative committee are important in determining
whether or not a bill receives a restrictive rule. Their assertion that the Rules Committee
contributes to non-centrist policy outcomes is contrary to the median-dominated claims of
Krehbiel’s (1991; 1997b) informational theory. Dion and Huber’s inferences support the
conventional wisdom that the Rules Committee is the arm of the party leadership. They
conclude: “Within the postreform era, the Rules Committee clearly ﬁmctions as an arm of
the majority party leadership, and thus it is the preferences of those majority party
leaders which determine the structure of Rules Committee interests” (Dion and Huber

1996: 43).

39

To summarize the partisan predictions regarding rule choice: (1) Party leaders
Should be more likely to use restrictive rules on policies (if they are needed to pass on the
ﬂoor) that are reﬂective of dominant partisan cleavages in the electorate. (2) Leadership
involvement in the legislative process tends to indicate that policies are of substantial
importance to the party and that they may be vulnerable to defeat at the hands of
concerted minority party efforts. Therefore, bills that are both important to the party’s
priorities and vulnerable to defeat should be increasing in the likelihood of receiving
restrictive rules. (3) The closer the policy preferences of the Rules Committee are to the
policy preferences of the legislative committee, the more likely that the policy should
receive a restrictive rule.

The partisan perspective that I develop in this dissertation is consistent with the
predictions made by the other partisan arguments (especially Aldrich and Rohde 1996a;
Sinclair 1998; 1999). I argue that leadership institutions including the House Rules
Committee can be more accurately understood as agents of the majority party.
Accordingly, it is largely the preferences of the majority party membership that determine
the behavior of the Committee. Leaders as agents would have an incentive to use special
rules to pull policies toward the preferred position of the majority party. The principal-
agent model I offer leads to the following prediction: (4) When the party’s policy
preferences are more extreme relative to the majority party contingent of the legislative
committee, then the policy should be increasing in the likelihood of receiving a restrictive
rule.

In sum, the extent that leaders are capable and willing to use Special rules to serve

the majority party depend on the dynamic conditions related to the coherence of the

40

majority party, institutional arrangements, and congressional elections. In addition, I
have argued that party leaders can use strategies (e. g. special rules) to shape conditions of
agency, such that, a leader’s behavior is not totally determined by exogenous constraints.
Instead, leadership strategies are endogenous with respect to the conditions that shape the
principal-agent relationship. Special rules have become an increasingly important tool in
the leadership’s repertoire to pursue partisan objectives, thereby enhancing their standing
with the majority party and their own relative level of power.

In Chapter 2, I discuss the institutional reforms to the Rules Committee. These
reforms have been addressed by many scholars, but not explicitly from an agency
perspective (Robinson 1963; Jones 1968; F ox and Clapp 1970; Oppenheimer 1977; Cox
and McCubbins 1993). I explain how the over time institutional changes affecting the
Rules Committee can be understood from a principal-agent perspective of congressional
leadership. Here, I draw out the empirical predictions of the theory. In this chapter, I
argue that the dramatic changes in the responsiveness of the Rules Committee to majority
party interests reﬂects the party’s success in dealing with issues related to “adverse
selection” and “moral hazard”. In the vernacular of organizational theory, the party
caucus over a period of time has been able to integrate the functions of the Rules

Committee in order to best serve the party (Cooper 1977: 151).

41

CHAPTER 2
THE DELEGATION OF INSTITUTIONAL POWER AND THE PARTISAN

IMPLICATIONS OF SPECIAL RULES IN THE U.S. HOUSE OF
REPRESENTATIVES

“Political institutions serve two very diﬂerent purposes. 0n the one hand, they help
mitigate collective-action problems, particularly the commitment and enforcement
problems so debilitating to political exchange, and thus allow the various actors in
politics to cooperate in the realization of gains ﬁom trade. 0n the other hand, political
institutions are also weapons of coercion and redistribution. They are the structural
means by which political winners pursue their own interests, often at the great expense of
political losers” (Moe 1990: 213).
Introduction

I don’t view the dual institutional functions Moe describes above as being
necessarily in opposition to one another. Indeed, the institutional initiatives of party
leaders may be designed (perhaps out of necessity) to simultaneously solve collective
action problems faced by the majority party and burden the minority party with most of
the costs of collective action. The achievement of a leader’s objectives are tied to his/her
institutional powers via the majority rank-and-ﬁle, so, leaders have the incentive to use
their tools to pursue partisan ends as the rank-and-ﬁle’s inﬂuence over those powers
increase. That is, in order to persist in his/her station, a leader must effectively fulﬁll the
role of agent to the majority party. As the majority party has become more homogeneous

over time, leadership powers have not only increased, but have become more important to

the pursuit of collective goals of the majority party.

42

One important aspect of the leadership’s increase in power was the transformation
of the Rules Committee, from an independent autonomous committee during the textbook
Congress, to a committee characterized after the reforms as a leadership institution
(Oppenheimer 1977; Rohde 1991; Sinclair 1995a). Indeed, Shepsle suggests that the
Rules Committee will become a central feature of the emerging postreform equilibrium in
Congress for the purpose of coordinating the achievement of collective partisan ends
(1989: 265). The theory developed here emphasizes the dynamic institutional
relationship between the Rules Committee and the majority party that has played an
important role in the resurgence of strong parties over time. Party leaders have become
more reliant on the Rules Committee to control the ﬂow of legislative business and their
control over special rules has allowed them to advantage policy initiatives collectively
preferred by the majority party. The changing institutional role of the Rules Committee
into the “arm of the leadership” in effect has meant that party leaders have a greater
opportunity to pursue policies important to the majority party (Oppenheimer 1977: 114).

In a series of reforms taking place during the 19608-19708, the Democratic
majority chose to institutionalize an agency relationship with the Rules Committee.
During this period, the Democratic caucus could have striped the committee of its
powers, as was done to the House Speakership during the revolt in 1910. However,
instead of dismantling the Committee’s power, the majority party decided it would better
serve their collective interests to delegate or incorporate the Rules Committee into the
leadership. So, by creating an institutional arrangement that made the Rules Committee
part of the leadership, the majority party was able to establish greater control. In other

words, the institutional reforms established a principal-agent relationship that ensured the

43

Committee would be responsive to the interests of the majority party.l Greater control
over the Committee has also enhanced the leadership’s ability to use special rules to
advantage the party’s electoral and policy goals (Sinclair 1999).

The Rules Committee and the choice of special rules have been at the core of
institutional design controversies among congressional theorists because of their pivotal
linkage between committee and ﬂoor decision making. According to Bach and Smith,
the study of special rules and the role of the Rules Committee provides an excellent
vantage point in assessing the overall changes that occurred during and after the reform
era (1988: 8). The Committee’s role as traffic cop not only sets it at an institutional
juncture between legislative committees, leaders, and the House membership but also at
a procedural juncture that determines what advantages, if any, and under what
circumstances that committee proposals will be considered on the House ﬂoor. In the
informational, distributive, and partisan rationales, special rules can be thought of as a
theoretical linchpin between a division of labor system and the achievement of collective
and/or individual goalsz. Each congressional rationale, however, offers a different role of
special rules in the legislative process.

The study of special rules, then, is an integral component to congressional
theories and for understanding collective decision making. Special rules are granted by
the Rules Committee and considered privileged motions in the House for the purpose of

structuring the House’s legislative business. In effect, special rules determine when and

 

' In general, the reforms put in place institutional mechanisms designed to make those individuals [leaders]
holding institutional powers dependent on the party membership (Rohde 1991).

2 There are many distinct contributions within these three contemporary theories of legislative
organization. However, it is important to note that other theories exist, like the bicameral rivalry theory
(see Dierrneier and Myerson 1996).

44

which bills will be considered on the House ﬂoor, the length of time a bill can be
amended, and which amendments (if any) will be allowed to the bill. So the study of
special rules in the legislative process is extremely important, not only because rules can
determine the content of legislation, but also because they can deternrine whether or not a
bill will be brought to the ﬂoor for consideration in the ﬁrst place. Moreover,
congressional scholars have argued that special rules can be extremely important in
shaping the decision context in which members must make choices (Aldrich and Rohde
1998a; Sinclair 1998 and 1999). According to these scholars, party leaders can use
special rules as a device to focus membership choices along certain policy dimensions or
lines of conﬂict in order to affect policy decisions.

The following anecdotal account taken from a debate over a special rule during
the 105‘“ Congress underscores the institutional relationship characterizing the Rules
Committee as part of the leadership and that special rules are used by party leaders as
devices that help them fulﬁll their agency role to the majority party. In other words,
special rules are used as leadership tools to pursue the policy objectives of the rank-and-
ﬁle. The rule would have made in order a conference report for an agricultural research
and crop insurance bill.3 In expressing his frustration over the rule (hres446),
Representative Hefner (D-NC) declared, “I would imagine the press releases are already
out for those that are speaking against this. So and so voted to kill crop insurance so you
can get food stamps for aliens. It will not say legal aliens; it will just say aliens, and it
will make it sound so ugly and so vicious...This is not about a conference report. The

Committee on Rules is the Speaker’s committee. It is now, it has always been, and they

45

do what the Speaker asks them to do. It has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with all the
good things that are in this bill” (CR 5/22/98: H3 769).

The conﬂict over this rule centered around a waiver that protected a conference
provision never considered in either chamber which would undermine the reauthorization
of food stamps to needy aliens. In effect, the leadership presented members with a
choice: either support the rule thereby preventing the reauthorization of food stamps, but
provide sorely needed crop insurance, or defeat the rule and jeopardize passage of crop
insurance but leave open the possibility of food stamp reauthorization. As Dick Armey
(R-TX) explained, “Everybody has understood, and for some period of time now we have
been unable to solve the riddle of how to bring this legislation related to crop insurance
to the floor because it was burdened with provisions that would be objected to by the
majority of the people in the majority conference. Now we have found a rule that makes
it possible. If members vote for this rule, ....we can get crop insurance....we can get
research centers paid for. If members want to go back to their districts and say, I
scuttled the plane at takeoff I defeated the rule because it was more important for me to
have things, provisions of this bill that are outside of the scope of its intent, that relate to
the extension of the time under which people who are legal aliens can get food stamps,
because that was more important to me than you and your crop insurance in Iowa and
North and South Dakota and Kansas, go ahead and make that vote” (CR 5/22/98:

H3763).

 

3 The rule (hres446) was voted down, Democrats (2, 190) and Republicans (118, 98).

46

 

 

Theoretical Qpestions and Empirical Implications: Summatl

Of particular interest to my theoretical approach is the relationship between the
party leadership in the House of Representatives, their institutional arm—the House
Committee on Rules, and the members of the majority party. This theoretical
undertaking addresses how members of the majority party have exerted collective control
over the Rules Committee, with its key agenda setting and procedural powers, and how,
under certain conditions partisan advantages can be realized for the majority party. The
theory I offer is inspired by the work of Rohde (1991), Cox and McCubbins (1993), and
Sinclair (1995a) who have offered theoretical foundations for understanding the rise of
strong party organization within Congress.

In this chapter I address the following theoretical questions. First, to understand
the underlying agency relationship that has developed over time between the Rules
Committee and the majority party, one must ﬁrst have a theory to explain, why members
of the majority party would be willing to empower their leaders with control over the
Rules Committee in the ﬁrst place? Secondly, how have the institutional changes over
time facilitated the control and responsiveness of the Rules Committee to the majority
party? In other words, what factors have led to the changing institutional role of the
Rules Committee, which prior to the reform era had been characterized as one of the most
powerful and independent institutions within the modern House, and after the reforms as
a committee ﬁrmly under the leadership’s control and increasingly responsive to majority
party interests (Robinson 1963). Lastly, what is the signiﬁcance of this principal-agent
relationship for understanding procedural choice, policy decision making, and theories

of legislative organization more generally?

47

I theorize that the Rules Committee acts as the agent of the majority party and this
view has speciﬁc empirical implications that reﬂect on the broad questions stated above.
In brief, if the Rules Committee acts as agent of the majority party, then, I expect to ﬁnd
evidence that special rules are used to affect the collective policy objectives of the
membership. To test this expectation, I will empirically assess whether or not (and to
what extent) the goals and/or policy preferences of the majority party systematically
affect the likelihood that bills receive restrictive rules. Moreover, the theory I offer is
dynamic so, the extent that majority party preferences will systematically affect this
likelihood should vary over time dependent on the homogeneity of the party, the party’s
inclinations to delegate power to leadership institutions, the issues on the legislative
agenda, and because the effects of the institutional reforms were not instantaneous.
Secondly, I expect to ﬁnd that the behavior of the Rules Committee should change over
time as the institutionalized agency relationship with the majority party takes effect.
Speciﬁcally, the Rules Committee should become less likely to use its negative powers to
block legislation preferred by the majority party. In addition, I expect to ﬁnd evidence in
majority and minority member voting patterns on amendments, special rules, and ﬁnal
passage of bills that reﬂect the over time development of this agency relationship.
Finally, I will bring to bear empirical evidence on these questions that reﬂects on the
systematic linkage between party support on restrictive rules and the ﬁnal passage of
policies enacted in the House.

I begin this chapter by taking into consideration the context of the ‘textbook
Congress’ and the electoral forces at work shaping member incentives that eventually led

to the institutional changes during the reforms between the 19608-19708 (Shepsle 1989).

48

I offer a theory based on work by Rohde (1991) and Sinclair (1995a; 1998) that explains
the logic behind why members of the Democratic majority might want to reform the
Rules Committee and how the electoral and institutional changes over time have shaped
their incentives to do so. In addition, the principal-agent model offers insight into the
speciﬁc institutional changes that have facilitated this relationship between the majority
party and the Committee. Here, I integrate some of the central issues in principal-agent
models (e.g. moral hazard, monitoring, and adverse selection) and how these issues can
be used to understand the institutional changes taking place between the Rules
Committee and the majority party caucus. Then, I discuss the signiﬁcance of the Rules
Committee as a leadership institution and why party leaders have become increasingly
reliant on special rules as a partisan tool to advantage the interests of the majority party
and how the principal-agent model can be used to explain changes in their use over time.
Finally, I will address the empirical implications and hypotheses from the principal-agent
model in terms of committee behavior, member voting behavior, factors affecting the
likelihood a bill receives a restrictive rule, and the systematic linkage (if any) between

special rules and enacted policies in the House and Senate.

Theoretical Issues: The Textbook Congress, Institutional Change, and the
Resurgence of Strong Parties in the House

The Egglv Beginnings.“ Ebb and; Flow of Leadership Power and the House Rules
Committee

In early Congresses the jurisdiction of the House Rules Committee was somewhat

sparse, but its institutional signiﬁcance or potential thereof did not go unnoticed by the

49

party leadership (Ripley 1967; Rohde 1991).‘ Even before the Rules Committee was
recognized as a permanent standing committee, Speakers routinely appointed themselves
as chairman from the 35‘h Congress (1 857-185 8) until the revolt against “Uncle Joe”
Cannon (R-Ill.) in the 61“ Congress (1909-1910). For example, during the 51“ Congress
(1889-1890) Speaker Reed (R-ME) used his dominant position on the Rules Committee
to write what is known as “Reed’s Rules” (Rohde and Shepsle 1987).5 In no uncertain
terms, the Rules Committee played an important role in strengthening Speaker Reed’s
hand in the face of a narrow majority party. Even more, Ripley (1967: 18-20)
characterized the House Committee on Rules during this period as an instrument of party
government. By 1880, the committee’s institutional signiﬁcance was considerable in that
control over the committee meant control over House affairs (Cooper and Brady 1981:
412-413; Smith and Deering 1990: 34).“

Later, Speaker Cannon (R-IL) used the Rules Committee with its control over
House business for his own ends. Eventually, his seemingly arbitrary actions led to a
rebellion of Progressive Republicans led by George Norris (R-Nebr.) and members of the

Democratic minority to overthrow him (Matsunaga and Chen 1976: 37; Shepsle 1978:

 

‘ Created initially as a select committee in 1789, the Rules Committee became a standing committee for

the ﬁrst time in the 31“ Congress (1849-1850) but lost its permanent status soon after in the 32"" Congress
(1851-1852). From 1880 on, the House Rules Committee was a permanent standing committee (Nelson
1993, Vol. 2: 1009-1010).

5 The adoption of the Reed Rules meant that members present on the ﬂoor could be counted toward a
quorum.

6 Between 1880-1890 the Rules Committee began to issue special orders controlling ﬂoor debate and the
amount of time for considering particular bills. In particular, Speaker Charles Crisp (D-GA, 1891-1895)
was responsible for institutionalizing “special orders” or rules. Speaker Crisp—also serving as the
Chairman of the Rules Committee—extended the Committee’s jurisdiction to include bills still pending in
legislative committees. Furthermore, Speaker Crisp expected his Democratic Rules’ appointees to use
these powers toward partisan ends (Ripley 1967: 19).

50

22).7 As a result, the speakerships’ powers were gradually stripped, including its
inﬂuence over the Rules Committee (Cooper and Brady 1981: 415-416). Hence, for
several decades after the revolt, the Committee was increasingly viewed as one of the

House’s most inﬂuential, yet, independent centers of power.

The Textbook Congress

For most of the ‘textbook Congress’, party leaders were vested with little in the
way of coercive powers to control committee ﬁefdoms and this was especially true of the
Rules Committee (Shepsle 1989). Leaders were expected to perform limited institutional
maintenance functions that preserved the operation of the status quo (Mayhew 1974). In
fact, the party organization within Congress had seemingly been limited by the
institutionalized distribution of power for a very long time (Wilson 1885: 92). Shepsle
(1989) described the ‘textbook Congress’ as an institutional equilibrium held together by
a geographically partitioned committee system that balanced factions of interest among
members of the majority party.8 This institutional arrangement facilitated the
achievement of member goals, so their willingness to preserve them lasted for decades
after the decline of the Speakerships’ powers.9 During this period, the House Rules
Committee was considered one of the most powerful and autonomous entities within the
House. Indeed, Maltzrnan (1997: 170) asserted that the “zenit ” of the committee’s

independence was between 1937-1961.

 

7 In effect, it was Uncle Joe’s social and economic philosophy that ﬁrst sparked trouble with the

Progressives (Robinson 1963: 61).
' According to Shepsle (1989), jurisdiction, geography, and party were the institutional and organizational
elements of the equilibrium.

51

Because institutional power during the textbook era was widely distributed among
committee chairs, while the power of party leaders was limited in scope, the Rules
Committee could operate unprohibitively as long as northern and southern wings of the
Democratic party remained satisﬁed with the status quo institutional arrangements.
Accordingly, the House required very limited roles of its party leaders because the
committee system offered the means by which members could achieve their goals.
Indeed, according to Cox and McCubbins (1993), the seniority system preserved an
equilibrium arrangement among committee chairs that reﬂected the regional balance of
power within the majority party.‘0

In this era of committee power, the conservative coalition and a lineage of
formidable chairs wielded considerable inﬂuence over the Rules Committee. Due to the
Committee’s agenda-setting powers, the policy initiatives of liberal Democrats and at
times the party leadership were considerably hindered (Robinson 1963; Shepsle 1989;
Rohde 1991). For most of Judge Smith’s tenure as the chairman of Rules (1955-1967),
the Committee was able to prevent policies from reaching the ﬂoor in one of two ways.
The ﬁrst was dependent on the chair’s discretion over the internal committee procedures,
such that the Judge would simply deny committee action on legislation he objected to.’1
The second source of the committee’s negative power was dependent on the Judge’s

ability to persuade his conservative Democratic colleagues to join with the panel’s

 

9 Speakership powers diminished markedly after the terms of Speaker Thomas Reed ® ME (1889-91,
1895-99) and Speaker Joseph G. Cannon ® 111(1903 - 11) (see Ripley 1967: 14).

'° In addition, Cox and McCubbins (1993) asserted that seniority violations prior to the reform era were
rare because each regional faction within the Democratic party had veto power that in effect could prevent
party leaders from coercing member compliance.

52

Republicans to produce a tie vote that would prevent the granting of a rule and therefore
almost certainly kill the bill (Oppenheimer 1977).

Indeed, the Committee’s involvement in stiﬂing policy change on some very
salient issues such as labor in the 19303-19403 and civil rights in the 19503-19603
continually fed the reputation of a recalcitrant committee. A leftward drifting chamber
resulting from large liberal classes entering in the 86‘h (1959-1960) and 89‘h (1965-1966)
Congresses, also made the conservative-dominated Rules Committee seem especially
disruptive (Shepsle 1986: 155). In fact, at the onset of the 86‘h Congress Speaker Sam
Rayburn (D-TX) (1940-47, 1949-53, 1955-61) convinced liberal Democrats that reforms
aimed at the Rules Committee would not be necessary, as he guaranteed liberals that the
Committee would not block the important policy initiatives of the party (Jones 1968:
637). Speaker Rayburn actively used his institutional and personal powers to minimize
or diffuse the deep division within the Democratic party. According to anecdotal
accounts, “Although he [Rayburn] did not own his Rules Committee, he frequently was
the only man in the party who could negotiate a compromise with dissident members of
the committee” (Truman 1959: 197). Despite his efforts, Speaker Rayburn was unable to
deliver on his promise and the seeds for institutional change were planted. Subsequently,
liberal Democrats initiated a series of reforms targeted at the Rules Committee beginning
in the 87‘“ Congress.

Before the onset of the reform era, members were selected to the Rules

Committee based on their prior reputations for supporting the leadership. This

 

" Before the 1970’s reforms, the House Committee on Rules had no written procedures so the means by
which the committee carried out its institutional responsibilities was at the chair’s discretion (Oppenheimer

53

apprenticeship period effectively meant that members serve for a length of time on other
committees to establish a history of electoral security and to test their dependability for
future leadership loyalty. Both the norms of apprenticeship and seniority represented
institutionalized selection systems that worked to preserve the current equilibrium
arrangement, contingent on the delicate regional balance between northern and southern
Democrats. For example, Chairman Judge Smith achieved his position on the Rules
Committee through the seniority system. If Democrats wanted to change the Rules
Committee, they would have to strike at Smith and thus the seniority system or the
property right norm that granted him his station. In order to strike at Judge Smith’s
conservative grip on the Committee, a sufﬁcient number of Democrats would have to feel
that the beneﬁts to be gained by chipping away at the seniority system would outweigh
the costs associated with its preservation. The inﬂux of liberals gradually shifted the

distribution of costs and beneﬁts associated with changing the Rules Committee.

Upsetting the Equilibrium: Electoral and Institutional Change

The nature of the institutional equilibrium during the textbook Congress was
dramatically disrupted by the electoral changes beginning in the late 19403. Of all the
Democratic congressional seats in 1947, nearly half were controlled by southemers and
the election of a GOP candidate to a southern seat was a rare event. Indeed, interparty
competition in most regions of the south was non-existent (Key 1949). This electoral
context provided the southern delegation in Congress with a signiﬁcant advantage in

accruing seniority—and with that, power.

 

1977: 97).

54

However, as the electorates in the South became more like their northern
counterparts, a slow deregionalization within the congressional parties took place.
Greater numbers of GOP candidates successfully sought election in the South, and the
distribution of Democratic seats controlled by southemers declined.12 Electoral forces
were also at work in other areas of the country with similar effects on the ideological
homogeneity of members from both political parties. In effect, this large scale
deregionalization in congressional elections produced majority party memberships in
Congress that were ideologically similar to their party colleagues and increasingly
different from their minority party counterparts (Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde 1995:
263-264).

Over time, these exogenous shocks from congressional elections caused by the
inﬂux of liberal-minded members not only changed the distribution of member
preferences within and between the political parties, but also re-structured member
incentives to overcome the costs associated with institutional change (Rohde 1991; Smith
1989; Sinclair 1985 and 1989). Together, these changes resulted in the emergence of a
new institutional arrangement that simultaneously dispersed power and provided the
potential for a stronger, yet responsive party leadership. On the one hand, the reforms
provided a growing majority of liberal Democrats with the institutional means to shape
the policy process. On the other hand, the reforms established greater potential powers
for party leaders and the institutional arrangements that would facilitate their

responsiveness (see Rohde 1991).

 

'2 By the mid-19903, southern seats—once the backbone of the Democratic party’s support was

transformed into a source of strength for the GOP majority.

55

More speciﬁcally, these changes in congressional elections created greater
homogeneity of preferences within the majority party and fostered conditions in which a
workable and growing coalition of liberal Democrats perceived the beneﬁts from
institutional and policy change to be in their favor. That is, as the preferences of liberal
Democrats became more alike, the beneﬁts that could be achieved through cooperation
became greater than what could be achieved through the preservation of the status quo.
In effect, these electoral changes provided the basis for a different incentive structure that
led to the development of a reinvigorated agency relationship between party leadership

organizations (e. g. Rules Committee) and members of the majority party.

Collective Incentives and the Delegation of Institutional Power

Rohde’s (1991) theory (and Aldrich and Rohde extensions) of conditional party
government provide theoretical insights regarding the conditions in which members of
the majority party would have the incentive to empower leaders and in effect, redistribute
institutional powers in a legislature. Rohde has asserted that the more intraparty
agreement in goals, the greater the membership’s incentive will be to empower leaders
with powers to pursue collective ends. As a consequence of intraparty homogeneity and
interparty heterogeneity, the more likely that the pursuit of these majority party ends will
be in opposition to the preferences of members from the minority party. That is to
suggest, the beneﬁts that members can achieve from granting party leaders additional
powers tend to be increasing under conditions of preference homogeneity while the costs
associated with leadership actions to members of the minority party tend to be increasing

with interparty heterogeneity (Aldrich and Rohde 1996a: 2; and 1998a: 5). Put more

56

succinctly, “As intraparty homogeneity increases, members see that it is less likely that
the use of leadership powers would result in policy outcomes that are signiﬁcantly
diﬂerent ﬁom their preference, and as interparty conﬂict grows, the consequences to
members of one party of legislative victory by the other party become increasingly
adverse” (Marshall, Prins, and Rohde 1998: 3).

When the condition of conditional party government (CPG) is not met (e. g.
majority party preferences are heterogeneous) delegating powers to leaders have potential
costs that are derived from issues of moral hazard. “Conditional party government
depends on intra-party homogeneity (especially in the majority party) and on inter-party
differences. If there is much diversity in preferences within a party, a substantial portion
of the members will be reluctant to grant strong powers to the leadership, or to resist the
vigorous exercise of existing powers, because of the realistic fear that they may be used
to produce outcomes unsatisfactory to the members in question” (Aldrich and Rohde
1995: 18).

Ferejohn’s (1986) constituent/representative model offers additional insight into
the principal-agent logic. On one hand, he shows that under conditions of homogeneity,
the dilemma faced by principals is purely one of agent control. In this scenario, the
principal(s) choose a reward structure or contract in which the agent subsequently acts to
maximize her utility. An equilibrium relation exists when the agent optimally responds
to the reward structure set up by the principal, and the principal in designing the reward
structure, has optimally anticipated the agent’s response (Fiorina and Shepsle 1989). The
party membership or “collective boss” could be conceptualized here as the principals

(Rohde 1991). On the other hand, when the homogeneity of preferences is relaxed, and

57

the membership does not coordinate to solve conﬂicts of interest then the agency
relationship can become problematic (e. g. moral hazard). A heterogeneous party
membership, or in this case the “multiple principals problem”, provides conditions in
which the agent can use the conﬂicting principal interests to maximize her own objectives
at the expense of one or more of the principals. In effect, the dilemma for principals
becomes one not only of agent control, but one of competing principal interests (Ferejohn
1986)

In effect, by empowering party leaders, the members of the majority party
instrumentally choose to shape the institutional processes affecting the distribution of
costs and beneﬁts resulting from intraparty cooperation. The reforms and the
institutionalized agency role of the Rules Committee are but one aspect of this delegation
that has taken place over time. The implicit incentive for members of the same party
sharing common interests is that they can get more of what they want through
empowering a common agent (e.g. leadership) than what they could achieve based on
shared preferences alone.

I have argued that the institutional reforms and the changing expectations
regarding the committee’s role can be understood from a principal-agent rationale. The
changes occurring to the Rules Committee were aimed at creating an institutionalized
agency relationship. By placing the Rules Committee ﬁrmly under the control of the
Speaker, members of the majority party (principals) established an incentive system or
contract in which party leaders would have reason to ensure that the Committee was

responsive to the majority party.

58

Figure 2 provides a ﬂow chart sketching the major components of my argument
(see Figure 2). The changes observed in congressional elections have made the political
parties more homogeneous over time and during the reform era provided liberal members
with the incentive to make institutional changes. In turn, over time these institutional
changes have dramatically affected the role of the Rules Committee and its
responsiveness to the majority party. In fact, I would argue that the institutional changes
facilitated the establishment of a principal-agent relationship between the members of the
majority party and the House Rules Committee. The development of this relationship
over time not only dramatically changed the role of the Rules Committee, but also the
way in which special rules are used in the legislative process. Both institutional and
electoral changes provided party leaders with greater control over the Rules Committee
and a greater incentive to use special rules as a partisan tool to provide collective beneﬁts
to members of the majority party.

To sum up then, I have argued that the change in congressional elections shaped
the distribution of member preferences within the majority party so that the incentive
structure for institutional change was both a feasible and rational alternative to the status
quo equilibrium arrangement of the textbook Congress. A party membership with
increasingly homogeneous policy preferences will ﬁnd it collectively and individually
rational to cooperate and empower leadership institutions to do the bidding of the
majority party. Moreover, I have argued that the institutional changes that directly
affected the Rules Committee were aimed at developing an agency relationship so that

the committee would be responsive to the policy interests held in common by members of

59

the majority party. The next step, then, is to address how the speciﬁc institutional

changes to the Rules Committee facilitated the agency relationship over time.

Institutional Solutions to Agency Problems: Rules Committee Reforms

The institutional changes that I discuss next like the 21-day rule, the enlargement
of the Committee, and the decision to provide the leadership with appointment powers
over the majority party members on the Committee can all be understood in the context
of an agency relationship. Speciﬁcally, these institutional changes represent attempts by
the majority party caucus to solve problems related to adverse selection, monitoring, and
moral hazard. Moreover, the agency framework can be useful in explaining why party
leaders have become increasingly reliant on special rules as a tool to provide advantages

to policies favored by the majority party.

The Ipstitutionalization of an Agency Relationship

21 -Day Rule

Since the mid-1930’s, the conservative membership of the House Rules
Committee had developed an anti-administration reputation by actively opposing popular
liberal policies of the president (Robinson 1963: 63). The congressional elections of
1948 began to change this trend. President Truman’s coattails brought in a large class of
liberal House Democrats. The administration hoped that with the support of the new
liberal members, the negative power of the conservative Rules Committee could be

curtailed (Truman 1959). The administration proposed and was successful in passing one

60

of the ﬁrst changes in modern Congresses to affect the Rules Committee, the passage of
the 21-day rule in the 81“ (1949-1950) Congress. This institutional change provided
committee chairman, given the Speaker would recognize them on the ﬂoor, the ability to
circumvent the negative power of Rules that had selectively stiﬂed the consideration of
liberal initiatives on the House ﬂoor." In effect, this new procedure allowed the
membership, through committee chairs, the ability to extract bills held hostage by the
House Rules Committee.

The 21-day procedure was designed to strengthen the hand of the Speaker at the
expense of the Rules Committee. In terms of the principal-agent framework, the
members of the majority party acted as rational principals by redistributing institutional
powers to an agent—the Speaker—they had greater control over. For Speaker Rayburn,
the decision to support the change was a difficult one because of the heterogeneity of the
majority party. The 21-day rule could either place too much control in the hands of
committee chairmen or place responsibility with “unwanted clarity” on the shoulders of
the Speaker (Truman 1959: 18). Evidently, Rayburn viewed the negative consequences
of both scenarios to be less than the liability that would result from leaving the Rules

Committee unchecked."

 

'3 The 21-day rule provided that any proposal reported out by a House committee but leﬁ pending

(pigeonholed) by the Rules Committee for a period exceeding twenty-one legislative days could be called
up for consideration the second and fourth Mondays of each month upon the request of the committee
chairman. Two existing institutional mechanisms, Calendar Wednesday and the discharge petition,
provided a majority of House members with the ability to bypass the Rules Committee and pass
legislation. However, these procedures were infrequently used and even more rarely successful (Robinson
1963: 63; Jones 1968).

" This would not be the last time that Speaker Rayburn would be placed in a position between the
northern and southern wings of the Democratic party. Indeed, during the 87‘h Congress, liberals wanted to
discipline ﬁve senior Democrats by stripping them of their committee posts because they did not support
the Democratic presidential candidate during the 1960 election. One of the members was the second-
ranking majority member on Rules, William Colmer. Speaker Rayburn did not want to tamper with

61

In addition, the move by liberal Democrats to strengthen the Speakership was also
a shot at the current status quo and the distribution of power that disproportionately
favored the southern wing of the party (Robinson 1963; Jones 1968; and Oppenheimer
1977). Given the nature of cross-party coalitions at this time, it was certainly not clear
that the legislation blocked by the Rules Committee was favored by a majority of the
party membership. Perhaps the Democratic loss of nearly 30 seats in the 82"d Congress
gave members of the majority party a reason to reconsider the usefulness of the Rules
Committee as an institution that could effectively keep divisive policies off of the
legislative agenda. Conservatives sought to preserve the status quo distribution of power,
so, not surprisingly a large number of southern Democrats joined a majority of
Republicans to vote down the 21-day provision at the beginning of the 82"“ Congress,
thus restoring the Committee’s negative power.

Electoral fortunes for congressional Democrats dramatically changed again at the
start of the 89‘” (1965-1966) Congress and the increasingly liberal Democratic majority
expanded to its largest size since President Roosevelt’s ﬁrst term (1933) in ofﬁce. The
majority once again decided to reinstitute the 21-day rule with a modiﬁcation that
provided the Speaker with the power to recognize a motion to send a proposal to
conference—a power previously at the discretion of the Rules Committee. This provision
was similar to the old one (passed in the 82“d Congress) in that it provided the leadership
with the ability to extract bills reported to the Rules Committee that had not received a

special rule. The change was once again in response to a power struggle between a

 

seniority and risk alienating the southern wing, so he proposed an altemative—committee expansion—that
precariously balanced the interests of the two opposing factions (Hinckley 1970: 287).

62

growing liberal Democratic majority and the committee. Moreover, the ramiﬁcations of
this procedural change were much more partisan in character as the intraparty policy
preferences were becoming more homogeneous within and the gap between interparty
policy preferences was expanding, as evidenced by the vote on the 21-day rule which was
clearly a partisan vote (see Jones 1968: 639). Indeed, at least eight separate pieces of
legislation during the 89"’ Congress were pulled from the Committee using this method
and many more probably passed because it [21-day rule] posed a legitimate threat by the
Democratic membership (Jones 1968).

Nevertheless, a loss of 46 House seats in the 90‘h Congress weakened the liberal
coalition within the majority party and the 21-day procedure was abandoned once again.
But by this time, several other important steps had been taken by the Democratic majority
to constrain the powers of the Rules Committee. The ﬁrst was in consequence to
electoral defeat. The Democratic majority was able to appoint William Anderson (D,
TN), a southern moderate to the Committee to replace Judge Smith (D, VA) who suffered
a primary defeat. Judge Smith’s loss was signiﬁcant because he had been extremely
effective in winning over key Democratic votes on the Committee for the purpose of
bottling up liberal policies and the appointment was the ﬁrst time since 1949 that the
Democrats had the opportunity to replace a southemer on the Committee (Oppenheimer
1977: 99). In addition, the new chairman, William Colmer (D, Miss) tended to be much
more receptive to working with the Democratic leadership. This is not surprising given
the fact that Speaker John W. McCormack (D, MA) stepped in to preserve Colmer’s
chairmanship during the 90‘h (1967-1968) Congress. Liberal Democrats in the House had

been pushing to take larger steps in controlling the Committee by denying Colmer the

63

chair. This would seemingly have the effect of making the next chair more aware of his
agency obligations to the party. Liberals worked out a deal with Speaker McCormack that
would provide Colmer with the chairmanship, but in return required the Committee to
establish written procedures and grant the ranking majority members on the Committee
greater powers in relation to the chair. According to Oppenheimer, “This was a major
step in placing control of the Rules Committee in the hands of its Democratic members,
who on most occasions would be responsive to the desires of the House Democratic

leadership” (1977: 100).

Tightening the Leash and Agency Responsiveness: Seat Expansion on Rules

Another step taken by the liberal coalition of Democrats was the enlargement of
the Committee to increase the number of loyal Democratic seats held by the majority
party. The enlargement was necessary from the viewpoint of liberals because the
southern conservatives on the Committee were thwarting liberal initiatives. The problem
for liberals trying to inﬂuence the Committee was not that they lacked information about
what conservatives would do once on the Committee (e.g. adverse selection problems),
but they had no real mechanism to place members that they thought would make loyal
agents on the Committee. Pushed by an ever more vocal liberal contingent of the caucus,
the party leadership was ﬁnally inclined to increase the size of the Committee from 12 to
15 members, adding two majority party members and one member from the minority.

Liberals wanted to prevent the conservative majority on Rules from blocking
President Kennedy’s legislation. In essence, the leadership felt that the strategy of

stacking the Committee would increase its support and responsiveness to the president’s

64

programs. This ﬁrst attempt at tightening the leash around the Committee passed at the
beginning of the 87‘’1 Congress (1961-1962) by only a ﬁve vote margin, but with a clear
majority of both parties opposing each other. The move to enlarge the Committee
permanently occurred at the beginning of the 88‘’1 Congress (1963-1964) and was even
more partisan. The nature of conﬂict on these votes suggests that the expansion of the
Committee was at least perceived by many conservative minority and majority members
to have negative policy and electoral ramiﬁcations.

Part of Table 1 is taken ﬁ'om Jones (1968: 639) to provide a summary of the
voting record on three institutional changes affecting the Rules Committee that I have
discussed (see Table 1). Jones argues that these changes during the 19603 mark the
decline of the Rules Committee’s power. However, I argue that these changes which
dramatically decreased the Committee’s autonomy were initiated to foster the
institutionalization of an agency relationship between the majority party caucus and the
House Rules Committee. This entails a transfer in the degree of control over one of the
House’s most powerful subunits and not necessarily a reduction in power or inﬂuence.
Under the existing institutional structure, committee chairman and members of the
conservative coalition had the incentive to protect the status quo arrangement. That is,
the autonomy of the Rules Committee under Chairman Smith and the behavior of the
Committee disproportionately beneﬁted the senior conservative members. Indeed, the
votes regarding these institutional changes affecting the Rules Committee in Table 1
indicates that the conﬂict was not only extremely partisan but also characterized by the

remnants of the northern and southern cleavage.

65

Jones asserted that the institutional changes in 1910 had important parallels to the
changes affecting the Rules Committee during the 19603.‘5 “As in 1910, those who
pressed for change in 1961 argued in favor of leadership accountability to the majority”
(1968: 639). Later, Jones summed up the reformers’ viewpoint, “that any leader or any
leadership committee had latitude in exercising power, they also agreed that there should
be limits beyond which leaders are not permitted to go. To the reformers, the Committee
on Rules ultimately should be a part of the majority leadership” (1968: 640) [the italics
are mine]. Thus, I would argue that the purpose of the Rules Committee reforms were
not so much focused on stripping it of its powers, but instead concerned with how to get
control over the Committee and how to make it carry out its functions in a way that
beneﬁted the growing coalition of liberals in the majority party. Making the Rules
Committee a leadership institution was part of that answer.

Viewing the Rules Committee as an agent of the majority party, there is no
necessary tradeoff between committee power and the institutional power of party
organizations that so many works at least implicitly suggest (Robinson 1963; Manley
1970; Deering and Smith 1997). That is to say that committees can be transformed to
operate as party entities, carrying out the party’s legislative platform and still remain as a
powerful platform of inﬂuence within the House. I think this especially true regarding
the committee’s expansion. In the case of the 21-day rule, one could argue that power

was perhaps transferred from the Rules Committee to the Speaker. But this institutional

 

‘5 Jones provides an important leadership comparison between Speaker Cannon and Chairman Smith.

Both leaders had signiﬁcant institutional powers that differed, Cannon’s power was impressive because of
his ability to pass legislation (proactive power) while Smith’s power rested with his ability to block
legislation ( reactive power). In addition, Smith’s power was derived from seniority--an institutionalized
incentive system that made the sanctioning of power holders very difﬁcult.

66

arrangement did not last and in fact was overturned twice. However, I would argue that
the problem with the 21-day strategy was that the leadership to some extent was inclined
to respond to the same conservative majorities that conditioned the behavior of the Rules
Committee. From this perspective, these institutional changes represent different
strategies taken by the membership in establishing an agency relationship that eventually
produced acceptable behavior on the part of the Rules Committee.

Even after the membership expansion, the 10 to 5 advantage held by Democrats
on the Rules Committee was sometimes not enough to satisfy liberals. All too often, the
Chairman on Rules was able to win over enough Democratic votes to join the
Republicans and deadlock or defeat liberal initiatives such as federal aid to education.
According to one committee member: “There was always the opportunity for a pickojf
and make an 8-7 win an 8-7 loss. Smith and Colmer together or separately were capable
of figuring out who to approach and how, be it in terms of district or personal preference
or a trade-oﬁ‘ or whatever” (Oppenheimer 1977: 98). Thus, neither the 21-day rule nor
the membership expansion totally solved the agency problems that the majority party was
having with the Rules Committee. However, at the onset of the 93'" (1973-1974)
Congress, the leadership was able to select three more members to ﬁll positions vacated
on the Rules Committee. These appointments basically assured the Democratic members
on the Committee would have a decisive majority and this majority would be
representative of the dominant liberal interests in the party caucus. Even if the remaining
conservative Democrats allied themselves with the Republicans, they would not have the

numbers to roll the expanded Democratic majority.

67

In terms of the principal-agency relationship, the selection of moderate and liberal
Democrats to ﬁll the seats on the Committee increased the likelihood that members’
policy interests and their subsequent behavior would be congruent with the increasingly
assertive liberal coalition of the party caucus. Indeed, due to the appointment of new
members during the 93rd Congress, the House Committee on Rules was now composed of
a majority of members that had ideological and policy preferences similar to a majority of
the party caucus. Still, as suggested earlier, the selection of like-minded members may
make the Committee more congruent, but the ﬁlling of vacancies may not be sufficient to

change the underlying incentive system that also shapes an agent’s behavior.

Committee Incentives and Monitoring: The Speaker ’s Power over Seat Assignment
Perhaps of even more signiﬁcance to the Committee’s behavior were the
institutional changes that occurred during the 93rd (1973-1974) and 94‘“ (1975-1976)
Congresses. Speciﬁcally, the House Democratic caucus granted the party leadership
positions on the Committee on Committees. This change in party organization provided
leaders with signiﬁcant institutional control in ﬁlling the three vacancies that opened up
on the Rules Committee during the 93rd Congress. In addition, during the 94‘h Congress
the party caucus moved to give the Speaker power at the beginning of every new
Congress to select the majority party members and chairperson of the Rules Committee.
These changes, I would argue have implications not only for the degree in which the
Committee’s behavior would become congruent with what the party caucus wanted, but
more importantly, these changes affected the underlying incentive system and the party’s

ability to monitor the majority party contingent from the Committee.

68

In terms of the changing incentive structure, majority party members on Rules
could no longer with relative certainty expect to be protected by the seniority system, but
were now directly reliant on the leadership and the liberal contingent of the majority
party. The old seniority system had preserved the distribution of power in the hands of
senior conservative members, but after this reform, their position on the Committee and
thus their ability to pursue their own goals was dependent on fulﬁlling their
responsibilities in serving the majority of liberals in the party caucus. So, the new
institutionalized system of control reshaped the incentive system and made it much more
likely for the majority party members of Rules to be responsive to the interests of the
majority party. Even if opportunities for defection existed, the critical determinants of the
incentive system was beginning to ebb and ﬂow away from the existing seniority system
and on balance was becoming controlled by the liberal contingent of the party caucus. In
other words, the reforms of the 19603-19703 established the leadership directly and
indirectly the party caucus as the dominant institution controlling the reward structure
over the Rules Committee".

In addition, by empowering the Speaker with appointment power over the
majority contingent on Rules, members of the party caucus facilitated the monitoring of
the Committee. That is, the changed institutional structure between the Committee and

the leadership, in effect made it [the committee] part of the leadership. The change meant

 

‘6 In addition, reforms like the transfer of committee assignment ﬁrnction from the Committee on

Committees (Ways and Means) to the leadership dominated Steering and Policy Committee enhanced the
leadership’s ability to demand greater responsiveness from committee chairs (Shepsle 1978: 262-281;
Strahan 1990). The Steering and Policy Committee became a very important leadership tool to facilitate
committee compliance. Leadership loyalty has become a signiﬁcant factor in the Committee on
Committee’s choice for seat assignment, especially on prestige committees. For example, during the 98‘”

69

that the Speaker was now more directly involved, and thus had a greater incentive to
ensure members selected to sit on the Committee would act as loyal agents of the party.
Misbehavior (e.g. issues of moral hazard) on the part of the Committee members would
have repercussions for the Speaker and the rest of the leadership because the Committee
was viewed as a part of the leadership. The change facilitated greater responsiveness
between the Committee and the majority party because the monitoring of the
Committee’s behavior became the direct concern of the leadership. This reform contrasts
nicely to the institutional changes initiated by the coalition of Progressive Republicans
and Democrats during the revolt against Speaker Canon in 1910. During this earlier
period, reformers wanted to weaken the hand of the Speaker and thus provided that
member assignment to the Committee would be conditional on the agreement of a
majority of the House (Cooper and Brady 1981: 416).

From the principal-agent perspective I have argued that the reforms facilitated the
party’s capacity to utilize the Rules Committee as an integral part of its strengthening
leadership organization. In effect, the institutional reforms that occurred to the Rules
Committee reﬂected a change in the principal-agent contract that greatly enhanced the
likelihood that majority party members on the Committee would optimally respond to the

interests of the party membership.

 

Congress, Representative Phil Gramm (D—TX) was denied his Budget Committee seat (Rohde and
Shepsle 1987: 126).

70

Hypotheses

Qppirical Predictiogsﬁom the Principal-Agent Framework

I have argued that the party caucus successfully institutionalized an agency
relationship with Rules. Furthermore, I have asserted that many of these changes were
aimed at solving agency problems faced by the majority party (e. g. moral hazard, adverse
selection, and monitoring). The caucus over time chose to delegate powers to the
leadership, so that greater control could be exercised over the Committee. The new
institutionalized agency system that developed meant that agenda-setting powers of the
Rules Committee would be integrated into the leadership organization and not under the
control of a free-wheeling committee chair. The Committee would no longer be able to
bottleneck legislation important to a majority of members from the majority party like it
did during the Judge Smith era. In addition, the increasing homogeneity of the majority
party caucus decreased the likelihood that the Committee would have the opportunity to
beneﬁt from playing off competing interests (moral hazard issues). What we observe
over time is not only evidence that the Committee members are behaving in a way
congruent with their interests and the caucus but also the Committee actively responds to
and pursues the party’s interests (Maltzrnan 1997: 172). This helps explain why the
Committee’s institutional powers have not only remained intact during the reform era but
have increased in signiﬁcance over time.

I have also asserted that the institutional changes to the House Rules Committee
have resulted in the increased capacity of party leaders to rely on special rules as

procedural strategies to advantage majority party initiatives. This has taken place over

71

time because the Rules Committee has slowly evolved into a more responsive agent that
serves an increasingly homogeneous majority party. Moreover, by changing the
institutional system so that the Speaker has power over Rules Committee assignments,
the majority party changed the incentive for Rules members to act in accordance with the
leadership and in turn ensured the Committee would be responsive to the party’s
collective interests. What are the implications for the development of this relationship
with respect to the behavior of the Rules Committee, patterns of voting behavior among
majority and minority party memberships, the choice of special rules, and the relevance

of special rules to policy outcomes enacted in the House over time?

Rules Committee Behavior

The Rules Committee controls the legislation reaching the ﬂoor. This agenda-
setting power is extremely important to the achievement of the majority party’s collective
policy objectives. As the majority party has initiated changes to the Rules Comnrittee to
establish a principal-agent relationship, the Committee should become more likely to
behave (use its institutional powers) in a manner that is consistent with the objectives of
the majority party. The Committee should become less likely to use its negative powers
to stall majority preferred initiatives—a3 it did in the days of Judge Snrith.l7 This leads to
the ﬁrst hypothesis regarding the expected change in the Committee’s behavior.

HYPOTHESIS l: The Rules Committee should become less likely over time to reject
rules requests as the Committee becomes more responsive to the majority party.

 

‘7 Oppenheimer (1977: 100) also looks at the number of rules requests denied over time as an indicator of

the Committee’s responsiveness to the Democratic caucus. He ﬁnds that the number of rules requests that
were denied by the Rules Committee decreased from the 89‘“-94"‘ Congresses (1965-1976).

72

 

It is important to add here that the change in congressional elections and the
resulting institutional reforms had large-scale ramiﬁcations to other institutions in
Congress as well. For example, legislative committees also became more responsive to
the interests of the majority party especially as leadership tools of coercion became more
signiﬁcant (Maltzrnan 1997). The Committee’s role as “trafﬁc cop” controlling the
legislation that gets to the House ﬂoor has changed over time and has become even more
signiﬁcant to the party leadership. In addition, the Rules Committee has played a more
important role in coordinating policy with the legislative committee so that proposals are
reﬂective of the party’s interests. Indeed, this coordination role would become a very
important part of the Committee’s leadership functions as the agency relationship
crystallized over time. According to Oppenheimer, “Democrats on the Committee agree
that the new trafﬁc cop is too lenient but think they must go along with the wishes of the
party leadership. However, that leadership is not yet strong enough to allow its Rules

members to be a tougher trafﬁc cop with the substantive committees” (1977: 103).

Amendment Rights and Procedural Support of Special Rules

The theoretical argument thus far suggests that the costs to party members
associated with empowering leaders decrease and the potential for collective gains
increase as intra-party homogeneity increases. Members then, would become more
inclined to relinquish some of their individual powers to affect policies, if the beneﬁts of
doing so outweighed the costs. The use of special rules and leadership control over the
Rules Committee relates to the tradeoff members face. By supporting restrictive rules,

members limit their ability to change committee proposals on the ﬂoor. Ideally, rational

73

members would not be willing to forgo amendment rights if they thought the costs in
terms of achieving their policy goals was prohibitively high or outweighed the beneﬁts.
Sinclair (1995a and 1998) suggests that the costs related to the majority party
membership limiting their amendment rights decrease as intra-party ideological
homogeneity increases. She asserts further that members face a tradeoff in relinquishing
their amendment rights in that members limit their own policy entrepreneurship (e. g.
individual ability to inﬂuence policy), but, gain by reducing the uncertainty of the
legislative process (Sinclair 1995a: 77).

One would expect that if the reforms tended to make committees and their leaders
more responsive to the party caucus, then members would in general become more
willing to restrict their amending rights. This follows because as committee proposals
become more reﬂective of the majority party, the costs associated with giving up
amendment rights decrease. Procedural support of special rules by the majority party
would place limits on a member’s amendment rights, but would increase the likelihood of
passing policies important to the party membership. As committee proposals become
more representative of the majority party’s interest, there became less incentive for
majority party members to attempt to alter policies on the ﬂoor. Indeed, Rohde (1992a)
provided evidence from the 92““ - 100"I Congress (1971 -l988) showing that the
proportion of amendments receiving majority party support on the ﬂoor decreased, from
which he infers that majority party members became more satisﬁed over this period of
time with prOposals coming from the committees.

The homogeneity of majority party policy preferences has at least two relevant

theoretical implications here that reduce the costs to membership cooperation. First of

74

all, as the majority party becomes more cohesive, the membership’s incentive to grant
party leaders more powers increase as well as the expectation that leaders will use their
resources for collective partisan beneﬁts. Under these conditions, the uncertainty
associated with leadership action and their effects on legislative outcomes should
decrease for members of the majority party. Secondly, as preference homogeneity
increases, it should become less costly for leaders to provide collective partisan
advantages or at least create the conditions in which they can more easily shape
incentives and/or deﬂect costs (e.g. provide cover), so that the membership can cooperate
for collective advantage. These implications for collective action lend themselves to the
three following testable hypotheses.

HYPOTHESIS 2: The increasing homogeneity of a majority party should reduce the
costs for individual party members associated with forgoing amendment rights.
Therefore majority party support on amendments should decrease over time.
HYPOTHESIS 3: The majority party ’3 support of restrictive rules should increase
over time as the costs associated with forgoing amendment rights becomes outweighed
by the benefits derived from the reduction of uncertainty and cooperation among
majority party members.

Because the potential costs to leaders to induce cooperation for the purpose of collective
advantage tends to decrease as homogeneity of the majority party increases, leaders

utilize their institutional powers more frequently.

HYPOTHESIS 4: The minority party support of restrictive rules should decrease over
time as leaders increasingly use rules to advantage policies favored by the majority

party.

The above hypotheses relate to the conditions under which members will choose

to grant leaders institutional powers that inherently affect their own individual ability and

75

that of the majority party to inﬂuence the legislative process (in this case, amendment
rights on the ﬂoor). Indeed, implicitly the members of the majority party choose to
transfer some of their parliamentary prerogatives to the leadership who develop the rules
that dictate to some extent the set of amendments to be considered. If an agency
relationship with the Rules Committee does exist, members of the majority party should
increasingly expect that special rules from the Committee would be used to advantage
policies collectively preferred by the party.

In essence, the principal-agent relationship that has developed over time between
the majority party and the Rules Committee has decreased the uncertainty that the
leadership will use restrictive rules to provide advantages to policy proposals preferred by
members of the majority party. Given the existence of this principal-agent relationship,
one should expect to ﬁnd systematic differences over time between majority and minority
party support on both rules and ﬁnal passage of legislation. Because member amendment
rights are constrained more under restrictive rules, the beneﬁts gained from policies
brought to the ﬂoor under these type of procedures should be greater for majority party
members as compared to the minority. This leads to the next hypothesis.

Hypothesis 5: Systematic differences will exist between majority and minority party
support on policies as special rules become more restrictive. Differences between
average majority and minority support will be the greatest for legislation brought to the
ﬂoor under restrictive rules. That is, majority party support will be greatest for

legislation brought to the ﬂoor under restrictive rules while minority party support will
be the least on legislation considered under the same restrictive ﬂoor procedures.

76

Procedural Choice and Theories of Legislative Organization

Finally, the theoretical discussion of the Rules Committee as agent of the majority
party also has implications for the role of special rules in the legislative process and for
theories of legislative organization more generally. The primary legislative theories I
address here are informational, distributive, and partisan. Each rationale makes different
claims regarding the factors that should affect the likelihood a bill receives a restrictive
rule. In this section, I will summarize the theoretical arguments and their predictions
regarding procedural choice. In Chapter 3, the research design chapter I will be more

explicit about the variables and empirical methods used to test these predictions.

Informational Theory

Krehbiel’s (1991) informational theory has challenged scholars to show that
organizational arrangements like the committee system, political parties, or procedures
like special rules can affect the direction and/or content of policies independent of
majoritarian processes. Krehbiel argues that the legislature utilizes rules to provide
committees with the incentive to specialize and share information while at the same time
minimizing the extent that enacted policies deviate from those preferred by the chamber
median. The legislature is able to achieve gains-from-specialization by creating
heterogeneous committees”. According to informational theory, legislation coming
from these representative panels are more likely to receive a restrictive rule then

committees that are not representative of the chamber. Krehbiel hypothesizes that

 

'8 Heterogeneous committees are made up of members whose preferences are likely to reﬂect chamber

preferences.

77

committee heterogeneity, complexity of policies, and the preferences of the committee in
relation to the median of the chamber are important factors affecting the likelihood that

bills will receive a restrictive rule.

Distributive Theory

From the distributive theory framework, special rules serve as a procedural device
that make legislative trades possible. Restrictive rules prevent members with diverse
constituency interests from defecting on legislative bargains that could otherwise unravel
on the ﬂoor. This theory suggests that pork—barrel type bills should be increasing in the
likelihood of receiving restrictive rules. That is, policies relatively high in their
distributive content should be more likely to receive restrictive rules than policies low in

distributive content.

Rules Committee as Independent Actor

Dion and Huber (1996) have also developed a formal model that asserts that the
Rules Committee has an independent affect on the likelihood a bill receives a restrictive
rule. In their formal model, the preferences of the Rules Committee in relation to the
legislative committee are important in determining whether or not a bill receives a
restrictive rule. They argue further that the Rules Committee can facilitate non-centrist
policy outcomes. This argument is completely contrary to the claims of informational
theory which suggests restrictive rules are used by the legislature to promote the passage

of policies that are representative of the chamber majority.

78

Partisan Theory

Similar to my own approach, scholars like Barbara Sinclair, John Aldrich and
David Rohde have asserted that party leaders can utilize special rules to provide
collective beneﬁts for members of the majority party. For example, Sinclair (1998; 1999)
suggests that party leadership involvement should be positively related to the likelihood a
bill receives a restrictive rule. My own argument emphasizes the importance of the
principal-agent relationship between the majority party and the Rules Committee.
However, I have also argued that this relationship has changed over time in part due to
the homogeneity of the majority party. That is, as the majority party becomes more
homogeneous, the Rules Committee should have less opportunity to defect from majority
party interests. The stronger this principal-agent relationship becomes over time, the
likelihood of the agent advantaging her own interests at the expense of the principals (i.e.,
the majority party) decreases. Over time we should observe that the preferences of the
majority party should become more inﬂuential relative to the preferences of the Rules
Committee in determining whether or not a bill receives a restrictive rule. Thus, my
expectation is that the spatial position of the party conference in relation to the legislative
committee should be an important factor (but should change over time) in determining
whether or not a bill receives a restrictive rule. In particular, as the party caucus becomes
more homogeneous in their policy preferences over time, the relative spatial position
between the legislative committee and the caucus should become a stronger predictor in
determining which policies receive restrictive rules. This leads to two general hypotheses

regarding the choice of restrictive rules in the legislative process.

79

HYPOTHESIS 6: Given the Rules Committee is the Agent of the majority party, the
committee ’s policy preferences will not have an independent aﬂect when controlling
for the policy preferences of the majority party on the likelihood a bill receives a
restrictive rule.

HYPOTHESIS 7: Given the Rules Committee is the Agent of the majority party, the
policy preferences of the majority party should independently affect the likelihood a bill
receives a restrictive rule.

In addition, the party effects and the effects of the Rules Committee should vary over
time dependent on the homogeneity of the party and the extent leaders use rules to
affect policy outcomes.

In sum, I have argued that the linkage between the Rules Committee as part of the
leadership team and the majority party caucus are of critical importance to understanding
the changing way in which restrictive rules have been used and the proliferation of
partisan conﬂict their use has engendered over time. I argue here that the principal-agent
relationship was facilitated directly through the choices of the party membership to
delegate institutional powers to their party leaders. Finally, the hypotheses that I have
derived reﬂect on the greater willingness of the party membership to empower its leaders
and the constraints leaders face in using rules to affect outcomes as the homogeneity of
the majority party varies over time.

In the next chapter (Chapter 3), I will outline the data and methods that will be

used to test the above stated hypotheses.

80

TABLE 1: Institutionalizing a Principal-Agent Relationship Between the Majority

Party and the House Rules Committee

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Institutional Change Date Vote Vote Party/Regional
Breakdown
Committee Enlarged January 31, 1961 217 - 212 SDEM 47 - 63
from 12 to 15 members (87“ Congress) DEM 195 - 64 NDEM 148 - 1
GOP 22 - 148 SGOP O - 9

NGOP 22 - 139
Committee Permanently January 9, 1963 235 - 196 SDEM 59 - 45
Enlarged from 12 to 15 (88"I Congress) DEM 207 - 48 NDEM 148 - 3
members GOP 28 - 148 SGOP 0 - l4

NGOP 28 - 134
Reinstitution of 21-day January 4, 1965 224 - 202 SDEM 23 - 75
rule plus transfer of (89* Congress) DEM 208 - 79 NDEM 185 - 4
power regarding sending GOP l6 - 123 SGOP O -18
bills to conference'. NGOP 16 -105

—___.L___—u—_—___

 

 

 

 

 

' The second part of this reform granted the Speaker the power to recognize a member offering a motion

to send a bill to conference (Jones 1968: 639).

81

 

 

FIGURE 2: Summary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Party-in—Elections

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homogeneity of Party Institutional Changes
Preferences
Majority Party Membership Rules Committee

 

(PRINCIPAL)

 

 

 

 

(AGENT)

 

 

 

 

 

 

i

 

 

Partisan Policy Implications

 

 

 

 

 

 

82

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 3

DATA AND METHODS
"Torture the data long enough, and it will surely confess !"

In Chapter 1, I developed a principal-agent theory for congressional leadership.
There, I emphasized the importance of institutional and electoral factors that condition
leadership institutions. Of particular signiﬁcance to my theoretical argument were the
homogeneity of the majority party and the effects of leadership strategies. In Chapter 2, I
argued that the electoral and institutional conditions have shaped the Rules Committee
and the extent that it responds to majority party interests. The principal-agent framework,
I argue, can explain the relationship that has developed over time between the majority
party and the Rules Committee. Here, I addressed several key institutional reforms aimed
at incorporating the Rules Committee into the party leadership, which had the affect of
giving the majority party control over the Committee. The underlying purpose behind the
establishment of Rules as a leadership institution was so that members of the majority
party could achieve their goals more effectively and with more certainty.

In this chapter, I address the data and methods used to empirically assess the
hypotheses derived from the principal-agent model in Chapter 2. I will discuss the data
separately for Chapters 4, 5, and 6. Because the data used in Chapters 4 and 6 are based
on fairly simple counts and aggregate vote measures over time, I will handle much of the

necessary descriptive details within the relevant chapters. Chapter 5 though, utilizes

83

multivariate maximum likelihood techniques in modeling rule choice, so much of the

space in this chapter will be dedicated to describing the data used for that analysis.

Data and Methodological Issues

C haQter 4

To begin, in Chapter 4 I empirically assess two sets of behavioral expectations
over time. The ﬁrst is the extent that the Committee’s behavior changes over time. As I
have documented previously, before the institutional changes the Committee clearly used
its negative powers to prevent policy initiatives supported by liberal members of the
majority party from reaching the House ﬂoor. If the reforms really did have the affect of
transforming the Committee into the agent of the majority party, then I would expect that
the way in which it used its powers would change, especially if those powers did not
conform to the goals and expectations of the majority party membership.

To test this, I look at the proportion of rules requests denied by the Committee
between the 96th and the 104th Congresses. The period (1979-1996) is theoretically
important because of the reforms made to the Committee prior to this time. The effects
of the reforms occurring during the early and mid-19703 were not instantaneous but took
some time to change the relationship between the Committee and the majority party. The
measure I use was calculated from the number of requests denied divided by the total
number of rules requests for each Congress [W ”“3 denied/ m, m, requested]. The data was
taken from the Final Legislative Calendars of the Committee on Rules. The proportion of

total requests denied over time, I argue, measures the extent that the Committee used its

84

negative power to block legislation. Oppenheimer (1977: 98-100) used a similar
measure for this purpose. Based on his analysis, be inferred that the decreasing number
of rules requests not granted by the Committee between the 87th and 94th Congress
indicated the beginnings of a signiﬁcant behavioral change. In particular, he argued that
the lower frequency of denied rules requests represented the Committee’s increased
responsiveness to the majority party.

The second set of expectations that I test in Chapter 4 relate to majority and
minority voting behavior. Here, I test the claim that as majority party members become
more closely aligned in their policy preferences, giving up a degree of their amendment
freedom should become less costly. By granting party leaders greater control over the
legislative agenda, members of the majority party give up some of their independent
ability to affect policy outcomes. Implicitly, the beneﬁts that members of the majority
party can achieve by granting their leaders control over special rules is greater than the
beneﬁts they can achieve by maintaining their ability to freely amend on the ﬂoor.

Evidence in support of this contention, I argue can be found in the level of
majority party voting support on amendments and special rules. Over time, as the Rules
Committee was established as the agent of the majority party, special rules were
increasingly used to provide collective beneﬁts to members of the majority party. If as I
have contended, the over time changes to Rules represent the membership’s decision to
empower its leadership organizations, then evidence should exist that members were
willing to give up some of their own individual powers (e.g. amendment rights). In

particular, I argued that majority party support on amendments should signiﬁcantly

85

decrease over time, and conversely, majority party support on special rules should
increase.

I created an aggregate majority and minority party support indicator on special
rules and amendments from the 80th to the 105th Congresses. The aggregate measure
calculates the proportion of majority party members voting aye and then averages this
score across all such votes, Congress by Congress. Formally, the aggregate measure can
be depicted as (( Z Yi/ Totali ) / N votes )) such that, Yi equals the number voting aye for
vote idivided by the total voting (Totali) on vote , summed across and divided by N votes.
This measure, and derivations thereof, are used in Chapter 4 for amendments and special

rule votes, but also in Chapter 6 on ﬁnal passage votes.l

Chapter 5

In Chapter 5, I test predictions made by competing theories of legislative
organization and my own principal-agent model regarding the procedural choice of
restrictive rules. Here, I assess what factors affect the likelihood of a bill receiving a
restrictive rule using logistic regressions. The dichotomous nature of the dependent
variable—rule choice—lends itself nicely to logistic analysis. I use the logistic binary
choice model to estimate the affects of informational, distributive, and partisan variables
on the likelihood a bill receives a restrictive rule. Logit offers valuable estimation
properties such as asymptotic consistency and asymptotic normality. The estimates from

the binary choice model do not make predictions about Y-hat per se, but instead predict

 

' The aggregate data used in the time series are from the roll-call data base constructed by David W.
Rohde, maintained by the Political Institutions and Public Choice Program.

86

the probability of Yi being 0 or 1 conditional upon the values of the independent
variables. More formally, P(Yi = 1) = <D([3’Xi) where (D represents the cumulative density
function of the model which is constrained between 0 and 1; and P(Yi = 0) = 1 - ¢(B'X,).
So, P(Yi =j) forj = O or 1, then P(Yi =j) = (13(13'Xi)j (1- <1>(B'Xi))l '1 .

Substantively, the estimators of the logit model are quite similar to the linear
regression model in that the sign of 13,, indicates the relationship of Xi to the dependent
variable. However, because the model makes no assumptions about the linearity of the
independent variables, the magnitude of effect of the independent variables varies
according to the values taken on by the Xs. Thus, later in the analysis I calculate
predicted probabilities for each exogenous variable of interest by taking one standard
deviation change in the mean X value while holding the other exogenous variables in the
model at their means in order to assess the effect of each variable on the probability of Y.
Speciﬁcally, the predicted probability calculations for each of the exogenous variables
uses the following formula: Pi = E[Y=1|X,.] = [1/(1 + exp -(Bl + [39(9)].

The dependent variable in this part of the analysis are the restrictive character of
the special rules. The rules are collected from the Legislative Calendar of the House
Committee on Rules and represent the population of special rules for the 97"“, 98‘“, 104'”,
and 105th Congresses that provide for initial consideration of legislation. This excludes
rules related to conference reports, adjournment resolutions, those used for initial debate

onlyz, and rules that were rejected by the House.

 

2 Usually special rules both bring bills to the ﬂoor for debate and structure the process in which they are
voted on. However, a few rules handle these functions separately. For the few instances in which a bill

received two rules, one for initiating ﬂoor debate and one for voting on the bill, only the latter rule would
be coded.

87

The 97‘“, 98”, 104‘“, and 105th Congresses were selected for both practical and
theoretical reasons. The availability of data and thus the feasibility of the analysis placed
constraints on the number of Congresses and the speciﬁc ones that I could choose from.
In some instances, especially for addressing the question of rule choice, bill-speciﬁc
information used to create variables consistent with previous research limited the range of
possible Congresses to no earlier than the 97th (1981-1982).

In general terms, the 97th and 98th are useful Congresses to start with because I am
concerned with the changes in how special rules have been used after the congressional
reforms (1970-1977). Central to my focus is the growth of strong leadership institutions
within the House and the changing relationship between the majority party and the Rules
Committee during this period. Before the early 19803, there was little visible affect of the
reforms on partisanship and the strengthening of party leaders (Rohde 1991: 16). The
forces affecting partisanship in Congress also have a major impact on the relationship
between Rules and the majority party, so data on the 97th and 98th Congress becomes
particularly important because this is when these forces begin to be the most pronounced.
In addition, before the 19803 relatively few policies were able to muster a strong
consensus among congressional Democrats, so the partisan affects of the reforms tended
to be attenuated. Indeed, policies like government management of the economy, foreign
and defense policy, as well as environmental policy tended to divide segments of the
Democratic majority (Rohde 1991: 34-35; Sinclair 1982).

Moreover, the 97‘h Congress is a theoretically logical period to start for several
other reasons. The 97‘“ was one of the most partisan Congresses before Jim Wright

became Speaker in the 100th Congress. The Democrats faced a very popular president in

88

Reagan’s ﬁrst term that sparked a dramatic and bitter partisan rivalry between
Democratic leaders in the House and the executive branch (see Sinclair 1985 and 1992;
Thurber 1992; Wright 1997). The partisan conﬂict was especially hostile over Reagan’s
budget priorities. In effect, the 97th Congress confronted the Rules Committee and the
Democratic leadership with a new legislative environment consisting of both a strong
Republican president and a more cohesive and enlarged minority party (Bach and Smith
1988: 68).

Under Jim Wright’s Speakership (1987-1988) a tradition of active leadership
involvement in the rules process began (Bach and Smith 1988: 37; Rohde 1991: 111-
112). Before this time, previous Speakers (e.g. Carl Albert, John McCormack, Tip
O’Neil) would get directly involved in the rule process only on truly important
legislation. On legislation of moderate or little interest to majority party interests, the
Committee would act fairly independently during this period. Thus, considerable
variation between the Rules Committee and the majority party should be evident for
comparison purposes for Congresses selected before the 100‘“ Congress (e.g. 97‘“-98"‘)
and those selected after the 100th Congress (e.g. 104‘h-105th ).3 Once more, there also
exists considerable theoretical debate surrounding the difference in partisanship and level
of leadership strength between the 104th and 105th Congresses (see Oppenheimer 1997).
In fact, Marshall, Prins, and Rohde (1998) found that special rules were used very

differently in the ﬁrst session of the 105th Congress on appropriations bills as compared to

 

3 In addition, the 97‘” Congress was the last chaired by Bolling. Bolling was integral in establishing the
Rules Committee as an extension of the leadership. Chairman Claude Pepper took over in the 98‘h
Congress. He was considered to be a more collegial (bipartisan) chairman. Chairman Pepper also claimed
that the Speaker was less involved in special rules during the 98"I Congress than the 97m (Bach and Smith
1988: 122).

89

how they were used in 1995 and early 1996. Indeed, the content of these bills differed
but so too did the goals of the GOP leadership. But when the leadership decided to usurp
the appropriations process for partisan purposes, special rules and the legislation they
protected were just as bitterly partisan as during the 104th Congress.‘ So, there also exists
considerable variation that is theoretically important between the 104th and 105th
Congresses as well.

Special rules for the 97"‘-98th and 104"'-105‘h Congresses were initially coded into
four categories based on the degree that the rule restricted amendments.’ After reading
the full text of each rule, I would make an assessment of its restrictiveness according to
the following criteria: (A.) Open rules were coded a 0 if the rule placed no restrictions
on a member’s ability to amend the bill. This could include granting priority to
amendments pre-printed in the congressional record, making certain amendments or
substitutes in order, but not restricting the offering of other amendments; (B.) Modiﬁed-
open rules were coded a 1 if the rule included a pre-printing clause that speciﬁed only
amendments included in the congressional record by a certain date would be in order or a
clause that ‘required’ only pre-printed amendments for consideration, a time limit on the

amendment process, the rule may preclude amendments to a substitute except those

 

4

Indeed, David Obey (D-Wisc.) ﬁguratively expressed his concerns regarding partisanship on spending
bills and special rules: “0n the Committee on Appropriations on each of these bills except one, we have
worked out a very eﬂective bipartisan relationship... The problem is that the Committee on Rules has
imposed a partisan straightjacket on the debate for those bills, and it has in the process turned those
bipartisan products into partisan war zones” (Congressional Record, July 23, 1997: H5653).

5 There are several ways that l have been able to independently check the validity of my coding scheme.
Whenever possible, I would compare speciﬁc references to a particular rule classiﬁcation made by scholars
like Bach and Smith (1988) with my own coding scheme. In addition, the GOP and Democratic
classiﬁcation of rules is available from the “Survey of Activities of the House Committee on Rules: Report
of the Committee on Rules”. My rule codes follow the GOP classiﬁcation very closely and the GOP
classiﬁcation has been used by other scholars to pursue this question (Sinclair 1998; Dodd and

90

printed in the congressional record, the rule may make in order a speciﬁc amendment but
preclude second-degree amendments to said amendment, the rule may also limit the
amendments to a “section or title” of the bill or substitute while the remaining part of the
bill or substitute was open to amendment (see hres620 for example from 97‘h Congress or
hreslS6 from the 104th). (C.) Modiﬁed-closed rules were coded a 2 if the rule restricted
amendments to the bill and/or substitutes made in order and speciﬁed in the text of the
rule (amendments are usually numbered), or in the Rule’s Committee Report, or speciﬁed
by name and number in the congressional record. (D.) Closed rules were coded a 3 if the
rule was completely closed to amendments with only a motion to recommit. The four
category dependent variable was then collapsed into two categories for the purpose of
logistic analysis. The dichotomous variable was constructed such that the modiﬁed-open
and open rules were coded a 0, while the modiﬁed-closed and closed were coded a 1.
Creating the dichotomous variable by collapsing the restrictive cutpoints in this
manner is consistent with other empirical works on special rules (see Krehbiel 1991:
168; Sinclair 1999: 24). More importantly though, I feel theoretically justiﬁed in
collapsing the data in this fashion because the biggest difference in terms of restricting a
member’s ability to change the bill on the ﬂoor is between the open-modiﬁed and the
modiﬁed-closed rules. Indeed, less difference exists between open and open-modiﬁed
and the modiﬁed-closed and closed rules. It is important to note however, that I do not
throw the information on the dependent variable away. Later in this analysis, I analyze

rule choice using the four category rule classiﬁcation scheme with multinomial logit. In

 

Oppenheimer 1997). Thus, 1 am fairly comfortable that the decision rules I use for my codings capture the
central components of the restrictive criteria of the special rules.

91

Chapter 6, I also utilize the extra information from the dependent variable in comparing
majority and minority aggregate support measures on ﬁnal passage and rule votes.

Figure 3 shows the distribution of special rules for the 97‘“, 98‘“, 104‘“, and 105‘h
Congresses (see Figure 3). There are several interesting patterns of the dependent
variable to take note of. First of all, the proportion of open rules declines markedly from
the 97‘“ to the 105‘“ Congress. In fact, the proportion of open rules goes from nearly 73%
down to just over 32% during this period. Conversely, the proportion of rules with some
restrictive criteria increases fairly dramatically over the same time period. For example,
modiﬁed-open rules make up about only 6% of the total rules during the 97‘“ and 98‘“
Congresses. This jumps to over 20% of the total rules during the 104‘“ and 105‘“.
Similarly modiﬁed-closed and closed rules also increased steadily. The former went
from 16% of the total rules in the 97‘“ to 27% by the 105‘“, while the latter rose even more
dramatically from a low of just over 4% to over 20% during the same time period. These
temporal changes in the increased restrictiveness of rules are consistent with the ﬁndings
by Sinclair (1997 and 1998), Bach and Smith (1988), and Oleszek (1996). So, although
the frequency of special rules remains nearly constant between the 97‘“ to the 105‘“, the
proportion that are restrictive has increased dramatically.

Figure 4 provides the distribution of special rules for the same four Congresses
using the dichotomous classiﬁcation in the dependent variable (see Figure 4). The
patterns here show a similar pattern in that the proportion of restrictive rules increases
dramatically over this time period. In fact, by the 105‘“, the proportion of restrictive rules

is nearly equal the proportion of open rules, 47.40% and 52.60% respectively.

92

Informational, distributive, and partisan theories each make different predictions
regarding the determinants of rule choice. The analysis in Chapter Five is designed to
assess empirically the accuracy of these predictions in explaining the likelihood a bill
will receive a restrictive rule. For the logit analysis, I have incorporated a number of
theoretically important exogenous variables used by other scholars as well as some of my
own. Table 2 lists the exogenous variables and the related research that has
incorporated these concepts for predicting rule choice (see Table 2). Appendix A
includes a complete description of how each variable used in the logit analysis was
measured (see Appendix A). In addition, Table 3 provides basic descriptive statistics
including the range, mean, and standard deviation of each exogenous variable, broken
down by Congress (see Table 3).

Several of the variables used in this part of the analysis were constructed using
nominate scores in order to measure ideological differences between subsets of the
membership. Nominate scores are widely used in legislative studies and are based on the
individual voting behavior of members during a given Congress. The strength of the
nominate measure is that it utilizes all voting behavior information relative to each
member in the legislature. There are weaknesses of the measure, although predominately
not the fault of the measure per say, but instead based on the misperception and/or the
temptation to interpret these as policy preferences. The nominate score is a relative
measure of voting behavior and not a measure of a member’s policy preference. Interval
measures of preferences cannot be derived from voting patterns (see Marshall, Prins, and
Rohde 1997). In fact, a vote may have very little to do with a member’s true policy

preferences because preferences are constrained by the agenda, party leaders, and

93

activated constituency groups.‘3 So, I will not refer to these measures constructed from
nominate scores as preferences, but as relative measures of ideological behavior.

The nominate scores derived from member voting behavior allow us to array each
member on an ideological spectrum ranging from -1 (most liberal) to +1 (most
conservative). In this way, nominate scores can be used as a measure to assess members
relative ideological behavioral patterns in relation to all other members in the legislature.
One additional point to note here is that I chose nominate scores over other measures
because I believe they are better indicators of a member’s general ideological behavior
than are alternative measures. They are more stable than interest group scores in part
because they use all relevant behavioral information. More importantly, they are
representative of and dependent upon the legislative agenda dealt with by Congress. This
offers a practical level of consistency that may not be achieved by other measures.
Scholars like Thorson and Nitzschke (1998) have also argued that nominate scores are
more effective for measuring a legislator’s ideology than are ADA scores, which is the
measure used by Krehbiel (1991).

Some of the independent variables are particularly important to the different
theoretical rationales, so, I will spend a little extra time discussing their operationalization

in the next several sections.

 

6 Rohde (1991: 41) offers an insightful distinction between true policy preferences and preferences that
almost always govern a member’s voting decision. The former he terms as “personal preferences” which
are unconstrained or truly exogenous. The latter he terms as “operative preferences” which are constrained
or inﬂuenced by factors outside of the member’s control.

94

Informational Theory Variables

The ﬁrst two variables are the committee heterogeneity and committee outlier
measures. These represent central features of Krehbiel’s (1991) informational theory. In
general terms, these are committee-level variables that tap into the relative usefulness of
the committee in providing information to the chamber. The former captures the relative
heterogeneity of the committee members’ preferences in relation to the chamber. The
heterogeneity variable is measured as the signed difference between the committee’s
standard deviation nominate score and the charnber’s. The measure uses the standard
deviation nominate score of the chamber as a baseline so that positive differences mean
that committee preferences are relatively heterogeneous as compared to the chamber
while negative scores mean that the committee is relatively homogeneous as compared to
the chamber. The latter variable, committee outlier is measured as the absolute difference
between the committee median the bill was referred to and the chamber median.
According to Krehbiel’s theory, this measure captures the relative distance in preferences

between the chamber median and the committee.

Distributive Theory Variables

The distributive content variable is a bill-level measure that attempts to capture
traditional pork-barrel type legislation. These are policies that narrowly target beneﬁts to
a relatively few congressional districts and widely disperse the costs. The variable is
measured as the ratio of states the bill affects in relation to the bill’s legislative scope (as
measured by key words plus the number of states). In addition, the urgency variable is

used to assess predictions made by distributive arguments (see Krehbiel 1991). The

95

urgency variable is a bill-level measure coded as a 1 to indicate the legislature’s
willingness to speed up the normal legislative process for a particular bill and 0
otherwise. The idea is that because of future uncertainty, members would prefer to have
distributive beneﬁts passed immediately as compared to later in the session. The

operationalization for both distributive variables is consistent with previous research

(Krehbiel 1991 ; Sinclair 1995b).

IndependentActor: Rules Committee Variable

Dion and Huber’s (1996) formal model asserts that the preferences of the
members from the Rules Committee matter in determining legislative outcomes.
Although my study is set up somewhat differently than theirs, I attempt to incorporate a
variable called the rules median that measures the relative distance in the ideological
behavior between Rules Committee members and the legislative committee the bill was
referred to. The Rules median variable was constructed from nominate scores as the
absolute difference between the committee median the bill was referred to and the Rules

Committee median.

Partisan Theory: Rules Committee as Agent of the Majority Party

I have developed a principal-agent model for the Rules Committee. The partisan
argument I address suggests that the majority party members on Rules act as the agent of
the majority party membership. Unlike Dion and Huber’s model, I emphasize the spatial

position of the party caucus in relation to the legislative committee proposing the bill.

96

The measure I incorporate is not sensitive to the ideological disposition of Rules, because
according to my theoretical argument, Rules is an agent, and thus, acts to fulﬁll the
expectations of the majority party. The stronger the majority party, the better the
Committee performs its agency role. The party median variable is a dummy variable that
takes on the value 1 when the party median is more extreme than the majority party
contingent from the legislative committee, relative to the ﬂoor median and 0 otherwise.
In other words, the dummy variable takes on the value 1 when the party conference is to
the far side of both the ﬂoor median and the committee median. When the party median
is more extreme, party leaders have an incentive to use special rules to pull policies away
from the chamber median and back toward the party median. The variable created to

capture this logic is represented spatially in Appendix B.

Chapter 6

Finally, Chapter 6 looks systematically at the linkage between special rules and
policies passed in both the House and Senate for the 97‘“, 98‘“, 104‘“, and 105‘“
Congresses. In other words, I assess the relationship between rules and ﬁnal legislative
products. I incorporate aggregate support measures on rule and ﬁnal passage votes in the
House identical to those used in Chapter 4. Then, I follow this legislation to the Senate in
order to determine the ﬁnal disposition of each bill. On the subset of bills receiving roll
call votes for ﬁnal passage on the ﬂoor of the Senate, I can make comparisons using
aggregate support measures between both chambers on ﬁnal policy outcomes controlling

for the type of rule used in the House.

97

In sum, I argue in Chapter 6 that leadership institutions in the Senate are very
different then in the House. The Senate has different institutional features and is
composed of a membership with different incentives to delegate leadership powers. Still,
a limited amount of partisan conﬂict can be attributed to leadership actions. Senate
leaders have less power relative to their House counterparts in advantaging partisan
outcomes, but Senate leaders are not devoid of such powers. Moreover, exogenous
sources of partisanship affect member decision making across both chambers in a similar
manner. Choices leaders make in the House regarding which bills to grant restrictive
rules indicate the partisan nature of the policy in debate and are reﬂected in the partisan

nature of ﬁnal passage votes in the Senate.

Conclusion

The focus of this chapter has been on discussing the data that will be brought to
bear in the analysis and why it is relevant for testing the hypotheses from Chapter 2. The
measures I have chosen (especially in Chapters 4 and 6) are not the most complicated of
techniques, but more importantly I believe they provide considerable empirical purchase
because of their relevance to the questions at hand. Measurement and selection issues
were addressed as well as a basic presentation of summary statistics and temporal
patterns in the data.

Careful attention was paid to previous empirical research in terms of variable
operationalization (especially for Chapter 5). There are costs and beneﬁts to
operationalizing variables the way others have. Adopting similar measures can be useful

for comparative purposes. However, at times I have been persuaded for theoretical,

98

empirical, and reasons of feasibility to measure theoretical concepts differently.
Whenever possible, I have tried to justify my decisions based on solid theoretical and/or
empirical grounds.

Admittedly there exists problems. Models are always underspeciﬁed, that’s why
they are models. Still, I think that the statistical models that I estimate in Chapter 5 are
very informative theoretically. Few empirical works incorporate all special rules, and
even fewer still over time (Bach and Smith 1988 is the exception). Most are limited to
rules on major legislation only. Indeed, according to my arguments the factors affecting
the Rules Committee and special rules have varied considerably over time. Given this
temporal variation, looking at a subset of special rules ﬁ'om major legislation tosses
theoretically relevant information away that can be used to develop a more dynamic
theory of congressional politics.

In the next three chapters, the methods discussed above will be used to understand
better the evolving role of the House Rules Committee as a leadership institution and
special rules respectively. To this end, the design is aimed at uncovering the signiﬁcance

of both for shaping public policies in the U.S. Congress.

99

TABLE 2: Empirical Research and Exogenous Variables Explaining Rule Choice

Theoretical Rationale Empirical Research Exogenous Variable

o Informational
Theory

0 Distributive Theory

0 Rules Committee:
Independent Actor

0 Partisan Theory

0 Partisan Theory:
(Rules Committee as
Agent of Majority Party)

Krehbiel 1991 and 1997b;
Sinclair 1995b; Dion and

Huber 1997; Thorson and
Nitzschke 1998

Krehbiel 1991 and 1997b;
Sinclair 1995b; Dion and
Huber 1997

Dion and Huber 1996 and
1997; Krehbiel 1997b;
Marshall 1998

Krehbiel 1991; Sinclair 1995b

Marshall 1998 and 1999

100

Bill Scope

Committee Heterogeneity
Laws Cited

Minority Cosponsors
Committee Outlier

Distributive Content
Bill Urgency

Legislative Proﬁle

Rules Median

Majority Cosponsors
Leadership Involvement
Omnibus Legislation

Party Median

 

 

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103

CHAPTER 4

POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE COORDINATION FOR COLLECTIVE
ACTION

One of the fundamental issues for the systematic study of institutions is to
understand whether and under what conditions that institutions matter (Shepsle and
Weingast 1995). In essence, institutions—and choices regarding their organization—are
important because they can differentially affect the costs and/or beneﬁts of collective
action. An important difference between theoretical approaches to Congress is in their
explanation of how institutions facilitate solutions to collective action problems and their
relevance in affecting policy outcomes. From this perspective, theories of legislative
organization that purport to explain institutional change and policy outcomes must also
explain how costs to cooperation within legislatures can be overcome and how

institutions affect these costs.

The Role of Party Leadership

To a large extent, the distribution of member interests shapes collective decision
making, and ultimately determines the allocation of costs and beneﬁts within Congress.
For example, the partisan perspective emphasizes the importance of members’ policy
preferences, but departs from the other theoretical approaches in that preferences are in a

context that relates members of the majority party to the members of the minority party.

104

Party organization, then, provides a framework in which the relative costs and beneﬁts
for collective action can be understood. Indeed, the relation of common interests within
the majority and the relative dissimilarity of these interests between the majority and
minority forms the incentive for majority party members to relinquish a degree of control
to leaders for the purpose of collective advantage (Rohde 1991).

Sinclair argues in her work (1995a) that the relationship between external party
organization in the electorate and the strength of internal party organizations within
Congress is very complicated. In general, stronger external party organizations in the
electorate may inﬂuence the costs and beneﬁts to the membership of strong party
leadership within Congress, but not in isolation of internal factors, such as, leadership
strategies affecting the agenda (see Marshall, Prins, and Rohde 1998 forthcoming). In
contrast to the common wisdom depicting the declining role of political parties in the
political process, the puzzle of strong leadership and party cohesion is not simply
dependent on a bivariate linkage between external and internal party organizations
(Wattenberg 1986). Instead, the mix of member goals, internal and external constraints,
and leadership strategies all play a role in determining the distribution of costs and
beneﬁts of initiating and maintaining strong party institutions.

Congressional scholars have argued that the dramatic changes in congressional
elections have increased the opportunities for cooperation among the membership and led
to a stronger reliance on leadership organization over time (Rohde 1991; Sinclair 1992
and 1995a). The more homogenous the party membership, the more likely these
opportunities will arise. Moreover, when the party membership agrees on policy

objectives, leaders have a greater incentive to use their institutional powers for partisan

105

ends (Cooper and Brady 1981; Rohde and Shepsle 1987). The institutional reforms
affecting the Rules Committee, I would argue, are excellent examples regarding the
dynamics of institutional choice and collective action in congressional politics. During
the reform era, party members granted the leadership signiﬁcant control over the Rules
Committee so that its institutional powers could be added to the leadership’s arsenal of
tools for pursuing partisan ends. This move by the majority party greatly enhanced the
leadership’s ability to take advantage of partisan opportunities when they would arise and
even enhanced their ability to create opportunities where little or none existed. I have
argued that the changes scholars have observed in special rules is in part a by-product of
these institutional choices.

In the preceeding theoretical chapters, I argued that electoral and institutional
changes during the reform era provided incentives for the majority party membership to
empower leaders with greater institutional resources like control over the Rules
Committee. This collective cooperation I argue manifested itself not only in majority
party support of leadership institutions more generally but also more speciﬁcally on
special rules.

In this chapter, I address hypotheses 1 through 4 from Chapter 2. In general, this
set of hypotheses reﬂect upon the changing incentives for members of the majority party
to empower leadership organizations. To begin, I assess temporal change in the Rules
Committee’s behavior. The ﬁrst hypothesis contends that the Rules Committee should
become less likely to use its negative powers to block policy initiatives by denying
special rules requests over time. Next, I examine the changing voting behavior of

majority party members on amendments and special rules. The crux of the theory argues

106

that the growing preference homogeneity of the majority party should increase the party
memberships’ incentives for collective cooperation. The behavioral expectation predicts
that majority party members should become more willing to relinquish some of their
individual rights to change (amend) legislation on the ﬂoor as committee proposals
become more reﬂective of the party’s policy interests. Implicitly, the beneﬁts of
coordinating partisan action outweighs the individual costs associated with not
coordinating their efforts. Hypothesis 2 then, asserts that the changing incentives over
time should be manifest in the decreasing levels of majority party support on
amendments. Similarly, hypothesis 3 predicts that the over time changes in member
incentives should also be reﬂected by increasing levels of majority party support on
special rules. Finally, hypothesis 4 argues that because of the collective policy
consequences of majority party cooperation on special rules, minority party support on

these procedures should signiﬁcantly decline over this same time period.

Empirical Analysis

I begin the analysis by examining the temporal changes in the Rules Committee’s
behavior of whether or not to grant a special rule to committee requests. As I show later
in Chapter 6, the procedural choice to grant a restrictive rule may have extremely
important policy consequences for ﬁnal passage decisions in both chambers. In the
second part of the analysis, I assess changes in membership support of special rules and
committee proposals by looking at majority and minority support on special rule and

ﬁrst-degree amendment votes from the 83rd-105‘“ Congress. Lastly, I analyze in greater

107

detail the voting behavior on amendments and special rules for the 97‘“, 98‘“, 104‘“, and

105‘“ Congresses.

Rules Committee Behavior

The ﬁrst part of the empirical analysis reﬂects directly on the Rules Committee’s
choice regarding whether or not to grant committee proposals a special rule. If as I have
argued, the Rules Committee reforms were designed to facilitate its responsiveness to the
collective policy interests of the majority party, and legislative committee proposals
became increasingly representative of the majority party, then Rules should become less
likely over time to use its institutional power to block policy initiatives from reaching the
ﬂoor. The data in Table 4 shows the proportion of special rules requests not granted from
the 96‘“ (1979-1980) to the 104‘“ (1995-1996) Congress (see Table 4). The table indicates
a substantial decline in the proportion of special rules that were not granted. During the
96‘“ Congress nearly 18% of the rules that were requested by a legislative committee were
not granted. By the 104‘“ Congress, this percentage dropped noticeably to less than 4%.
These ﬁndings parallel Oppenheirner’s (1977) earlier analysis of Rules Committee
behavior. There, he found a substantial decrease in the number of rules denied after the
89‘“ Congress, which he attributed to the dramatic change in the Committee’s
composition and subsequent decreases to the reforms that followed.

In effect, the ﬁndings from Table 4 demonstrate that if the Committee did shape
policy, it became less likely over time to do so by blocking proposals from reaching the
ﬂoor. The patterns of evidence also ﬁt nicely with Sinclair’s ﬁndings that policy

disagreements between the liberal members of the Democratic caucus and their fellow

108

partisans on committees decreased during the 19708 (Sinclair 1995a: 38). Indeed, if
committee proposals became more representative of the majority party caucus, one would
not expect the Rules Committee as agent of the majority party to prevent those policies
from reaching the House ﬂoor. Thus, the ﬁndings in Table 4 tend to support the ﬁrst
hypothesis that the institutional reforms affecting the Rules Committee facilitated greater

responsiveness to the majority party.

Temporal C hange .' Procedural and Policy Paﬂisanﬂip

The theoretical argument asserts that as the party membership’s policy
preferences become more homogeneous, majority party members would be more
supportive of the leadership’s use of institutional tools that provide for the advancement
of shared party goals. In the context of the reform era changes, as committee policies
became more in line with the interests of the party membership, the individual costs of
giving up amendment rights on these policies should decrease and the collective beneﬁts
from supporting special rules should increase.

Figure 5 tends to conﬁrm that members of the majority party became more
supportive of committee proposals over time (see Figure 5).1 The argument here is that
support for ﬁrst-degree amendments reﬂects that members are not satisﬁed with the
original policy proposals brought to the ﬂoor by the committee. So, the decreasing

patterns observed for majority party support on amendments signiﬁes that the majority

 

' Average party support is measured as the number of members from a given party voting aye over the
total number from that party voting, averaged across all votes. Figure 5 utilizes all ﬁrst-degree
amendments from 1953-1998 to calculate average party support. The patterns remain robust for different
selection criteria. For example, the analysis of conﬂictual amendments (e.g. majorities of 90% or less ) for
the majority party support series is also characterized by a signiﬁcant pattern of decay over time.

109

party members became more supportive of committee policies over time. In Figure 5,
average majority party support on ﬁrst-degree amendments goes from .68 during the 83rd
(1953-1954) Congress down to .35 by the 104‘“ (1995-1996). Interestingly, the series
rebounds back up to .53 during the 105‘“ Congress. Still, the declining trend in the series
of majority party support is statistically signiﬁcant over time. That is to say, average
majority party support on amendments possesses a signiﬁcant negative correlation with
time.2 In contrast, the series for average minority party support on amendments is not
characterized by a signiﬁcant trend over time.3 But this ﬁnding is not necessarily
contrary to the theory purported here because it is the change in majority party behavior
that speaks to the changing incentives for members of the majority party to cooperate for
partisan ends.

The decreasing trend in majority party support on amendments from Figure 5
supports hypothesis 2 and the theoretical argument that the incentives changed for
majority party members to limit their ability to alter legislation on the ﬂoor of the House.
The variation in majority party support on amendments over time also supports Rohde’s
empirical ﬁndings that committee proposals in general became signiﬁcantly more
responsive to the policy interests of the liberal Democratic caucus from the early 1970s to
the late 19808 (1992a). Also interesting in Figure 5 is the decline in majority party

support around the 89‘“ Congress (1965-1966) which brought in a very large class of

 

2 The correlation coefficient of the time trend with average majority party support is -.57 (p > .004). The
unstandardized beta coefﬁcient (-.007) for the time trend in a regression context is also signiﬁcant
(p>.004).

3 The correlation coefﬁcient of the time trend with average minority party support is -.012 (p > .956). 1n
the regression context of this series the time trend was insigniﬁcant (-.0001, p>.956).

110

liberal Democrats who successfully compelled the Democratic leadership to diminish the
powers of the conservative-leaning Rules Committee.

The inference from the signiﬁcant decline in majority party support on
amendments is that member incentives for cooperation changed over time. In essence,
giving up amendment rights became less costly for members of the majority party and the
beneﬁts related to party coordination increased. Thus, members of the majority party
became more inclined to cooperate for the purpose of achieving collective partisan
objectives.

Figure 6 provides additional evidence relating to the changing incentives for
cooperation that emerged over time among members of the majority party. This
manifested itself in support on special rules. Figure 6 depicts two series, one of average
majority party support and one for average minority party support on special rules ﬁ'om
1953-1998 (see Figure 6).4 Average majority party support for special rules starts at .74
during the 83‘“ Congress and reaches an astonishingly high level of .97 by the 104‘“
Congress (the highest level in the series). In contrast, average minority support goes from
.56 in the 83rd Congress, then peaks at .84 in the 92"“ and falls off steadily to a low of .15
by the 103rd Congress. It is also interesting to note the patterns of dramatic divergence
between majority and minority support starting with the 92“‘1 Congress (1971-1972). This
stark change in majority and minority support on special rules occurred when the
Committee’s composition was purposefully and signiﬁcantly altered to ensure that the

Rules Committee was responsive to the policy views of the liberal Democratic caucus.

lll

Both series are signiﬁcantly correlated with time and in the theoretically predicted
direction.’

The patterns in Figure 6 follow the expectations from hypothesis 3 and hypothesis
4. In the case of the former, the levels of majority party support suggest that members
became more willing to support special rules as committee proposals reﬂected majority
party policy interests. In the latter case, the declining level of average minority party
support suggests that special rules were in conﬂict with or detrimental to the minority’s
policy interests. In other words, the rules were increasingly used to advantage majority
policy initiatives, often times by restricting amendments preferred by members of the
minority party. Indeed, one minority member during the 104‘“ Congress colorfully
expressed his concern over the signiﬁcant increase in restrictive rules, “These days the
Republicans are passing out closed rules like Fenway ﬂanks at a Red Sox game (CR
2/9/95: H-1476). The temporal ﬁndings are consistent with previous works that contend
restrictive rules have become more prevalently employed for partisan purposes (Bach and
Smith 1988; Aldrich and Rohde 1996b; Sinclair 1995b). So, from Figure 5 we can infer
that the incentives for majority party cooperation increased over time, but also the results
from Figure 6 reﬂect that the costs of this cooperation in terms of majority party

procedural support on special rules shifted the burden to members of the minority party.

 

‘ Figure 6 measures average minority and majority support using all ﬂoor roll-call votes on special rules.
The patterns remain consistent using alternative selection criteria (e.g. conﬂictual votes with majorities less
than 90%).

5 The correlation coefﬁcient for the increasing and decreasing trends in special rules are .811 (p>.000) for
majority party support and -.576 (p>.004) for minority party support. The unstandardized betas in a
regression of time on majority and minority party support on special rules votes were .01 (p>.000) and
-.002 (P>.004) respectively.

112

One might expect from the theory offered here that majority party members would
be supportive of limiting amendment activity on policies in which the majority party was
satisﬁed with the committee proposal. But, at the same time, if majority party members
were satisﬁed with the committee proposal they could fairly easily unify to defeat any
amendments offered on the ﬂoor that would compromise or alter the committee’s
proposal. On bills in which the majority party is very cohesive, leaders would be less
inclined to use restrictive rules because any opposition amendments could be easily
defeated.“ This is where leadership strategy in using special rules becomes so important.
If members of the majority party can agree to cooperate by supporting restrictive
procedures, then the leadership can selectively use the rules on policies that are the most
vulnerable to minority amendments. That is, on those policies in which the minority
party offers amendments in an attempt to siphon majority member support. Although not
shown here, I do ﬁnd some conﬁrmatory evidence of this argument. The average level of
majority party opposition to amendments on legislation considered under open and
modiﬁed-open rules is consistently greater than the average level of majority party
opposition on amendments under modiﬁed-closed rules for the 97‘“, 98‘“, 104‘“, and 105‘“
Congresses.

Figure 7 provides one additional bit of evidence that reﬂects on the costs to

majority party members associated with the procedural commitment to forgo amendment

 

‘5 Perhaps this is one reason why open rules have become more partisan over time. Party leaders may
choose to use open rules on policies that cannot be threatened by minority amendments because of the high
levels of cohesion among the majority party. This was true of several Judiciary Committee bills considered
during the 104‘“ Congress. The leadership had the luxury of high levels of majority support, so the only
protection needed on the bills were time restrictions for the amendment process. In addition, leaders may
choose to structure rules that allow extreme minority party amendments to be voted on in order to
potentially damage the party’s reputation or make their position more difﬁcult to defend.

113

rights on the ﬂoor. Figure 7 shows the proportion of ﬁrst-degree amendments in which
majority party support was higher than the level of minority party support controlling for
the type of special rule attached to the bill (see Figure 7).7 The patterns for the 97‘“, 98‘“,
and 104‘“ Congresses illustrate that the proportion of amendments that received higher
levels of support from the majority party than the minority party increased as the rule
associated with the legislation became more restrictive. For example, during the 97‘“
Congress the proportion of amendments in which the level of support was higher for the
majority goes from 41% for legislation under open rules to 56% of the amendments on
legislation considered under modiﬁed-closed rules. Similar patterns in the propensity of
amendment support across rule type are found for the 98‘“ and 104‘“ Congresses. 8 The
patterns of variation regarding the propensity of the majority party to support
amendments more so than the minority does suggest that when amendment possibilities
are limited, the subset allowed are more likely to be favored by members of the majority
party as the rules become more restrictive.

These ﬁndings of systematic variation in amendment support likely reﬂect the fact
that party leaders use rules for partisan ends. Special rules provide leaders with a
procedural mechanism to select between amendments that will be considered on the ﬂoor.

Anecdotal evidence supports the signiﬁcance of this claim. One minority member

 

7 Figure 7 utilizes ﬁrst-degree amendments on bills with special rules for the 97‘“, 98‘“, 104‘“, and 105‘“
Congresses. The proportion that are majority favored include the subset of amendments in which the
percentage of majority party members voting aye on the amendment was greater than the percentage of
minority party members voting aye on the same amendment.

“ The pattern found during the 105‘“ Congress is opposite of the patterns found for the previous
Congresses. The proportion of amendments favored by the majority party is the greatest for bills
considered under open rules (65%) and the proportion decreases with more restrictive ﬂoor procedures
(e.g. 44% and 41% for modiﬁed-open and modiﬁed-closed respectively). The different pattern of support

114

commented in the 104‘“ Congress during the debate on a modiﬁed-closed rule which
would bring an immigration bill to the ﬂoor (HR. 2202) that, “In general I would say
that there are lots of amendments that were good amendments, ﬁne amendments, in terms
of improving and honing this bill, that were not allowed. In certain cases it seems that
the most extreme amendments were allowed, but not those that would have moved the bill
in a more moderate direction...It looks a little bit political” (CR 3/19/96: H2367).
Indeed, the amendment votes on the immigration bill tend to verify the minority
member’s accusations. For the amendments favored by the minority party, the average
level of minority support was over twice the level found for the majority members.9 In
contrast, for the subset of amendments favored by the majority party on this same
immigration bill the average level of minority support was less than a third of the level
garnered by the majority.‘0 Clearly, the amendments allowed to the immigration bill
under the rule tended not to have bipartisan support.

Overall, the ﬁndings in Figure 7 demonstrate that amendments offered on bills
considered under open and modiﬁed-open rules were less likely to garner greater levels of
support from members of the majority party as compared to the minority party during
three of the four Congresses examined here. But on amendments to bills considered
under modiﬁed-closed rules majority party members were more likely to have higher
levels of support than the minority. Both the frequency and the average levels of majority

party support are greatest on amendments offered to legislation considered under more

 

may actually parallel other empirical ﬁndings that claim the GOP leadership to some extent used special
rules differently during the 105‘“ Congress (see Marshall, Prins, and Rohde 1998 forthcoming).

9 The average level of support on minority preferred amendments was .56 for the Democrats and .23 for
the Republicans.

115

restrictive ﬂoor rules. This systematic variation in amendment support I would argue
reﬂects on both the incentives for majority party cooperation and on the leadership’s use
of rules that limit certain amendments over others for the purpose of providing collective
partisan advantage.

Finally, Figure 8 illustrates the levels of partisan conﬂict on rule votes when
controlling for their restrictive character (see Figure 8). With only one small exception
during the 105‘“ Congress, modiﬁed-closed and closed rules on average were more
partisan than open and modiﬁed-open rules. The patterns of partisan conﬂict on special
rules votes also supports hypotheses 3 and 4 and the earlier ﬁndings from Figure 6. In
addition, the evidence here parallels previous ﬁndings that levels of partisanship on
special rules have increased dramatically over time (Rohde 1991; Oleszek 1996). But,
the variation in partisan conﬂict across rule type adds an important element. Based on the
systematic patterns of partisan conﬂict found on special rules votes, one can infer that
special rules (especially the restrictive rules) have increasingly been used to advantage
majority party initiatives and have become more detrimental to the policy interests of the
minority party over time. In fact, Figure 7 helps explain why partisanship on the rules
from Figure 8 may vary systematically. That is, Figure 7 showed that the proportion of
amendments favored by the majority party increased as the rules became more restrictive.
Thus, minority members would be more opposed to the rules that limit their amendment

choices because the ones that are allowed tend to be favored by members of the majority

party.

 

‘° The average level of support on the majority preferred amendments was .69 for the Republicans and .21
for the Democrats.

116

Conclusion

Party leaders can use institutional mechanisms to coordinate collective action for
the beneﬁt of the membership. Procedural commitment by the majority party is one
solution that can transform shared incentives for cooperation into partisan advantage.
Special rules have increasingly served this purpose. Indeed, the empirical ﬁndings speak
to the signiﬁcance of intra-party cooperation and leadership strategies in relation to
special rules.

In sum, the evidence presented in this chapter supports hypotheses 1 through 4.
The change in the Rules Committee behavior over time supports the theoretical
contention that members of the majority party institutionalized an agency relationship
with the Committee. As policies from the legislative committees increasingly reﬂected
the interests of the party caucus, the Rules Committee became less likely to block
proposals from reaching the House ﬂoor. The patterns of member voting behavior from
Figures 5 and 6 support hypotheses 2, 3, and 4. Figure 5 shows that majority party
members became less supportive of proposed changes to committee policies, while the
series in Figure 6 illustrate that members from the majority and minority parties became
more likely to disagree over these ﬂoor procedures. That is, majority members became
more likely to support the rules and minority members became more likely to oppose
them over time. This supports the theoretical argument that under conditions of
increasing intra-party homogeneity, majority party members become more willing to
forgo amendment rights because the costs of doing so decrease as committee proposals

become more reﬂective of majority party interests. Minority party opposition to the rules

117

reﬂects how procedural commitment by the majority on special rules can be used as a
mechanism to redistribute the policy costs to members of the minority.

The evidence presented in Figures 7 and 8 emphasize the signiﬁcance of
leadership strategies in the legislative process. The ﬁndings in Figure 7 are only
tentative, but suggest that a systematic relationship exists between the frequency of
majority party support on amendments and restrictive rules. For three of the four
Congresses, majority party members were likely to have higher levels of support than
were members of the minority on amendments considered under modiﬁed-closed rules.
As the rules became less restrictive, the frequency in which majority party support on
amendments was greater than the minority decreased. In addition, members of the
majority party were always more cohesive, on average, in their opposition to amendments
offered under less restrictive procedures as compared to the amendments offered under
restrictive rules.

The choice to use an open procedure may reﬂect that party leaders were less
concerned about limiting minority amendments on these particular policies because the
chances of gaining signiﬁcant majority support to overturn the committee proposal was
low. That is, why use a restrictive rule on policies in which the majority party is united
enough to pass regardless of the amendments offered by the minority? Indeed, during the
debate in the 104‘“ Congress on the rule to bring the Victim Restitution Act to the ﬂoor
(HR. 665), the minority leader on Rules, Representative Moakley (D-Mass.) makes this
very point, “You can have an open rule if it doesn ’t look like you 're going to use it” (CR

2/7/95: H-1304). Finally, the increasing levels of partisanship across categories of rule

118

type found in Figure 8 reinforce the claim that majority party leaders tend to employ

restrictive rules with an eye toward partisan ends.

119

TABLE 4: Changes in the Proportion of Special Rules Not Granted, 96‘“ - 104‘“
Congresses

 

 

Congress 96‘“ 97‘“ 98‘“ 99‘“ 100‘“ 101“ 102““ 103‘“ 104‘“ Total All
Congresses

 

 

%Rules

Requests

Not

Granted 17.7% 12.6% 10.0% 13.4% 8.1% 0.0% 11.4% 4.9% 3.4% 10.1%

Total
Requests n=254 n=183 n=202 n=l79 n=l72 n=63 n=l75 n=143 n=206 N=1577

Note: Data from Table 1 were collected from the Final Legislative Calendars of the House Committee on
Rules. The proportions of rules requests not granted include those that were deferred, denied, not heard, or
pending. Total requests exclude provisions that were disposed of via suspension, unanimous consent, and
request that were subsequently withdrawn.

120

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CHAPTER 5

EXPLAINING RESTRICTIVE RULES IN THE POSTREFORM HOUSE

The use of the House Rules Committee as a platform for pursuing party leadership
objectives is not a strategy unique to modern Congresses. According to Brown (1922:
88), just before Speaker Reed (R-ME, 1889-91, 1895-99) would report a special rule for
the purpose of passing legislation, he would inform the opposition party with grim
sarcasm, “Gentlemen, we have decided to perpetrate the following outrage”. Since the
days of Czar Rule, the Committee has been forced to adapt to changing legislative
demands and take on new institutional roles (Oppenheimer 1977; Bach 1981; Bach and
Smith 1988). The relationship between party leaders and the Committee has certainly
changed over time, but one aspect that has remained relatively constant is the
Committee’s importance as an avenue to inﬂuence the legislative process.

Indeed, special rules may be employed by leaders as an agenda-control tool to
deﬁne a subset of alternatives or to emphasize the importance of certain issue dimensions
over others in making policy choices (Aldrich and Rohde 1998b; Sinclair 1999). For
example, the GOP leadership’s strategy for the impeachment proceedings against
President Clinton denied House members a ﬂoor vote on censure, and instead, forced
members into an up or down decision. During the ﬂoor proceedings, one Democratic
member complained that the “Rules Committee could have brought up any motion on the

ﬂoor and would have had the votes to enforce it.... But ‘they’ [meaning the leadership]

125

chose not to bring up a motion of censure and instead claimed that censure was
unconstitutional” (CR December 19, 1998).

Underlying the impeachment decision was a more subtle but just as politically
important choice facing moderate Republicans: vote against impeachment and risk
alienation from the GOP mainstream g vote for impeachment and be labeled an
extremist in districts that Clinton carried in 1996. According to one account, the
leadership’s strategy directly affected the choices of a group of moderates numbering
between twenty and thirty members. “Many of them were willing—some anxious to—
consider something short of impeachment” (CQ December 22, 1998: 3323). The
outcome is history.1 But the point is that if the majority party leadership or its
institutional arm—the Rules Committee—would have allowed a choice between
impeachment and a less extreme alternative to be considered on the House ﬂoor, a
different outcome could possibly have resulted.2

Leadership strategies then, are of central concern for understanding congressional
politics generally and policy outcomes more speciﬁcally. The purpose of this chapter is to
test a number of speciﬁc claims discussed in Chapter 1 regarding factors that affect the
choice of restrictive rules in the legislative process. I begin by brieﬂy elaborating the
theoretical arguments and empirical predictions made by the different theories of

legislative organization regarding procedural choice. Here, I also present my own

 

' The four articles of impeachment and respective ﬂoor votes were: 1. Perjury before a grand jury (228 -
206). 2. Perjury Paula Jones deposition (205 - 229). 3. Obstruction of justice (221 -212). 4. Violations
of oath of oﬂice (148 - 285).

2 Indeed, only a few days after the historic vote on the House floor, four Republican House members
delivered letters to Majority Leader Trent Lott, (R-Miss.) requesting that the Senate explore a wider range
of options in dealing with the President. The four House members were Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY),
Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R-NY), Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), and Rep. Jim Greenwood (R-PA).

126

empirical claims derived from viewing the Rules Committee as the agent of the majority
party. Next, I marshal] empirical evidence using logistic regressions to model rule choice
during the 97"“, 98‘“, 104‘“, and 105th Congresses in order to test assertions made by the
competing congressional theories. Finally, the chapter reﬂects upon leadership strategies
and the empirical ﬁndings that signify the importance of a Rules Committee that can
employ special rules as an agent of the majority party and the implications of these
institutional features for understanding policy making. Chapter 6 will then follow up this
analysis by empirically assessing the policy implications of rule choice by focusing on
the ﬁnal passage votes for legislation considered under special rules during this same

time period.

Theories of Legislative Organization: Testing Expectations of Procedural Choice
Considerable theoretical debate has emerged between congressional theorists
regarding the rationale(s) motivating the procedural choice of restrictive rules.
Informational, distributive, and partisan perspectives each posit that special rules serve
different purposes in the legislature. Gilligan and Krehbiel (1987 and 1990) and Krehbiel
(1991 and 1997b) have asserted that restrictive rules are used to produce gains in
specialization from the committee system. In contrast, distributive arguments suggest
that the structures supporting the committee system (e. g. restrictive rules, gatekeeping,
conference committee control) are designed to maintain inﬂuence over speciﬁc policy
areas to provide members with the means to achieve gains from trade (Mayhew 1974;
Weingast and Marshall 1988; Baron and Ferejohn 1989; see also the discussion in

Shepsle and Weingast 1995). Still, other scholars maintain that restrictions and/or control

127

over amendment possibilities are used by party leaders to promote majority party
priorities (Aldrich and Rohde 1996a; Sinclair 1995a and 1999; Hixon 1999; Marshall,
Prins, and Rohde 1998).

Not surprisingly, the research on special rules make various empirical claims and
tend to focus on different sets of factors to explain the occurrence of restrictive rules.
Table 5 provides a brief overview of the literature that investigates the question of
procedural choice (see Table 5). The data on special rules allows us to investigate factors
that are hypothesized to affect the choice of restrictive rules. The dependent variable is
whether a bill receives an open or restrictive rule. Table 6 provides a complete listing of
the variables used in the logit models and their hypothesized effects on rule choice (see
Table 6). The next sections summarize the predictions made by informational,

distributive, and partisan theories that are addressed with the empirical analysis.

Lnformalional Theory Predictions

From the informational framework, restrictive rules represent the grease for
committee specialization. The chamber grants procedural advantages via restrictive rules
to induce committees to invest in particular policy areas and then share information for
the purpose of collective decision making. Restrictive rules, according to the theory
represent an informational tool used by the chamber that results in median-centered

policy choices.

128

The ﬁrst informational claim is that restrictive rules will tend to be granted to
committees with heterogeneous memberships.3 Committee heterogeneity will be
increasing in the likelihood of receiving restrictive rules ([3, > 0). In contrast, committees
composed of members with homogeneous preferences will be less likely to receive
restrictive rules. Committee outliers then, will be decreasing in the likelihood of
receiving restrictive rules ([32 < O). In addition, the theory predicts that legislation
requiring higher levels of committee specialization will be increasing in the likelihood of
receiving restrictive rules. The last of the informational claims tested here suggests that
minority cosponsors convey policy-relevant information indicating that the particular bill
is representative of the chamber. So, both the number of laws cited and the number of
minority cosponsors are predicted to have a positive aﬁ‘ect on the likelihood of restrictive
rules ([33 > 0; and B, > 0).

One ﬁnal point is that in Krehbiel’s (1991) original rule analysis, he utilizes a
multiple referral variable as another test of the heterogeneity hypothesis. According to
his argument, policies referred to multiple committees should reﬂect greater
heterogeneity, so, the variable should be increasing in the likelihood of receiving a
restrictive rule. However, Bach and Smith (1988) suggest that multiply referred
legislation tends to be associated with higher levels of procedural uncertainty and
therefore more likely to receive restrictive rules. Both Krehbiel’s and Bach and Smith’s
theory predicts the variable will be positively related to restrictive rules, ([3, > 0).

Similarly, the bill scope variable was used in Krehbiel’s original analysis to control for

 

3 Heterogeneity is a relative term. But in Krehbiel’s theoretical context, committee heterogeneity means

that members’ policy preferences tend to be varied across the ideological spectrum similar to the extent that

129

omnibus legislation. Although a-theoretical, he justiﬁed bill scope in the model
speciﬁcation because the empirical literature suggested that omnibus legislation was an
important correlate of restrictive rules. In Krehbiel’s analysis, the bill scope variable was
predicted to be increasing in the likelihood of restrictive rules, ([36 > 0). Sinclair has since
offered a theoretical rationale for omnibus legislation and used a different measure of
omnibus legislation for testing partisan claims (1995b; 1999). Because the theoretical
pedigree of these two variables—as measured here—is less clear, I simply incorporate

them into the speciﬁcation as control variables.

Distributive Theory Predictions

Distributive rationales have posited that the differentiated jurisdictions of the
committee system facilitate cooperation among a membership with very different
constituency interests. The committee system represents an institutionalized exchange
mechanism for policy inﬂuence. From this view, restrictive rules bond members into
keeping legislative agreements. According to the predictions made by distributive theory,
the greater the distributive character of the legislation the more likely it will be to receive
restrictive rules. Legislation characterized as highly distributive (i.e. concentrates the
beneﬁts and spreads the costs) should be more likely to receive restrictive rules than
legislation characterized less so. In addition, Krehbiel (1991) attempts to test the
distributive claim that suggests because legislators are motivated by reelection related
interests, they will grant restrictive rules to increase the probability of receiving

particularistic beneﬁts during the current session as opposed to a later one. Thus, both

 

member preferences are varied in the larger chamber.

130

variables incorporated to test distributive theory—the distributive content variable and
the bill urgency variable—are hypothesized to be increasing in the likelihood of

restrictive rules ([37 > O; and [38 > 0).

ﬂartisan TheorxPredictions

Of the central partisan claims summarized in Chapter 1, this analysis addresses
only the predictions made by Dion and Huber’s (1996) formal model and my own
principal-agent model. So, the theoretical concepts developed in Sinclair’s (1995b; 1999)
and Aldrich and Rohde’s (1996b; 1998b) partisan arguments are not directly tested in the
models here. However, in previous work, I tested some of Sinclair’s claims and found
little supportive evidence. Instead, my concern here is to explicitly test the implications
of my own partisan argument derived from the principal-agent relationship between the
majority party and the Rules Committee.4 In addition, I believe that testing between
competing theories as opposed to testing among smaller variations of the same general
theoretical ﬁ'amework provides greater purchase into congressional politics.

According to Dion and Huber’s formal model, the Rules Committee can grant
ﬂoor protections in order to promote non-centrist policy outcomes. Their argument
asserts that the policy position of the Rules Committee in relation to the legislative
committee are a central feature in determining procedural choice. Implicitly, their model

suggests that the median policy position of the Rules Committee should have an

 

‘ In previous work, I found that Sinclair’s measure of committee partisanship had no systematic aﬁ‘ect on
rule choice (Marshall 1998). However, my model estimates were based on all rules granted during the
104‘h Congress while Sinclair’s (1999) empirical results were based on a subset of rules granted on major
legislation and extended over a longer period of time.

131

independent affect on whether or not a bill receives a restrictive rule.5 Although this
study is set up differently than Dion and Huber’s, the variable constructed to test their
claim captures the distance between the policy position of the legislative committee and
the Rules Committee" As the distance in policy positions increase, the Rules median
variable should be decreasing in the likelihood of a restrictive rule ([39 < 0).

Another variable used to test partisan claims is the number of majority party
cosponsors on a particular bill. This variable seems theoretically less suited to test the
partisan arguments presented thus far, but has been incorporated here in order to be
consistent with previous empirical work on restrictive rules (Krehbiel 1991; Sinclair
1995b). According to Krehbiel’s (1991) argument to test the partisan theory, the larger
the number of majority party cosponsors, the greater the partisan interest in the bill and
therefore the more likely it will receive a restrictive rule ([310 > O).

In addition to Dion and Huber’s claims, I have proposed my own partisan
argument for empirical investigation. The partisan perspective I have offered views the
majority party contingent on the Rules Committee as a leadership institution, and thus, an
agent of the party rank-and-ﬁle. I have argued in previous chapters that the majority
party caucus deliberately delegated the institutional powers of the Rules Committee to its
leadership during the reform era for the purpose of promoting collective partisan

advantage (Oppenheimer 1977; Bach 1981; Rohde 1991; Sinclair 1995a; Maltzrnan

 

’ In particular, their model predicts that when the policy preferences of the Rules Committee and the

legislative committee are on the same side of the ﬂoor median, then the legislation should be granted
restrictive rules. When this condition holds, then both Rules and the legislative committee agree on the
direction that policies should diverge from median outcomes (Dion and Huber 1996: 27).

° Dion and Huber’s (1996) analysis utilizes the proportion of restrictive rules for each of the legislative
committees as their dependent variable. The level of aggregation in their dependent variable is problematic
for testing bill-level assertions made by the different theories of legislative organization.

132

1997). The reforms during the 19603 and 19703 eventually institutionalized a principal-
agent relationship between the majority party caucus and the majority contingent on
Rules. Even more, the increasing homogeneity of the party membership over time has
strengthened this relationship between the majority party and the Rules Committee.

Unlike Dion and Huber’s model that focuses on the preferences of the Rules
Committee, I argue that it is largely the preferences of the majority party that determines
whether or not legislation receives restrictive rules. Over time then, as the agency bond
between the Rules Committee and the majority party strengthens, we should observe that
the policy position of the majority party should become more inﬂuential relative to the
policy position of the Rules Committee in explaining restrictive rules.

The Rules Committee, then, fulﬁlls an agency role for the majority party. And as
such, the Committee would have an incentive to use restrictive rules to pull policies
toward the preferred position of the majority party. Thus, the spatial position of the
majority party in relation to the legislative committee should be an important factor in
determining whether or not a bill receives a restrictive rule. According to this argument,
the party median variable will be increasing in the likelihood of restrictive rules, ([310 > 0).

The partisan argument outlined above is based on the premise that the Rules
Committee acts as an agent of the party rank-and-ﬁle. By employing leadership
institutions, like the Rules Committee, members of the majority party can better achieve
their objectives. The effectiveness of this relationship in achieving collective party
objectives depends on the willingness of the party membership to coordinate their

actions. The partisan rationale for rule choice developed here is also consistent with

133

previous arguments emphasizing the importance of party institutions within the
legislature (Aldrich and Rohde 1996b; Sinclair 1995a). I now focus on the empirical

results to assess the different theoretical claims regarding rule choice.

Empirical Results: Logit Analysis

In ormational Theo Results

The logistic regressions are designed to test predictions regarding rule choice
made by competing theories of legislative organization and my own partisan model.
Turning now to explaining rule choice, the logit models include in their speciﬁcation the
informational, distributive, and partisan variables. Table 7 presents the frndings for the
97‘” and 98th Congresses, while Table 8 presents the ﬁndings for the 104th and 105‘“. For
each Congress there are two models, one with the party median variable and one without.
For example, Model 97a of Table 7 does not include the party median variable while
Model 97b does.7

Beginning with Models 97a and 97b from Table 7, one can see that the
coefﬁcients for committee heterogeneity and committee outlier are statistically signiﬁcant
and in the expected direction (see Table 7). The positive coefﬁcients for the former
variable suggests that committee heterogeneity is increasing in the likelihood a bill will
receive a restrictive rule. The negative coefﬁcient for the outlier variable suggests that as

the distance between the committee’s position and the charnber’s increase, the likelihood

 

7 In other words, the unconstrained models have the party median variable included in the speciﬁcations
while the constrained models don’t. More formally, the constrained models assume that [310 M mm = 0.

I34

a bill will receive a restrictive rule decreases. Although the model speciﬁcations for the
97'h Congress are not identical to Krehbiel’s (1991) analysis, it is reassuring to see that
the substantive effects of the two key informational variables parallel his earlier ﬁndings.8
However, for the 98‘“ Congress, one can see that these two variables don’t fare as well in
explaining restrictive rules. Neither the committee heterogeneity nor the committee
outlier variables approach statistical signiﬁcance in Models 98a or 98b. In fact, Table 8
casts further doubt on the committee heterogeneity and outlier variables of informational
theory (see Table 8). In all of the model speciﬁcations for the 104‘“ and 105‘“ Congresses,
the two central variables of informational theory—committee heterogeneity and
committee outlier—are statistically insigniﬁcant. One might conclude from the over time
results that the affects of informational variables on explaining rule choice were unique to
the 97th Congress. Barring the results from the 97th Congress, the inference from the
models suggests that neither the relative distance of the committee’s policy position in
relation to the chamber median, nor the heterogeneity of committee memberships explain
rule choice.

In addition, the models for the 97th and 98th Congress from Table 7 provide some
support for the conﬁrmatory signaling hypothesis. The positive coefﬁcient support the
argument that minority support of a particular policy conveys information to the chamber
that the bill is representative of the chamber and therefore deserving of ﬂoor protection.

However, for the 104‘h and 105th Congresses, the coefﬁcients for the conﬁrmatory

 

’ The consistent ﬁndings between the models for the 97‘h Congress and Krehbiel’s lends some credence to
the argument that the models here are not egregiously under-speciﬁed.

135

signaling variable are statistically insigniﬁcant and the sign contrary to the theoretical
expectations.

The results from the # of laws cited variable don’t support the specialization
hypothesis during the earlier period and are signiﬁcant in the later period only for the
104‘” Congress. That is, the ﬁndings for the specialization hypothesis tend to contradict
Krehbiel’s informational claims. The results suggest that for three of the four
Congresses, restrictive rules were not used by the chamber to help committees overcome

specialization costs.

Dgtribziive Theory Results

The ﬁndings on the distributive content and bill urgency variables are consistent
with previous research on rule choice (Krehbiel 1991: 174; Sinclair 1995b: 243). Tables
7 and 8 show little support for the distributive argument. The estimated coefﬁcients for
the distributive content variable was signiﬁcant in Model 104a only, and the signs were
always contrary to expectations. The negative coefﬁcient of the variable for the
distributive argument suggests that policies with greater distributive content decrease the
likelihood a bill receives a restrictive rule. The results for the distributive content variable
point to a couple of plausible explanations (if one accepts the models are correctly
speciﬁed): either the claims made by distributive theory are not operative in the
postreform House; or what is more likely, the distributive content variable used in this
and numerous other empirical works on rule choice is not a reliable measure of

distributive policies (Krehbiel 1991 and 1997; Sinclair 1995b; Dion and Huber 1997).

136

The bill urgency variable was signiﬁcant in all but one of the model speciﬁcations
for the four Congresses analyzed here. The positive relationship between bill urgency
and the likelihood of restrictive rules conforms to Krehbiel’s (1991) ﬁndings. In the
context of Krehbiel’s earlier analysis, the evidence here suggests that legislators are
inclined to grant restrictive rules so that policy beneﬁts can be distributed more quickly.
However, there is an alternative explanation for the signiﬁcant relationship of this
variable to restrictive rules that tends to support partisan claims. The bill urgency
variable captures those policies that are packaged into emergency, supplemental, or
continuing resolution bills. White (1989) and Sinclair (1997) have both found that these
types of measures tend to be used by party leaders for partisan purposes. So, the positive
effects of this variable may have nothing to do with distributive theory, and instead,
suggest that restrictive rules may be granted to bills that bundle together majority party
priorities. Interpreted in this way, the ﬁndings for the bill urgency variable are also
consistent with Sinclair’s ﬁndings that omnibus bills have a positive effect on the

likelihood of restrictive rules (1995b; 1999).

fthisan Theorv Results

Table 7 also provides some support for Dion and Huber’s (1996) argument. The
Rules median variable is statistically signiﬁcant and suggests that as the distance between
the ideological position of the Rules median and the legislative committee increases, the
likelihood a bill receives a restrictive rule decreases. From a substantive standpoint, the

interpretation of the Rule median coefficient in Models 97a and 97b supports the claim

137

that the ideological position of the Rules Committee can have an independent affect on
rule choice.

However, the Rules median variable does not approach statistical signiﬁcance in
Models 98a or 98b suggesting that the policy position of the Rules Committee did not
systematically affect procedural choice during the 98" Congress. This ﬁnding may be
surprising given the context of the 98th Congress because Chairman Claude Pepper of
Rules (D-FL) had claimed that the Speaker was less involved in the rules process than
had been the case during the 97‘“ Congress (Bach and Smith 1988: 122). Under these
conditions, one might expect the policy position of the Rules Committee to have a grca_te_r
affect on the choice of restrictive rules.

On the other hand, the results may not be surprising if one views the Rules
Committee as an agent of the majority party. The fact that Claude Pepper, who took
over the Rules Committee in the 98‘h Congress, was viewed as a more bipartisan chair
suggests that the Committee may not have been as actively involved in pursuing a
partisan agenda as previously was the case during the 97‘“ Congress under Chairman
Bolling (D-MO). Moreover, the positive coefficients for the Rules median variable
during the 98th Congress suggests that as the distance in policy positions between Rules
and the legislative committee increased, the likelihood of a restrictive rule also increased.
Certainly, the results for the 98‘h Congress are not the basis from which to characterize the
Rules Committee as an independent and autonomous institution. Nor do the ﬁndings
attest to Dion and Huber’s claims that during the 98‘“ Congress the Committee used

restrictive rules to pull policies toward a position more in line with their own.

138

In contrast, the results in Table 8 for the 104th and 105‘h Congresses are tentatively
more supportive of Dion and Huber’s claims. The signs of the Rules median variable are
once again in the expected direction, statistically signiﬁcant in Model 104b, and
approach signiﬁcance in the other three models.9 The over time results then, provide
tentative support for the argument that the policy position of the Rules Committee can
have an independent affect on rule choice. Still, the results for the Rules median variable
are not necessarily inconsistent with the argument that the Rules Committee serves an
agency role for the majority party. That is, the leadership may stack the committee
membership to ensure its responsiveness to the policy interests of the majority party.
Dion and Huber raise this very point: “Why does Rules have the members that it does,
and thus a particular set of policy preferences and interests?” (1996: 43). The answer,
perhaps by design of the majority party. The policy positions of the Rules Committee
matter in explaining restrictive rules because the party chooses agents with preferences
reﬂective of or at least compatible with the party’s policy objectives.10

The last claim addressed by the logit analysis is the partisan argument that the

Rules Committee acts as the agent of the majority party and thus, the policy position of

 

9 One problem with the Rules median variable is that it captures spatial distance only. For this reason, I
created an interaction variable that captures relative position in relation to the ﬂoor median an_d the distance
between Rules and the legislative committee. According to Dion and Huber’s model, the Rules
Committee would consider granting a restrictive rule when the substantive committee and Rules were on
the same side of the ﬂoor median. Presumably, as the spatial distance increases, their model would predict
the variable to be decreasing in the likelihood of restrictive rules. For the congresses used here, it was
never the case that the Rules median and the legislative committee took on the same values, so zeros
indicated the ﬂoor median was between the committee and Rules. Alternatively, positive values indicated
the spatial distance between the two when Rules and the legislative committee were on the same side of the
ﬂoor median. The results were mixed. The variable was signiﬁcant in the 97th and 98‘h but in the expected
negative direction only for the latter.

‘° The Rules median and the Party median variable are correlated. It is also interesting to note that the
coefﬁcients of the Rules median variable increase in size for Models 97b, 104b, and 105b when the Party
median variable is added.

139

the majority party should be an important factor in explaining restrictive rules. Tables 7
and 8 indicate that the party median variable is statistically signiﬁcant and in the expected
direction for each of the models (97b, 98b, 104b, and 105b). The positive coefﬁcients
suggest that when the party median is more extreme than the substantive committee and
both are on the same side of the ﬂoor median, then the bill will be more likely to receive a
restrictive rule. The inference is that the policy position of the party median does
systematically affect whether or not a bill is granted a restrictive rule. Moreover, the
overall ﬁt of the models are generally better with the party median variable then without.
The likelihood-ratio tests presented at the bottom of Tables 7 and 8 further attest to the
claim that the party median variable contributes a signiﬁcant amount of information in
predicting restrictive rules.
Table 9 transforms the logit coefﬁcients in order to make more

interpretable comparisons of each variable’s effect on rule choice (see Table 9). Table 9
provides the marginal effects on the probability of a restrictive rule for the unconstrained
models (Models 97b, 98b, 104b, and 105b). The cells in the table represent the
percentage change in the probability of a bill receiving a restrictive rule when one of the
exogenous variables is ﬂuctuated one standard deviation from its mean while all other
variables are held constant. For example, looking at Table 9, the committee
heterogeneity variable for the 97‘“ Congress increased the probability a bill would receive
a restrictive rule by 12%. One interesting pattern to take note of is that the marginal
effect of the party median variable has increased substantially from the 97‘“ to the 105‘“
Congress. The marginal effect of the party median variable went from 6% in the 97‘“, to

14% during the 98‘“, and doubled again by the 104‘“ Congress to 28%. These ﬁndings

140

seem to parallel arguments that restrictive rules have become increasingly relied upon by
party leaders as a strategy to advantage the policy agenda of the majority party over time

(Sinclair 1992 and 1995b; Aldrich and Rohde 1998a).

Diagnostics

Robust Estimation

There are potential problems in relation to the data and estimation procedures that
can affect the inferences I make from the statistical models on rule choice. In this
section, I use a couple of diagnostic procedures to test the overall sensitivity of my
results. The ﬁrst diagnostic test that I consider is the extent that the errors in the logit
model meet ideal conditions (e.g. independent and identically distributed - i. i.d.). In
effect, the robust estimation technique attempts to achieve the efﬁciency of the typical
logistic method under ideal conditions (e. g. when the Gauss-Markov assumptions hold).
The robust estimation technique tests the assumption that for any given values of X, say
Xi and Xj , that the correlation between their residuals will be zero, E (Ui / X9 and E (U j /
X) = 0. For the cross-sectional data, like that used here, this problem is called spatial
autocorrelation. The root of the problem in violating this assumption is a reduction in
efﬁciency. In terms of making inferences, this violation affects hypothesis testing. In
particular, greater standard errors of the estimates may mean that null hypotheses are not
rejected when in fact they should be. Thus, larger standard errors increase the proclivity

of committing a type II error or accepting a false hypothesis that Bk = 0.

141

The standard errors presented in Tables 7 and 8 were generated using the robust
technique. There were only minimal differences between the standard errors of the
normal logit and robust logit models. The comparison of the standard errors suggests that
no real differences in efficiency exists between the two. To the extent that the
assumptions about the data are violated, they do not pose problems for the statistical
signiﬁcance of the variables in the analysis. Moreover, the results from the robust
estimation technique provide greater conﬁdence in the substantive inferences made

regarding rule choice and the theories of legislative organization.

Multinomial Models

In addition, a different estimation technique was used to test the effects of
informational, distributive, and partisan variables on rule choice. The multinomial
technique incorporates an expanded level of information on the dependent variable. By
comparing the estimated effects of the exogenous variables on the expanded dependent
variable with those from the logit models, I can discern how the effects differ across the
two, and therefore better judge the substantive inferences made from the original analysis.
In other words, by comparing the two techniques, I can determine how much information
is lost from modeling rule choice as a dichotomous variable. The multinomial technique
may provide additional insight on the conditions in which the exogenous variables matter
(i.e. only under modiﬁed-open or modiﬁed-closed).

Here, the dependent variable assumes four categories. The multinomial logit
model makes the same assumptions and can be derived directly from the logit case. More

formally, the polytomous choice model is expressed such that P(Yi = j) for j = 0, 1, 2, or 3

142

and P(Yi =j | er) = exp(x,-Bj)/ 1 + 2“,, exp (xin) for each j.” As discussed in Chapter 3,
special rules were coded into open, modiﬁed-open, modiﬁed-closed, and closed
classiﬁcations. In Chapter 3, I showed that there were very few modiﬁed-open and
modiﬁed-closed rules in the 97‘“ and 98‘“ Congresses. Modeling rule choice for these
earlier Congresses is problematic because of the relative deprivation of information (cases
and variance in X) for the two categories. So, I rely on the 104‘“ and 105‘“ Congresses in
using the multinomial technique for estimating the effects of the exogenous variables on
rule choice.

Tables 10 and 11 present the ﬁndings of the multinomial logit models for the 104‘“
and 105‘“ Congresses. In Table 10, we can see that the effects of the exogenous variables
on rule choice are similar to the ﬁndings found in the original logit models (see Table
10). For example, the signs of the variables and their signiﬁcance parallels the ﬁndings
from the logit model in Table 8. Table 11 also shows analogous ﬁndings to the original
logit analysis (see Table 11). In fact, the party median variable in Tables 10 and 11
demonstrate that the policy position of the majority party signiﬁcantly affects the choice
of modiﬁed-closed and closed rules. Overall, the ﬁndings from the multinomial models
are consistent with those from the logit models and further reinforce the substantive

claims regarding rule choice previously discussed.

 

” The base category is open rules (i=0), so the equation solves forj = l, 2, and 3 (modiﬁed-open,

modiﬁed-closed, and closed rules respectively).

143

@tlier Analysis

I use one ﬁnal diagnostic tool to test for potential problems and/or the fragility of
the inferences I have made about rule choice. Outlier analysis provides insight into the
performance of the models predictive ability. In particular, this type of analysis allows
one to observe the speciﬁc cases that are not predicted accurately by the statistical model.
This can be theoretically useful in order to determine the conditions in which the model’s
performance does not accurately represent the data generating process. In addition,
outliers can be a concern for making inferences because they can pull estimates in a
contrary direction.

The ﬁrst step to assess the effects of outliers on the model estimates is to plot the
data to see which cases don’t ﬁt well. Figure 9 identiﬁes each data point according to the
intersection of two dimensions (see Figure 9). The ﬁrst dimension represents the
predicted probability of a bill receiving a restrictive rule (the X-axis) and the second
represents a poomess-of-ﬁt dimension (the Y-axis). The location and size of the circles
on the plot determine relative ﬁt and inﬂuence respectively. Observations that are
relatively high and relatively large tend to be the cases that require further scrutiny.
Figure 10 provides the comparable plot of outliers for the 105‘“ Congress (see Figure 10).
Three outliers for the 104‘“ and 105‘“ Congresses are labeled and identiﬁed at the bottom
of each ﬁgure. There is no theoretical reason at this point to exclude these cases from
analysis, but as a methodological exercise, the three outlier cases ﬁom each model were
removed to test their effects on the statistical models. Although not shown here, the
coefﬁcient estimates for the 104‘“ and 105‘“ Congress show very little change when these

outliers are removed from the analysis. This indicates that even though there are some

144

rules that are not predicted well, none have an undue inﬂuence that jeopardizes the
inferences made from the models.

Interestingly enough, two of the outliers identiﬁed for the 104‘“ are for rules
dealing with budget policy and a third outlier for the 105‘“ is related to an emergency
supplemental appropriations bill. This follows to some extent ﬁndings by Kiewiet and
McCubbins (1991), who suggest that budget related policies may receive different types
of advantages by the Rules Committee. Their argument could reﬂect on the fact that the
models estimated here don’t capture these type of advantages (a shortcoming of the data
and not necessarily the theory). For example, instead of restricting amendment activity,
party leaders could advantage certain policies by selectively waiving Budget Act
requirements or in the case of appropriations, waiving points of order against authorizing
language. The point here is that the coding scheme employed here for restrictive rules
does not incorporate this type of information. The statistical model I use does not predict
well for rules used on these policies because party leaders can employ different types of
advantages through special rules.

The three additional methodological techniques used here have allowed me to
better assess whether or not assumptions of the statistical model have been violated, and
if so, the extent that the violations affect the substantive inferences made from the
models. Overall, the results from these different procedures have increased the

conﬁdence I have in the statistical results and the sturdiness of the theoretical inferences.

145

 

Cont

exp]
key

lESl

he‘

5P

Conclusion

The analysis set out to test contemporary theories of Congress that purport to
explain procedural choice in the legislative process. With only one exception, the two
key variables in Krehbiel’s informational theory did not explain variation in the choice of
restrictive rules. Both the committee heterogeneity and outlier variables were found to
be systematically unrelated to whether or not a bill receives a restrictive rule for the 98‘“,
104‘“, and 105‘“ Congresses. The lack of empirical support for the committee
heterogeneity and committee outlier constructs undermines the majoritarian claim that
special rules are used as informational devices by the chamber and that this design tends
to promote median-centered policy results. In addition, there exists little support for the
distributive argument that restrictive rules are used as the glue to bond together legislative
deals. The coefficients for the distributive content variable were consistently opposite the
theoretical claims.

Evidence for Dion and Huber’s (1996) arguments were limited. The Rules median
variable was statistically signiﬁcant only for models estimated during the 97‘“ Congress.
Interestingly though, the ﬁndings differ between the ﬁrst and second sessions of the 97‘“.
When the same models were estimated after dividing the Congress by session, the Rules
median coefﬁcient was insigniﬁcant for the ﬁrst session (1981), but highly signiﬁcant for
the second (1982).

This ﬁnding seems to make sense in the principal-agent context because the
Democratic majority in the 97‘“ Congress was deeply divided (Sinclair 1985). With deep
divisions in the majority party, one might not expect the Rules Committee to perform its

loyal agency role as effectively as when the party was not so divided. Speciﬁcally,

146

during the ﬁrst session of the 97‘“ a sizable contingent of conservative Democrats
supported President Reagan’s ﬁscal policies that were designed to turn back decades of
liberally-directed federal growth. Reagan’s overall economy-ﬁxing philosophy was so
popular in the districts of these conservative Democrats that they had basically estranged
themselves from the leadership and the rest of the left-leaning caucus. Sinclair (1985)
argued that many southern Democrats were converted to Reagan’s economic cause
because most viewed the 1980 landslide election as a mandate for Reagan’s economic
philosophy and it had maintained overwhelming popularity and resilience in the
electorate. In fact, Sinclair shows that President Reagan was able to dominate the House
ﬂoor agenda and thus the ability to deﬁne policy choices. The Democratic leadership
were in effect resigned to a policy strategy of me tooism (Sinclair 1985: 293).

These forces dividing the House Democratic majority were extremely potent in
shaping lines of conﬂict over the President’s ﬁscal plan represented by the ﬁrst
concurrent budget resolution CIR 3982). Moreover, House members in general viewed
the vote on the rule for the budget resolution critical to the policy outcome and during the
debate on the rule Trent Lott (R-LA) appealed to members’ constituency concerns, “The
reconciliation rule proposed by the Democratic leadership in the Rules Committee
effectively denies at least half the Members of this House and the 110 million Americans
they represent a clearcut vote on the President ’s package...Make no mistake about

it... This is the vote on substance, not on procedure... The American people will know that

this is the vote” (CR 6/25/1981: 14074).'2

 

‘2 There was intense partisan debate regarding the proposed rule (Hres 169) that would bring the ﬁrst
concurrent budget resolution to the ﬂoor. But, the previous question on the rule was defeated. By

147

Certainly, the differences found between the ﬁrst and second sessions of the 97‘“
are an interesting case. The ﬁndings illustrate an important inter-institutional dynamic in
congressional politics—part of which goes untold in Sinclair’s analysis (1985). Despite
the Democratic leadership’s dominance over the Rules Committee, the leadership was not
able to control the ﬂoor agenda, especially during 1981. Without the ability to deﬁne
policy alternatives on the ﬂoor, the institutional powers of the liberal-oriented Rules
Committee became largely irrelevant in shaping outcomes. This effect appears in the
insigniﬁcant results for the Rules median and Party median variables on rule choice
during the ﬁrst session. But, as Reagan’s control over the House agenda slid, the ability
of the Democratic leadership and the Rules Committee to shape policy outcomes
strengthened. This effect is demonstrated by the highly signiﬁcant results for the Rules
median and Party median variables on rule choice for the second session.

In addition, the empirical ﬁndings show that the Rules median variable always
explained rule choice better when in conjunction with the Party median variable. The
result suggests that the two variables together may capture an important element of rule
choice that is not captured by each separately. For instance, the coefficient for the Rules
median variable was larger during three of the four Congresses when the model
speciﬁcations included the Party median variable. Although not shown, there was little
difference in the Party median coefﬁcients when the Rules median variable was not

included in the models. So, the Party median variable tended to add explanatory power to

 

defeating the previous question on the rule, the Republicans achieved procedural control of the House ﬂoor
to offer their own substitute rule (see CR 6/25/ 1981: H14078). If a House majority votes to order the
previous question on the rule, then the House immediately considers the rule with no further debate and
with no further opportunity for amendment (see Bach and Smith 1988: 8).

148

the Rules median variable, but the reverse was not true. This indirectly lends support to
the argument that the Rules Committee behaves in a manner consistent with the policy
position of the majority party. The policy position of the Rules Committee matters in
determining restrictive rules, by design, as a leadership institution for the majority party.

The substantive effect of the Party median variable on rule choice was found to be
two times as great during the 104‘“-105‘“ Congresses as compared to the earlier ones (see
Table 9). It is true that the Party median variable does not capture the homogeneity of the
majority party. But, it has been empirically shown that the level of party homogeneity
has risen noticeably between the 97‘“ and 105‘“ Congresses (Aldrich and Rohde 1998a).
And more importantly, the theory says that the substantive inﬂuence of leadership
institutions should become more prevalent as the majority party becomes more
homogeneous. The ﬁndings on rule choice support this very contention. So, one might
infer that the stronger or more homogeneous the majority party, the better the Committee
performs its agency role.

The direct evidence in support of the partisan ﬁarnework for rule choice is
compelling. The party median variable was signiﬁcant in all of the speciﬁcations for the
97‘“, 98‘“, 104‘“, and 105‘“ Congresses. Indeed, one of the most important factors in
determining whether or not a bill receives a restrictive rule is the relative position of the
majority party in relation to the legislative committee. This is also consistent with the
view that the Rules Committee tends to grant protective rules in order to pull policies in
the preferred direction of the majority party or at least prevent them from being amended

toward the ﬂoor median.

149

Special rules represent a choice made by party leaders regarding whether or not to
use a particular type of legislative strategy. This decision tends to reﬂect the goals and/or
preferences of the majority party. One freshman during the ﬁrst 100 days of the 104‘“
makes the point nicely, “ If worse comes to worse we ’11 close the rules at the last minute
and ram everything through” (Gimpel 1996: 98-102). The ﬁndings from this logit
analysis of rule choice during four Congresses of the postreform strongly support the

claim that the policy position of the majority party affects this choice.

150

TABLE 5: Overview of Research Explaining the Occurrence of Restrictive Rules

Authors/Theoretical
Rationale

 
 

  

Krehbiel 1991;
1 997b
Informational

Sinclair 1995b; 0
1998; 1999
Partisan

Aldrich and Rohde
1 996a; 1 998a
Partisan

Dion and Huber o
1996; 1997
Rules Committee

F erejohn 1974; o
Fiorina 1981;

Weingast and

Marshall 1988
Distributive

Central Concepts Explaining
Rule Choice

Committee Heterogeneity
Committee Outlier
Committee Specialization
Conﬁrmatory Signaling

Party Leadership
Involvement
Committee Partisanship
Omnibus Legislation

Partisan Policy Division

Party Homogeneity

Rules Committee
Preferences

Pork-Barrel Policy

151

   
 

 

Empirical Findings

Findings in support of
informational rationale, but
against distributive and
partisan theories.

Findings in support of
partisan theory, but against
informational and
distributive.

Findings in support of
partisan theory.

Supports that Rules
Committee facilitates non-
centrists policy outcomes.

Mostly formal results.
Supports distributive claims.

TABLE 6: Theories of Legislative Organization and Expectations Regarding

Theoretical Rationale

Restrictive Rules

Exogenous Variable

Expectations for Restrictive

 

Informational

0 Control Variables

0 Distributive

0 Rules Committee

0 Partisan

0 Committee Heterogeneity

0 Committee Outlier
o # Laws Cited

(specialization)
- # Minority Cosponsors
(conﬁrmatory signaling)

0 Multiple Referral
(restrictive rule correlate)
a Bill Scope
(restrictive rule correlate)

- Distributive Content
0 Bill Urgency

0 Rules Median
- Rules Median Interaction
(Rules X Legislative Proﬁle)

0 # Majority Cosponsors
Party Median

 

RulesI
o ﬁ>O
o B<O
o B>O
o B>O
o B>O
o B>O
o B>O
o B>O
o B<O
o B<O
c B>O
o B>O

‘ B“ > 0 indicates the exogenous variable is hypothesized to be increasing in the likelihood a bill receives a
restrictive rule. [3,, < 0 indicates the exogenous variable is hypothesized to be decreasing in the likelihood a

bill receives a restrictive rule.

152

TABLE 7: Logit Models 97‘“ and 98'“ Congresses (1981-1984)

Independent Theoretical Model 97a Model 97b Model 98a Model 98b
Variables Rationale 97‘“ Congress 97‘“ Congress 98‘“ Congress 98‘“ Congress

Constant ..... 14305 a: ., -:

   

(6.310)
Referral Control -.088
(.872)
Bill Scope° Control
Committee Information 23.342 **
Heterogeneity (8.895)
# of Laws Cited Information -.033
(.026)
# of GOP Information .034 *
Cosponsors (.016)
Committee lnfonnation -74.537 "’
Outlier (32. 170)
Distributive" Distributive
Content ----

Bill Urgency Distributive 2.947 **

 

.._____.———_—

(.883)

Rules Median Rules -73.742 *
(30.226)

# of Democratic Partisan -.065

Cosponsors (-037)

Party Median Partisan -----
N =1 17 9; ,
LL=-41.829 ‘ LL=-68.715
x’ (s) = 35.08" x’ (10) =23.03--
Pseudo R'=.30 E Pseudo R‘=. 14
Predicted =sr% ' Predicted =79%
Null Model =80% I Null Model = 73%
Improvement =1% Improvement =8%

 

 

' The dependent variable is whether a bill received an open or restrictive rule. Standard errors are robust. in
" Indicates statistical signiﬁcance at (p < .05). " Indicates statistical signiﬁcance at (p < .01).

0 Bill scope and distributive content variable information were not available for the 97‘“ Congress.

Y Model 97b is the unconstrained model. Likelihood-Ratio Test: 11(1) = 14.24 (P= 0.0002).

‘1’ Model 98b is the unconstrained model. Likelihood-Ratio Test: x’ (1) = 4.30 (P=0.0381).

153

TABLE 8: Logit Models 104‘“ and 105‘“ Congresses (1995-1998)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Independent Theoretical Model 104a Model 104b Model 105a Model 105b
Variables Rationale 104‘“ Congress 104‘“ Congress 105‘“ Congress 105‘“ Congress
Constant ----- 1.847 1328 i 3.121 ‘i'
(1.631) (1.70.4) " ’ ' (2.198)
Referral Control .847 -. 1:72 1.21 1
(.546) (.623) (.719)
Bill Scope Control -.002 4005 * -.002
(.002) (.1003) (.003)
Committee lnfonnation .590 3.670 ‘ -4.794
Heterogeneity (6.443) (6.;873) (5.71 l)
# of Laws Cited Information .031 * .046 ** .023
(.015) (.016) (.021)
# of Democratic Information .002 -.0001 -.021
Cosponsors (.020) (.0318) (.016)
Committee Information -7.929 45.882 1' : ; ‘1 -7.446
Outlier (6.552) "(6.753) f ' (6.509)
Distributive Distributive -l6.l73 * 4:37.19. —7.823
Content (8.296) (8.067) ’ ' (4.568)
Bill Urgency Distributive 3.331 ** 3.639 *" 2.104 *
(.614) (2900)-' ' (1.001)
Rules Median Rules -1 1.606 47.766 * -13. 143
(6.192) (7.181) (7.883)
# of GOP Partisan .004 .007 .016 **
Cosponsors (.006) (.096) 1 (.006)
Party Median Partisan ----- I 2.431 * " . ----- ’
"(519935) I , . 13.17
: N =140 Nee-140 -- ~ ' N=136 ,;
I LL = -72.043 ELIE-63.353; ‘ ' . LL = 432.911 2'
1 xi (10) =47.13** .x?.;(11),é=54.$0!-~ . , x“ (10) =22.45*- 9.
I Pseudo R“=.25 _'ddn'i=39-grz. : . Pseudo R’=.12 -.;-,':JI
: Predicted =7r% j Predieied 3‘76“th ' . Predicted =58% 2:
, Null Model =56% N ' [#56941 Null Model = 53% ~ -;,
1 Improvement =28% . memmteam I
I ' r I

 

 

‘ The dependent variable is whether a bill received an open or restrictive rule. Stande errors are robust. 7

" Indicates statistical signiﬁcance at (p < .05). ” Indicates statistical signiﬁcance at (p < .01).
Y Model 104b is the unconstrained model. Likelihood-Ratio Test: 11(1) =
‘P Model 105b is the unconstrained model. Likelihood-Ratio Test: 11(1) =

154

7.37 (P= 0.0066).
7.17 (P=0.0074).

TABLE 9: Marginal Effects on Changes in the Probability of a Bill Receiving a
Restrictive Rule, 97‘“, 98‘“, 104‘“, and 105‘“ Congresses

 

 

Independent Theoretical Model 97b Model 98b Model 104b Model 105b
Variables Rationale 97‘“ Congress 98‘“ Congress 104‘“ Congress 105‘“ Congress
Constant ---------- ---- ---- -----
Referral Control 0% 4% 2% 17% *
Bill Scope Control ----- 2% 17% * 12%
Committee lnfonnation 12% ** 8% 4% 3%
Heterogeneity
# of Laws Cited lnfonnation 0% 5% 27% ** 14%
# of Minority Information 1% * 16% * 0% 11%
Cosponsors
Committee lnfonnation 1% * 4% 9% 17%
Outlier
Distributive Distributive ----- 6% 14% 10%
Content
Bill Urgency Distributive 2% * 12% ** 29% ** 10%
Rules Median Rules 1% * 1% 25% * 31%
it of Majority Partisan 1% 29% * 8% 20% **
Cosponsors
Party Median Partisan 6% ** 14% * 28% * 20% *

155

The dependent variable is whether a bill received an open or restrictive rule.
* Indicates coefﬁcients in logit models were signiﬁcant at (p < .05).
** Indicates coefﬁcients in logit models were signiﬁcant at (p < .01).

 

 

 

TABLE 10: Multinomial Logit Model 104‘“ Congress (1995-1996)

 

 

Independent Theoretical Modiﬁed-Open Modiﬁed-Closed Closed
Variables Rationale
Constant ----- 2.979 4.437 4.082
(3.078) (3.653) (3.795)
Referral Control .708 .668 -.798
(.856) (.886) (.951)
Bill Scope Control .003 -.0003 -.020 *
(.003) (.004) (.009)
Committee lnfonnation -4.878 1 .852 -7.280
Heterogeneity (7.204) (7.332) (1 1.880)
# of Laws Cited Information .018 .057 * -.130
(.022) (.024) (.141)
# of Democratic Information -.047 -.018 -.006
Cosponsors (.048) (.025) (.023)
Committee Outlier Information -16.751 -19.871 -l3.077
(12.523) (14.595) (14.736)
Distributive Distributive .021 - 10.95 1 -3 1 .906
Content (5.025) (9.287) (22.653)
Bill Urgency Distributive 20.498 ** 23.019 ** 24.088
(1.329) (.943) (. . .)
Rules Median Rules -16.262 -36.185 * -23.914
(12.103) (16.134) (14.934)
# of GOP Partisan .005 .013 .004
Cosponsors (.008) (.007) (.009)
Party Median Partisan .397 2.699 * 3.210 *
(.983) (1.301) (1.391)
N=140
LL = -l33.869
x“ (33) =1 10.27
P>.0000

 

 

Pseudo R2 = .29

 

 

 

‘ The dependent variable is whether a bill received an open, modiﬁed-open, modiﬁed-closed or closed

rule.

2 The base category is open rules.

“ Indicates statistical signiﬁcance at (p < .05). ** Indicates statistical signiﬁcance at (p < .01).

156

 

 

TABLE 11: Multinomial Logit Model 105‘“ Congress (1997-1998)

Independent
Variables

Constant

Referral

Bill Scope

Committee
Heterogeneity

# of Laws Cited

# of Democratic
Cosponsors
Committee Outlier
Distributive

Content

Bill Urgency
Rules Median
# of GOP

Cosponsors

Party Median

 

 

Theoretical Modiﬁed-Open Modiﬁed-Closed
Rationale

Control

Control

Information

Information

Information

Information

Distributive

Distributive

Rules

Partisan

Partisan

-5.377
(2.942)

-l.584
(1.445)

.009
(.005)

6.154
(8.897)

-003
(029)

-002
(.026)

1 1.778
(9.202)

-6.963
(6.686)

21.460
(...)

1 1.812
(9.675)

.007
(.012)

.590
(.844)

 

 

 

N=136

LL = 454.820
x2 (33) =61.81
P>.002

Pseudo R2 = .17

 

1.728
(2.835)

2.123 *
(.925)

.005
(005)

6.586
(8.580)

.021
(.031)

-042
(.021)

-6.343
(8.888)

-12.881
(6.760)

22.184 **
(1.454)

-17.058
(10.235)

.027 **
(009)

1.676 *
(835)

 

 

 

Closed

2.179
(3.828)

.869
(.997)

-.010
(006)

3.589
(8.042)

.056
(036)

-.017
(023)

-6.330
(12.135)

-3.9 I 6
(5.502)

23.520 **
(1.566)

-16.069
(13.273)

.014
(.009)

1.990 *
(.896)

 

 

‘ The dependent variable is whether a bill received an open, modiﬁed-open, modiﬁed-closed or closed

rule.

2 The base category is open rules.
* Indicates statistical signiﬁcance at (p < .05). ** Indicates statistical signiﬁcance at (p < .01).

157

O Hres435

 

 

e i
Hres440
Hres396
O
.9 4 — @ .
> O
8 00 . Q
.s 00
0 O
O) O O
, 9 o
— o

0 Q) 09

$900

0 63° «9
9 $3 Q 00 OO
o 00 0° 060 O O
.000" o
o "o' .9 ‘- ° °
0 I 1 1 1
O 5 1

Predicted Probability

1.) hres435/HR3448. Small Business Tax Package. Predicted probability of restrictive rule =
5%.

2.) hres440/HCR178. Concurrent Resolution on the Budget FY1997. Predicted probability of
restrictive rule = 13%.

3.) hres396/HR842. Truth in Budgeting Act. Predicted probability of restrictive rule = 54%.

FIGURE 9: Outlier Analysis Model 104b (104‘“ Congress)

158

 

 

 

10 4
3 Hres413
d)
o
t:
.1!
>
O
O 5
.E 7 H 441
0 res Hresl49
g
2 .
O
0 —.
1 1 1
0 5 1

Predicted Probability

l.) Hres413/81502 D.C. Student Opportunity Program. Predicted probability of restrictive
rule = 1%.

2.) Hres441/HR3616 National Defense. Predicted probability of restrictive rule = 24%.

3.) Hresl49/HR1469 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations. Predicted probability of
restrictive rule = 67%.

FIGURE 10: Outlier Analysis Model 105b (105“I Congress)

159

CHAPTER 6

THE POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF LEADERSHIP STRATEGIES: EVIDENCE
FROM THE HOUSE AND SENATE

Introduction

In Chapter 4, I found a marked change in the behavior of the Rules Committee
over time. The ﬁndings there suggest that the Committee has become much less likely to
block legislation from reaching the ﬂoor by denying special rules. I argued that this
dramatic change reﬂected the Rules Committee’s increased responsiveness to majority
party policy interests. In addition, the evidence on majority and minority party support of
amendments suggests that committee proposals in general tended to also better reﬂect the
collective interests of the majority party. I have argued that these changes (especially
related to the committee system) have lowered the costs for majority party members to
empower leaders and have subsequently increased the incentives for the rank-and-ﬁle to
support leadership strategies that provide greater ﬂoor protection on committee proposals.
This was also evidenced by the dramatic increase in majority party support on special
rules over time.

In Chapter 5, the analysis set out to conﬁrm or disconﬁrm claims made by
theories of legislative organization regarding the role of restrictive rules in Congress.
Overall, the logistic analysis of rule choice for the 97‘“, 98‘“, 104‘“, and 105‘“ Congresses
provide strong evidence regarding the importance of the majority party’s policy position

in determining the choice of restrictive rules. The ﬁndings support the theoretical

160

argument that party leaders employ restrictive rules in response to the collective policy
interests of the majority party. Together, the ﬁndings from the two previous empirical
chapters tend to strengthen the theoretical claim that the majority party successfully
harnessed the power of the Rules Committee—institutionalizing an agency relationship.

In this last empirical chapter, I address the importance of the Rules Committee
and leadership strategies in shaping legislative outcomes. Here, the analysis follows the
subset of policies considered under special rules to the Senate. The cross-chamber
analysis provides insight into the policy implications of rule choice by focusing on
member behavior on ﬁnal passage votes for bills considered under special rules for the
same four Congresses (97‘“, 98‘“, 104, and 105‘“ ). In particular, I consider the hypothesis
from Chapter 2 that majority party members should have signiﬁcantly greater levels of
support on bills considered under restrictive rules than minority party members and that
these differences should increase with time. Moreover, the temporal changes in majority
and minority party support on these bills should reﬂect that party leaders have
increasingly relied on special rules (especially during the 104‘“) to push the legislative
priorities on the majority party’s agenda.

This seems to beg the question, what happens to these bills when they reach the
Senate? Are these policies collectively important to Senate political parties and therefore
conﬁonted by conﬂict to the same extent as in the House? Do leadership strategies in the
Senate advantage the passage of policy proposals preferred by the majority party? If
leaders can use special rules to pass majority party priorities in the House, but the policies
never pass the Senate or are moderated signiﬁcantly, then one could argue that leadership

strategies and political parties more generally may make little difference in the grand

161

scheme of legislative politics. The evidence presented in this chapter is only exploratory,
but suggestive that this is not the case.

To be clear, my goals here are very modest, as I am not setting out to develop a
theory of party leadership in the Senate. Still, I think it is useful to brieﬂy consider how
some of the theoretical issues can be extended in the Senate context. As a theoretical
exercise, understanding institutional differences and how these affect leadership
organization can help conﬁrm that the structures focused on in the case of the House are
really the relevant ones that give the theory its explanatory purchase. Moreover, the
Senate’s institutional context helps to condition the expectations for differences and/or

similarities that may be found on the legislation under investigation here.

A Few Thoughts on Party Leadership in the Senate Context

I have approached the study of the Rules Committee from a principal-agent
perspective, but with an important caveat that leaders can use their strategies to affect the
very conditions that motivate the rank-and-ﬁle to strengthen leadership institutions. That
is, leaders have the potential to inﬂuence their own powers. However, Senate leaders are
not granted the same level of inﬂuence that House leaders enjoy and are therefore less
able to affect conditions that can promote their own power within the institution.‘ From
this perspective, the traditional principal-agent framework may actually ﬁt the Senate
context better than the House. However, Senate leadership seems to be more dependent

on the choices of the chamber membership. Indeed, Robert Dole (R-Kan) once lamented

 

‘ Senate leaders don’t have the same degree of agenda-control mechanisms to affect coherence in the
chamber as do House leaders.

162

that the role of majority leader is not a very enviable position—in many respects [he] is
“the slave of al ” (Davidson 1989: 275). Ironically, the super-majority requirement
makes Senate institutional structures even more endogenously driven than the House.
Efforts to signiﬁcantly centralize institutional powers to party and/or committee
organizations are usually thwarted (Smith 1992: 183; Binder and Smith 1997).

To begin, there does not exist a Senate committee comparable to the House Rules
Committee. Not surprisingly, Senate party leaders have fewer mechanisms to control the
legislative agenda and inﬂuence member choices than do leaders in the House.2 This
institutional difference alone makes majority party control of the Senate ﬂoor much more
uncertain and greatly reduces the party leadership’s ability to prosecute a partisan policy
agenda (Smith 1992: 172). The absence of a Rules Committee to structure ﬂoor debate
is important for another reason because Senate Committees don’t have as great of an
incentive to accommodate the preferences of the party leadership. Instead, most
conﬂictual legislation is brought to the ﬂoor by unanimous consent, so committees try to
accommodate all interested parties, be they in the majority or in the minority (Rohde
1992b: 33). Even more, institutional differences like the lack of a gerrnaneness rule and
the unprohibited amendment rights enjoyed by individual members in the Senate
effectively denies party leaders the ability to keep issues off of the legislative agenda“.

However, the principal-agent ﬁamework can still be usefully applied for

understanding party leadership in the Senate. Steve Smith argues that,

 

2 For example, the process of bill referral in the Senate is less under the control of party leaders than is the
case in the House (Davidson 1989: 285). Referral appeals require the acquiescence of all senators and not
just the majority party. In addition, multiple referrals in the Senate requires the support of party leaders
from both the minority and majority (Maltzrnan 1997: 134).

163

“They [Senate leaders] are subject to periodic re-election by the some persons
they have been leading. That is, Senate ﬂoor leaders are, ﬁrst and foremost,
party leaders. Indeed, they are appropriately viewed as agents of their party
colleagues. Their success and failure is largely dependent on the cooperation of
those party colleagues. Consequently, leaders’ goals and strategies are shaped
by the demands and expectations of their party colleagues, whose own behavior is

driven by three major goals” (1993: 261).

Moreover, the work on congressional leadership in the upper chamber suggests that
partisan strength is dependent on more than just exogenous forces like the homogeneity
of party coalitions in states, but also hinges upon presidential popularity and the party’s
national reputation (Patterson and Caldeira 1988). There does exist then, the same kind
of collective incentives for party members to organize leadership institutions in the
Senate. So, the view here is that there are some common strands of logic from the theory
developed on leadership in the House which may also be applied to the Senate, but in a
more limited degree.

The institutional differences have substantial theoretical implications for
leadership. The barriers confronting Senate leaders are greater and the conditions that
motivate members to empower leaders likely have a higher threshold than in the House
(Smith 1992: 171; Rohde 1992b: 32). The higher costs to empowering leaders are at
least in part due to the signiﬁcant institutional prerogatives placed in the hands of each
individual senator to affect their own goals (Fenno 1982; Smith 1992: 191; Maltzrnan
1997: 133). Senators don’t need party leaders as much as House members do to affect

the policy making process. For example, Bader and Jones (1993) argue that Senate

minority party members maintain considerable inﬂuence over policy because the

 

3 The budget resolution is one important exception in which the Senate has collectively sought restraints

I64

President concedes greater deference to the minority members there as compared to the
House minority. According to them, the President anticipates the greater electoral
uncertainty in the Senate and the likelihood of change in majority party control.

Despite considerable institutional differences, this does not mean that Senate party
leaders are inconsequential to the policy making process. In fact, Senate leaders are in a
better institutional position relative to non-leaders to affect policy outcomes. Sinclair
(1997) ﬁnds during the 104‘“ Congress that Senate party leaders played an active role in
the passage of a majority of major legislation. So, saying that Senate party leaders have
fewer institutional powers to pursue collective party interests than their House
counterparts is true, but it is far from saying that they are completely devoid of such
power.

Still, congressional scholars observe that most Senate leaders are less inclined to
actively lead as compared to House leaders (Davidson 1989; Baker 1989; Smith 1992:
184-185). Certainly, Senate leaders pick fewer partisan ﬁghts and perhaps are more
careful about those choices. During a ﬁrrious ﬂoor debate, Majority Leader Howard
Baker (R-Tenn) once explained his tentative philosophy to a junior senator, “Aint got no
dog in this ﬁght” (Davidson 1989: 296). The Senate then, is a very different institution
than the House. Leaders there operate and interact differently with the Senate structure
and are faced with a somewhat different set of institutional constraints.

Basically, I have argued that the electoral and institutional forces affecting House
leadership can also affect Senate leaders in a similar manner, but often times to a lesser

degree. On the one hand, the greater heterogeneity associated with state constituencies

 

on their individual prerogatives (Smith 1992: 189).

165

h.

suggests that electoral conditions that shape the homogeneity of parties within the Senate
will be more attenuated. This tends to produce more moderates in the Senate and lessen
the chances of extremely divergent party coalitions. On the other hand, the institutional
differences suggest that the degree in which the Senate can operate in a partisan fashion is
much less than in the House (Rohde 1992b: 28). To be successful, Senate leaders are
more likely to accommodate the policy interests of the minority party. Senate leaders
have less ability to prosecute a partisan policy agenda and when the opportunities do
arise, the nature of the super-majority requirements signiﬁcantly reduces their leverage in
pursuing partisan ends. Ceteris paribus, the Senate context should lessen the extent that
endogenous leadership strategies inﬂuence partisanship. Thus, both electoral and
institutional features of the Senate should tend to facilitate the occurrence of bipartisan
policy making (Fenno 1989). Indeed, Rohde ﬁnds that the incidence of party behavior
over time is less in the Senate, but when issues that divide the parties are debated there,

the level of partisan conﬂict tends to be as great as that found in the House (1992b: 42).

Empirical Analysis: Procedural Choice and Policy Consequences

Bills That Become Law Under Special KM: 97th, 98th, 104th, and 105th Congresses
Of particular interest to this chapter is the linkage between restrictive rules and
enacted policies in the House and Senate. The evidence from the logit analysis supports
the claim that the policy interests of the majority party are important in determining
whether or not a bill receives a restrictive rule. If the partisan rationale offered here is

also relevant for understanding the policy consequences of rule choice, then there should

166

be some systematic relationship between the policies granted restrictive rules and
majority and minority voting patterns on these policies. That is, if the Rules Committee
does indeed act as the agent of the majority party, then restrictive rules should be used on
those policies that can do majority party members the most good (e.g. those policies that
are confronted by organized opposition).

The partisan theory articulated here suggests that House leaders have increasingly
used restrictive rules over time to pass policies of collective importance to the majority
party. Indeed, the majority party employs restrictive ﬂoor procedures because these
policies tend to be the ones that minority members cohere in opposition to and are most
vulnerable to defeat. Given House leaders use restrictive rules on policies to anticipate
the highly charged partisan forces at work, then we should observe party members in the
Senate behaving in a similar fashion on this subset of policies. To the extent that the
issues invoke similar partisan interests in the constituencies of the two Houses, similar
patterns of partisan conﬂict should be found on policies considered under special rules.
In particular, the greatest differences between majority party and minority party support
should be found on policies considered under restrictive rules. Moreover, the
institutional differences also suggest that the frequency of partisan conﬂict on these issues
considered under special rules should occur less in the Senate as compared to the House,
but the occurrence and relative level of conﬂict should increase over time.

The ﬁrst three tables of evidence don’t directly reﬂect on these expectations, but
do provide insight into what happened to bills considered under special rules during the
four Congresses analyzed here and how these polices are disposed of in the two

chambers. Table 12 shows the distribution of bills considered under special rules

167

according to ﬁnal outcome by each Congress (see Table 12). Here, the table allows one
to assess ﬁnal policy outcomes according to whether they passed or failed to become law.
The table breaks down policy outcomes into four categories. The subset that failed to
become law includes a category for bills that were defeated in the House and/or Senate
and a category for bills that passed but were subsequently vetoed by the President. The
subset that passed to become law includes a category for bills that garnered the necessary
support from both chambers and signed by the President and a category for those bills
that were subsequently vetoed and successfully overridden.

For example, the proportion of bills considered under special rules that did not
become law because of failure in one or both chambers was lowest during the 97‘“
Congress (39%) and was relatively higher for the remaining Congresses. Across all
Congresses, the proportion of bills considered under special rules that did not become law
from both categories was 57%. This includes 52% of the bills that did not pass through
one or both of the chambers plus another 5% that actually passed both Houses but failed
by presidential veto. These bills almost always pass in the House, so when they fail it is
usually the result of the Senate. Of those bills considered under special rules that failed
by presidential veto, the largest proportion (10%) was from the 104‘“ Congress. Indeed,
the veto ﬁnding speaks to the signiﬁcance of the policy changes that the GOP was
attempting during the revolutionary 104‘“. This still leaves nearly half or 43% of the bills
considered under special rules that passed both chambers to become law. If the House
takes up a bill under a special rule, its chances of becoming law are substantial.

Table 13 provides further evidence on the legislative success of bills considered

under special rules, but with a breakdown of the legislative outcome by rule type (see

168

Table 13). Looking down the ﬁrst column at the bills considered under Open rules, we
observe an interesting pattern over time. The proportion of bills considered under open
rules that passed dropped noticeably over the period considered here. During the 97‘“
Congress, 60% of the bills considered under open rules passed. By the 104‘“ Congress,
the proportion of bills considered under open rules that passed was only 30%. In Chapter
5, the 97‘“ Congress was found to be somewhat unique probably due to the popularity of
President Reagan’s domestic and economic policies. The ﬁndings here seem to parallel
the earlier ones. The 97‘“ may have been relatively more successful at passing bills under
open rules as compared to subsequent Congresses because of the administration’s success
at garnering the support of a working conservative cross-party coalition in the House and
Republican control of the Senate.

In contrast, looking down the second column of Table 13 we observe that the
proportion of legislation that passed under restrictive ﬂoor procedures remained about the
same over the course of these four Congresses. The proportion of bills that passed under
restrictive rules went from 46% during the 97‘“ to 51% in the 98‘“, then to 44% during the
104‘“, and down to 40% by the 105‘“ Congress. What is interesting about the 104‘“ is that
the proportion of bills considered under restrictive rules that passed would be much
higher if it were not for the fact that a large number (more than in the other Congresses)
of the bills that failed, did so because of presidential veto.’ Across the four Congresses,
the proportion of bills that pass under open or restrictive rules is about the same, 42% in

the case of the former and 44% in the latter. Overall, the patterns over time suggest that

 

‘ Twelve of the fourteen bills vetoed by President Clinton during the 104‘“ Congress had been considered
under a rule that granted ﬂoor protection in the House.

169

restrictive rules have not only become more prevalent, but also that the proportion of bills
becoming law are as likely to be ones considered under restrictive rules as are policies
considered under open rules. These ﬁndings are also interesting when one considers that
the differences in the proportion of bills passed under open versus restrictive rules
between the 97‘“-98‘“ and the 104‘“-105‘“ may be due to the fact that a more homogeneous
GOP majority controlled both chambers in the latter Congresses and so were more likely
to pass partisan proposals into law.

Table 14 shows how the legislation that passed both chambers was disposed of
(see Table 14). For the House, the table breaks down ﬁnal passage by voice vote and
non-conﬂictual and conﬁctual roll-call votes. For the Senate, the table categorizes ﬁnal
passage by voice vote, non-conﬂictual and conﬂictual roll-call vote, and unanimous
consent. In the House, bills considered under special rules are much more likely to be
roll called for ﬁnal passage than in the Senate. Across the four Congresses, 80% of bills
considered under special rules that passed were roll call voted in the House while just
about only half (44%) as many were roll call voted in the Senate. In fact, over half (55%)
of the bills passing the House under special rules invoked substantial conﬂict, while the
same level of conﬂict occurred in the Senate only 23%. This is not surprising given the
Senate’s greater tendency to accommodate minority policy interests. In the House, the
ﬁnal passage of these bills are likely to engender considerable conﬂict on the ﬂoor and
therefore likely to receive a recorded roll call vote. But the institutional context of the
Senate tends toward consensus, so when these bills reach the ﬂoor for ﬁnal passage, the

incidence of conﬂict is much less likely.

170

Indeed, the bills that passed by conﬂictual roll-call vote in the House and/or
Senate reveal an interesting pattern over time. The proportion of bills disposed of via
conﬂictual roll-call vote in the House went from 56% to 42% and then ﬁ'om 72% to 48%
during the 97‘“-98‘“ and 104‘“-105‘“ Congresses respectively. For the same Congresses in
the Senate, the proportion of bills that passed by conﬂictual roll-call vote went from 21%
to 12% and from 48% down to only 9%. In both chambers, the patterns of conﬂictual roll
call votes suggest similarities between the 97‘“ and 104‘“, while the lower levels found
during the 98‘“ and 105‘“ suggest greater similarity between these two Congresses. Still,
the 104‘“ Congress indicates that roll-call votes on the ﬂoor for this subset of bills were
substantially more likely to be conﬂictual, even as compared to the 97‘“ Congress. In the
House, an astonishing 72% of these bills were characterized by conﬂict. The same
category for the Senate during the 104‘“ Congress was 48% which is still over twice the
proportion of the next highest Congress—the 97‘“. So, despite the institutional bias
toward consensus building, the policies considered under special rules during the 104‘“

provoked considerable conﬂict in the Senate as well.

Aggregate Voting Analysis: Legisla_tion Considered Utyer Special Rules

To brieﬂy reiterate, the theory offered here suggests that the agency bond between
the Rules Committee and the majority party increased over time, so, the relationship
between restrictive rules and policies opposed by the minority party should likewise vary
with the passage of time. That is, if the majority party employs the Rules Committee to
grant restrictive rules for the purpose of achieving collective policy aims, we should

expect to observe evidence of majority and minority members reacting in opposition to

171

these aims over policies considered under special rules. If as I have argued, party leaders
have become more assertive in using special rules as strategies to affect legislation after
the early 19803, then the patterns in voting behavior between minority and majority party
members on policies should reﬂect this change in strategy over time. Moreover, because
the majority party in the House tends to use restrictive rules on policies that are important
to their collective interests and vulnerable to minority opposition, these policies should
engender similar behavior among the party members in the Senate. Thus, when conﬂict
does occur on these policies in the Senate, we should observe similar levels of
partisanship as found in the House.

The data in Figure 11 supports these expectations for partisan voting behavior
over time.“ The bars in Figure 11 measure the percentage of ﬁnal passage votes on bills
considered under open and restrictive rules controlling for the level of partisanship (see
Figure 11).“ The two bars in each of the four groups represent the proportion of ﬁnal
passage votes for the House and for the Senate respectively. To make the proportions of
ﬁnal passage votes and level of partisanship more discernible, I present only the House
and Senate categories with levels of partisanship greater than .50. But I will also discuss
the proportion of ﬁnal passage votes in each category with levels of partisanship less than
.50. For the analysis I broke down the proportion of ﬁnal passage votes into two groups,
one with partisanship greater than .50 and one less than .50. So, the proportions shown in

Figure 11 equal 100% of the ﬁnal passage votes when the complement categories with

 

’ Figure 11 combines the ﬁnal passage voting data for the 97‘“ and 98‘“ and the 104‘“ and 105‘“
respectively.

6 Partisanship is measured here as the absolute difference between the proportion of GOP ayes and the
proportion of Democratic ayes. The partisanship variable ranges ﬁ'om zero (no partisanship) to one
(perfect partisanship).

172

partisanship less than .50 are considered. For example, during the 97‘“-98‘“ Congress, the
proportion of ﬁnal passage votes on policies considered under open rules that had levels
of partisanship greater than .50 in the House was 19%. The proportion (although not
shown) of ﬁnal passage votes that had levels of partisanship less than or equal to .50 was
81%. For ease of reference, I will discuss the House patterns ﬁrst and the Senate last.

The ﬁrst bar in Figure 11 indicates that during the 97‘“ and 98‘“ Congresses, the
proportion of ﬁnal passage votes generating high levels of partisanship (.51 to 1.0) under
open rules during the 97‘“-98‘“ was just 19% in the House. This proportion increased to
46% by the 104‘“-105‘“. Alternatively, this means that over 80% of ﬁnal passage votes on
bills considered under open rules generated fairly low levels of partisan conﬂict (0 to .50)
in the House. This proportion fell to 54% by the 104‘“ and 105‘“ Congresses. For bills
considered under restrictive ﬂoor procedures, the proportion of ﬁnal passage votes
generating relatively high levels of partisanship went from 37% during the 97‘“-98‘“
Congresses up to 59% by the 104‘“-105‘“. In contrast, the proportion of votes generating
fairly low levels of partisan conﬂict during the earlier period went from 63% down to
41% by the latter Congresses. For the House then, the proportion of highly partisan ﬁnal
passage votes under restrictive rules for the 104‘“-105‘“ Congresses (59%) was greater
than the proportion of highly partisan votes considered under Mr open (19%) and
restrictive (37%) rules for the 97‘“-98‘“ Congresses. This sharp contrast seems to lend
weight to the argument that the GOP leadership were more assertive in their use of
restrictive rules than were the Democrats, at least before the era of Speaker Wright and
the 100‘“ Congress (Aldrich and Rohde 1996b). The over time results for the House show

that by the 104‘“-105‘“ Congresses, the greatest frequency of conﬂict, and the highest

173

levels occur where the partisan rationale would expect—on policies considered under
restrictive rules.7

In the Senate, the patterns in partisanship found on this subset of policies is
remarkably similar to those for the House. Here, the second bar of each group in Figure
11 represent the comparable proportion of ﬁnal passage votes for the Senate. It is
important to note that there are no special rules in the Senate, but the analysis here
measures the incidence and level of partisan conﬂict on this same subset of policies
considered under special rules in the House. The same trend is present in the Senate as
was found in the House for the proportion of ﬁnal passage votes controlling for
partisanship. For example, during the 97‘“-98‘“ Congresses, the proportion of ﬁnal
passage votes generating levels of conﬂict greater than .50 was only 3% for those under
open and just 30% under restrictive rules. Conversely, in these earlier Congresses, over
two-thirds of the ﬁnal passage votes on bills for both categories of rule type were
relatively low in partisanship. Virtually all or 97% of the legislation under the open
category and 70% under the restrictive category received low levels of partisan conﬂict in
the Senate. The proportions of lower level partisan voting patterns fell to 59% and 43%
on the subset of policies for the 104‘“-105‘“ Congresses for the comparable groupings.
Indeed, the parallel patterns in the House and Senate by the latter period are almost
indistinguishable for the subset of policies considered under restrictive rules. The

partisan voting patterns on this subset of legislation suggest that these policies tended to

 

7 Indeed, differences in the frequency of partisan conﬂict would be greater between open and restrictive

rules, if ﬁnal passage votes considered under modiﬁed-open rules were classiﬁed into the restrictive
category. I chose not to categorize the data in this way so that the break down of special rules remains
consistent with that used for the logistic analysis.

174

deeply divide the political parties in both chambers similarly. So, although the frequency
of conﬂict tended to occur less in the Senate over these policies (as indicated by the
number of ﬂoor roll-call votes), when it did occur, Senators were as partisan as their
House counterparts.

Table 15 provides one last piece of evidence for majority and minority voting
behavior on the subset of policies that became law (see Table 15). Speciﬁcally, the ﬁrst
two columns of Table 15 averages the majority and minority party support on ﬁnal
passage votes in each Congress for legislation considered under special rules that became
law. The third column of the table is simply the difference of the two averages. The
evidence tends to conﬁrm the hypothesis that differences between majority and minority
party support on bills considered under restrictive rules will be higher than differences on
policies considered under open rules. Once more, considerable change has taken place
between the 97‘“-98‘“ Congress to the 104‘“-105‘“. For example, during the 97‘“ Congress
the average majority party support on bills considered under restrictive rules was lower
than the average level of minority support, .61 and .78 respectively. This ﬁnding may be
due to the inﬂuence of the large number of Reagan Democrats that were unwilling to
work with the House Democratic leadership and often voted with the Republican party.
By the 104‘“ though, we see that average majority support on bills considered under
restrictive rules is very high and starkly different than the levels of minority party support
found on these bills. In fact, the difference is .39 on policies considered under open rules
and .52 on those considered under restrictive. The evidence on majority and minority
party support is even more stark in the 105‘“. Here, the average difference for majority

party support on bills considered under restrictive procedures was .57 and under open was

175

only .12. These ﬁndings show that important differences in levels of support exist
between the majority and minority on bills considered under restrictive rules. The rules
facilitate the passage of policies in the House that minority party members appear to be
collectively opposed.

Similar to the earlier ﬁndings, Table 15 also illustrates the similarities in majority
and minority party support in the Senate. The levels of majority party support on the
subset of policies considered under restrictive rules were always greater than levels of
minority party support. On the subset of policies considered under open rules, the
ﬁndings are a little more varied. In fact, during the 98‘“ and 105‘“ Congress, average
minority party support on this set of policies was greater than majority party support.
This may reﬂect institutional differences in the upper chamber that allow the minority
party senators considerably greater levels of policy inﬂuence as compared to minority

members in the House.

Conclusion

The evidence in this chapter illustrates the signiﬁcance to the legislative process
of majority party control over the Rules Committee. In the four Congresses of the post
reform period studied here, legislation that receives a rule for initial consideration was
extremely likely to pass the House. Once passed the House, almost half of these bills
become law. Certainly, if passing policy is a valuable goal of the majority party, control
over the choice of special rules seems to be of immense importance. To the extent that
voting behavior is associated with member preferences, the policies considered under

restrictive rules appear to increasingly reﬂect the collective interests of majority party

176

members. Given that the majority party leadership controls the Rules Committee, we
might infer that the intent of the rules is to achieve these policy ends.

In general, the ﬁndings from Figure 11 and Table 15 tend to support hypothesis 5
(from Chapter 2) that substantial differences do exist between majority and minority party
support on policies considered under restrictive rules. The data underscore the
signiﬁcance of special rules to enacted policies and the partisan implications of these
policy outcomes. Partisanship was found to systematically vary across policies
considered under open versus restrictive rules. In the House, high levels of partisanship
occurred on a non-trivial proportion (37%) of ﬁnal passage votes for bills considered
under restrictive rules during the 97‘“-98‘“ Congresses, but the proportion generating this
level of conﬂict had risen dramatically, up to 59% by the 104‘“-105‘“. Although less
frequent in the Senate, the patterns of partisan conﬂict were very similar to those found in
the House. When conﬂict did occur there, the partisan behavior was similarly affected on
this subset of policies. Over time, the patterns of partisan conﬂict found between the two
periods are different. In fact, Figure 11 showed that during the 97‘“-98‘“, over three-ﬁﬁhs
of the policies considered under special rules on the House ﬂoor generated relatively little
partisanship (and over two-thirds of these on the Senate ﬂoor). By the 104‘“-105‘“, the
majority of policies considered under special rules (open or restrictive) could no longer
be characterized as relatively bipartisan.

Certainly, the increasing levels of partisan conﬂict over policies brought to the
ﬂoor by special rules represents a combination of electoral and institutional changes
taking place within Congress. But part of the explanation also speaks to the signiﬁcance

of leadership strategies to congressional politics. That is, special rules represent a choice

177

made by party leaders regarding whether or not to use a particular type of legislative
strategy. The ﬁndings from the logit models in Chapter 5 support the claim that the
policy position of the majority party affects this choice. The aggregate ﬁndings on ﬁnal
passage votes in this chapter reﬂect the fact that party leaders have increasingly relied
upon restrictive rules and that these strategies have been increasingly designed for

partisan ends.

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Controlling for Rule Type, 97‘”, 98‘”, 104‘“, and 105"I Congresses

Congress Majority Support Minority Support Difference
97‘“ (1981-1982)

House/Open .88 (n=47) .79 (n=47) .09
House/Restrictive .61 (n=12) .78 (n=12) -.17
Senate/Open .91 (n=27) .89 (n=27) .02
Senate/Restrictive .88 (n=8) .53 (n=8) .35
98“ (1983-1984)

House/Open .92 (n=27) .67 (n=27) .25
House/Restrictive .88 (n=14) .67 (n=l4) .21
Senate/Open .88 (n=9) .93 (n=9) -.05
Senate/Restrictive .91 (n=8) .76 (n=8) .15
104"I (1995-1996)

House/Open .94 (n=23) .55 (n=23) .39
House/Restrictive .95 (n=34) .43 (n=34) .52
Senate/Open .88 (n=17) .52 (n=17) .36
Senate/Restrictive .93 (n=22) .36 (n=22) .57
105“ (1997-1998)

House/Open .92 (n=26) .80 (n=26) .12
House/Restrictive .95 (n=24) .38 (n=24) .57
Senate/Open .96 (n=11) .98 (n=1 1) -.02
Senate/Restrictive .94 (n=8) .63 (n=8) .31

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CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION

Although the procedural aspects of congressional politics may be less visible to
the critical eye of public opinion, they are fundamental in shaping public policy and
essential for understanding democratic governance. Relating to this point, the House
minority leader Robert Michel said: “Nothing is so boring to the layman as a litany of
complaints over the more obscure provisions of House procedures. It is all inside
baseball. Even among the media, none but the brave seek to attend to the howls of
dismay ﬁom Republicans over such esoterica as the kinds of rules under which we are
forced to debate. But what is more important to a democracy than the method by which
its laws are created?” (Bach and Smith 1988: 91).

This dissertation set out to apply a principal-agent theory to leadership
institutions within the House of Representatives. In particular, the theory attempted to
shed light on the changing institutional and procedural role of the House Rules
Committee and special rules respectively. I sought to place these changes in a theoretical
framework in order to better understand their signiﬁcance in shaping congressional
politics and the making of public policy. One aspect of the model that departs from more
traditional principal-agent approaches was that party leaders in Congress can shape the
very conditions that motivate the membership’s willingness to allocate powers to
leadership organizations. Basically, my model differs by endogenizing the principal’s

incentive structure to employ leaders as agents. This part of the theoretical model is

184

important because I don’t think congressional scholars can completely understand the
dynamics driving institutional and behavioral changes by assuming member preferences
are simply exogenous (Aldrich and Rohde 1998a).

The idea for extending the principal-agent model was rooted in the way that
leaders use institutional tools and strategies to enhance the level of collective advantage
that can be achieved by the majority party. The observed result of these leadership-
directed strategies can lead to the magniﬁcation or remission of partisan conﬂict
(Marshall, Prins, and Rohde 1998). These strategies undoubtedly affect member choices
and preferences in ways that are still not well understood. Certainly, the endogenous
component to party leadership in Congress is deserving of further empirical and
theoretical attention. In the dissertation, I argued that these endogenously driven
processes affected changes in Rules Committee behavior and the role of special rules over
time. To this end, the empirical evidence in this analysis links the signiﬁcance of a

majority party dominated Rules Committee and procedural choice to the policy process.

Summary of Empirical Results

Overall, the evidence from Chapters 4, 5, and 6 largely conﬁrm the theoretical
hypotheses set out in Chapter 2. In Chapter 4, I found that the Rules Committee became
less likely to block legislation from reaching the ﬂoor over time. During the prereform
Congress, the Rules Committee oﬁen killed committee proposals before they could be
considered by the full House by simply denying special rule requests (Robinson 1963;
Oppenheimer 1977). In effect, Rules served as an institutional veto point between the

committee system and the House ﬂoor. By the 104‘h Congress, the Rules Committee can

185

no longer be characterized as the legislative graveyard it once was. This marked change
in committee behavior I argued, showed that the committee has become much more
responsive to the majority party’s policy interests.

The behavioral change of the Committee did not occur in isolation. Certainly, the
reforms aimed directly at Rules were not the only forces shaping its behavior, as other
institutional reforms affecting the wider committee system and the distribution of power
within Congress also played a central role (Shepsle 1989; Smith 1989; Rohde 1991;
Sinclair 1997). However, I argued that a signiﬁcant component of the change in Rules
Committee behavior was due to the change in majority party incentives for procedural
cooperation resulting from legislative committee proposals becoming more in line with
the policy interests of the majority party over time.

The temporal ﬁndings on party support of amendments from Chapter 4 bolsters
the claim that the committee system and the policies they produced had become
increasingly sensitive to liberal Democratic party priorities. There, I found a signiﬁcant
decrease over time in majority party support on changes to committee proposals on the
ﬂoor, while the same trend in minority party support was not present. Moreover, as
majority party support of amendments decreased, there was a precipitous increase in
majority party support of special rules. In fact, as shown in Figure 6 of Chapter 4 the
levels of majority and minority support on special rules diverged quite dramatically after
1974 when the Speaker was granted the power to ﬁll majority party seats (including the
chairperson) on Rules. Interestingly, Fox and Clapp (1970) come to a somewhat different
conclusion based on evidence ﬁ'om an earlier period. In their analysis from 1953-60 and

from 1961-68, Fox and Clapp (1970: 443) argued that the institutional changes to the

186

Rules Committee, like the seat expansion, did not appreciably affect the number and/or
substantive nature of the legislation that was prevented from reaching the House ﬂoor.
But, the principal-agent theory that I have articulated contends that sufficient incentives
for agency behavior on the part of the Committee were not fully institutionalized until the
party caucus granted the Speaker direct control over its [Rules Committee] members. So,
their ﬁndings relating to the Committee’s earlier behavior don’t necessarily contradict my
theoretical claims.

In addition, the empirical ﬁnding in Chapter 4 on amendments and special rules
parallel nicely with the theoretical contention that the decreased costs associated with
forgoing amendment rights should coincide with higher levels of procedural commitment
on restrictive ﬂoor procedures. These ﬁndings supported my theoretical claim that as the
homogeneity in policy preferences among the rank-and-ﬁle increased, the costs to
foregoing amendment rights on the ﬂoor should decrease and incentives for party
cooperation should increase. As majority party members became less supportive of
amendments (more supportive of committee proposals) they became more willing to
support special rules that restricted proposed changes to these policies. Not only did the
level of majority party support increase over time on restrictive rules, but as shown earlier
in Figures 3 and 4 of Chapter 3 the share of rules that were restrictive increased starkly.
For example, Figure 4 indicated that during the 97th Congress the proportion of special
rules that were restrictive was only about 20% and by the 105’” Congress this proportion
had more than doubled to nearly 48%. So, the data shows that majority party members
became more supportive of rules, and in addition, that Rules Committee behavior seemed

more responsive to members’ policy interests. That is, the Committee not only became

187

less likely to deny committee requests for special rules, but also the rules it did grant to
committee proposals were increasingly more likely to be restrictive.

The theory contends that the greater intraparty homogeneity creates conditions in
which members are more willing to empower leadership institutions generally, and more
speciﬁcally in this case to support leadership-directed strategies that ﬂow from members’
procedural commitment on restrictive rules. Thus, the ﬁndings from Chapter 4 on the
Rules Committee behavior and majority party support on amendments and special rule
votes lends credence to the theoretical claim that the majority party has effectively
institutionalized an agency relationship with the Rules Committee during the postreform
Congress.

In Chapter 5, the logit analysis tested empirical predictions made by
contemporary theories of Congress regarding the procedural choice of restrictive rules.
The analysis of rule choice from the 97‘“, 98‘“, 104*, and 105th Congresses largely
contradicted Krehbiel’s (1991) majoritarian claims that restrictive rules are used by the
legislature as informational devices. The informational perspective he espouses claims
that institutions are determined by maj oritarian processes and have no independent effects
on policy that would be counter to these underlying forces of remote majoritarianism. To
be clear, the partisan theory I have articulated does not contend that the chamber median
will not impose constraints on collective decisions nor does it contend that the median is
not inﬂuential to policy making. Still, the statistical models provide little or no support
that informational variables systematically inﬂuence the choice of restrictive rules. The
empirical evidence just does not support the theoretical claims that restrictive rules are

designed for the purpose of producing information from the committee system.

188

Similarly, disconﬁrming evidence was found for distributive theory variables. In the four
Congresses analyzed, bills characterized as highly distributive were not systematically
related to the choice of restrictive rules.

In addition, the logistic models on rule choice provided very little evidence
supportive of Dion and Huber’s (1996) view that the Rules Committee acts as an
autonomous institution and that its policy position can independently affect the likelihood
of legislation receiving restrictive rules. Instead, when the majority party’s policy
position was controlled for, the policy position of the Rules Committee tended not to
have an independent effect on the choice of restrictive rules. The implicit design of the
Rules Median and Party Median variables are relational with respect to the policy
position of the legislative committee. The evidence on rule choice shows that the
relationship between the majority party and the legislative committee systematically
affects whether or not policies receive a restrictive rule. This ﬁnding follows from my
theoretical argument which expects that the Rules Committee should act as the loyal
agent of the majority party and therefore the policy preferences that should matter in
determining restrictive rules are those of the majority party.

Certainly then, one major lesson from the analysis of rule choice is that one of the
most important factors in determining the choice of restrictive rules is the policy position
of the majority party. More speciﬁcally, legislation from committees that were more
moderate in- their policy interests relevant to the policy interests of the majority party
were more likely to encounter restrictive rules. Alternatively, committees with the same
or more extreme policy interests than the party caucus were less likely to receive

restrictive rules. Table 9 (from Chapter 5) illustrates that during the 97m, 98‘“, 104‘“, and

189

105th Congresses the Party Median variable increased the likelihood of a bill receiving a
restrictive rule by 6%, 14%, 28%, and 20% respectively. In light of the theoretical
argument, the interpretation of these ﬁndings is that bills are more likely to receive
restrictive rules when they are susceptible to being rolled away from the party median and
in the direction of the ﬂoor median. This is because when the committee’s position is
between the ﬂoor median and the party’s position, any moderation in the policy will
always be at the expense of the policy position of the majority party.l Under these
conditions, leaders have an incentive to structure the rules in order to eliminate some of
these amendment proposals. When bills are more extreme than the party median,
amendments offered to moderate the policy would (up until a certain point) tend to bring
the policy closer to the position of the majority party, so leaders may be less concerned
with the extent that amendments are restricted.

The ﬁndings from Chapters 4 and 5 dovetail nicely together in explaining under
what conditions that restrictive rules are most likely used. The theory claimed that when
legislative committees develop policies that are not reﬂective of the party caucus’
interests and those policies are important to the party, leaders will have an incentive to
use their power in creating rules that mitigate the legislative committee’s lack of
responsiveness to the party. More speciﬁcally, the theoretical contention was that on the
subset of legislation in which the policy position of the majority party was more extreme
than the legislative committee, leaders would have an incentive to use restrictive rules to

prevent bills from being amended toward the ﬂoor median and/or used to present choices

 

' This argument assumes that the ﬂoor’s position is more moderate than the majority party’s position. See
Appendix B from Chapter 3.

190

 

that sharpen differences between the minority and majority party positions. In fact, the
empirical results from Figure 7 in Chapter 4 can shed further light on this theoretical
insight.

According to the theory, special rules may be designed by party leaders (via
amendment selection) to anticipate the moderating pull of the ﬂoor. The empirical
ﬁndings on majority party support of amendments from Chapter 4 follows from this
theoretical argument. Figure 7 substantiates that majority and minority preferred
amendments are not equally as likely to occur on bills considered under special rules.
That is, there exists a systematic pattern to amendments supported by the majority and
amendments supported by the minority dependent on the type of rule the bill receives. In
Figure 7, the proportion of amendments in which the level of support was greater for the
majority than the minority was almost always found on amendments considered under the
most restrictive of ﬂoor procedures (i.e. modiﬁed-closed rules). Moreover, both the
frequency and the average level of majority support tended to be greatest on this subset
according to the theory because leaders crafted rules that tended to protect amendments
that favored the party caucus’ interests and not those amendments that could roll the
party’s position. Indeed, the theory would contend that leaders craft rules that allow the
majority party members to offer certain amendments intended to change policies on the
ﬂoor so that they would be more reﬂective of the party’s policy views.

However, when committees produce legislation in line with majority party
interests and the party is highly uniﬁed, restrictive rules are not needed as much to
manage amendment challenges. Thus, on bills considered under open rules, the evidence

from Figure 7 shows that the frequency of majority party support for amendments was

191

substantially less. More speciﬁcally, on amendments considered under open rules, the
proportion that were preferred by the majority party as well as the average level of
support were lower compared to the analogous results for amendments considered under
restrictive rules.

In Chapter 6, the analysis speaks to the signiﬁcance of majority party control over
a key institution (i.e. the Rules Committee) that manages the House’s legislative agenda.
There, I found that legislation receiving a special rule from the Rules Committee almost
always passes the House and has a considerable chance at becoming law. More
importantly though, the evidence supported the theoretical argument that restrictive rules
have increasingly become a tool for partisan policy ends. The levels of partisan conﬂict
varied systematically across policies considered under open and restrictive ﬂoor
procedures. The Senate does not have analogous institutional mechanisms like restrictive
rules or a committee that controls the ﬂow of legislation reaching the ﬂoor as does the
House. So, in the Senate, partisan conﬂict over these policies tended to occur less
frequently, but when it did occur, the patterns of conﬂict were similar to those found in
the House. The subset of policies considered under restrictive rules in the House
disproportionately engendered high levels of partisan conﬂict when they reached the
Senate ﬂoor. Thus, the empirical ﬁndings in Chapter 6 emphasize the signiﬁcance of
intraparty cooperation and procedural choice to the legislative process. This cooperation
led to majority party control over the Rules Committee as well as the party leadership’s
greater reliance on restrictive rules.

Special rules remain as one of the major institutional mechanism used by the

House to manage its business, but the analysis here shows that both their design and

192

 

effects on policy has had increasingly partisan implications. Overall, the empirical
ﬁndings in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 support the theoretical claim that the choice of restrictive
rules in the legislative process has become more and more determined by and reﬂective

of the collective policy ends of the majority party.

Future Extensions:

The work in this dissertation can be expanded as part of a broader project related
to the study of leadership strategies and their effects on congressional politics. One
obvious direction would be to increase the number of Congresses. The extended time
series would allow me greater leverage in comparing periods of party leadership
development with the changes in the use of special rules. For example, during the 106th
Congress Speaker Hastert has publicly commented about trying to promote a working
consensus between the two parties. Perhaps his efforts reﬂect that he has been attempting
to save the GOP’s reputation as a responsible and effective governing party in Congress.
Congress watchers have suggested that the Speaker has taken on the role of GOP
“uniter” and “promoter” of “bipartisanship”—“roles that he [Hastert] hopes will serve
the long-term aims of the GOP after the provocative tenure of his predecessor as
Speaker, Newt Gingrich, R-GA {1979-1999)” (CQ, May 1, 1999: 1039). Even more,
Barbara Sinclair remarked about proposed House rules changes intended to facilitate
greater comity, “In a period of close party balances, it would thus be in the self-interest
of the current majority to set precedents of generosity” (CQ, May 1, 1999: 1020). So,

with the new dynamics involved with Hastert’s leadership, the 106’h Congress should be

193

an extremely interesting Congress to analyze special rules as compared to the 104th and
105th.

In addition, the analysis can be extended by controlling for variation across bills
according to their salience and/or importance in the legislative process. This would
include looking at potential differences and changes over time on special rules used to
bring major versus minor legislation to the ﬂoor. Another means to control for the
importance of policies considered under special rules would be to group the bills
according to their committee jurisdiction. For example, the theory asserts that the design
of rules may differ dependent on the bill’s importance to the majority party. Thus, one
would expect that rules used to bring legislation to the ﬂoor from prestige committees
may be very different than those used for constituency committees.

Moreover, much can be learned from the evolution of particular rules. My
research here focuses on the end product of rules that go through a series of processes that
can change their substantive content and design. Considerable bargaining can occur on
certain rules where the leadership may be forced to alter the end product to balance
competing party and/or committee factions in order to pass the rule on the ﬂoor (Bach
and Smith 1988). Also, rules that are defeated on the ﬂoor are not considered in my
analysis but can provide information that is theoretically useful for understanding the
interaction between leaders and the rank-and-ﬁle, or likewise, committees and the ﬂoor.
These aspects represent an incredibly important part of the rule process that remains
largely unexplored here and certainly worthy of future investment.

Another path of research would be to more thoroughly extend the analysis by

exploring leadership tools and strategies in both chambers. My work has primarily

194

focused on how rules restrict amendments to policies on the House ﬂoor, but this is only
one component of the leadership’s manipulation of special rules. In the House context,
the extended analysis might entail speciﬁc components of special rules like the use of
waivers, time limitations on the amendment process, leaving parts of the bill unprotected
by the rule, or even different methods for bringing bills to the ﬂoor like under suspension
of the rules. For the Senate, the analysis could include the leadership’s use of procedures
like the complex unanimous consent agreements and partisan ﬁlibusters. The extension
to the 106th Congress would also be an interesting case in the Senate both because of the
House’s new bipartisan-oriented Speakership and the institutional change regarding the
use of legislative holds to block policies from reaching the ﬂoor (see CQ, March 6, 1999:
543). Will Senate party leaders take greater initiative in promoting the GOP’s collective
policy agenda? Will this change in Senate rules affect partisanship on the ﬂoor?
Legislative holds will now carry potential political costs for individual Senators and/or to
the parties. Moreover, Senate leaders can now keep track of speciﬁc members who use
the holds and on which policies.

One additional puzzle regarding special rules that has already sparked my interest
is to explain why there exists partisan conﬂict on open rules in the ﬁrst place (Hixon and
Marshall 1999). That is, why would partisan conﬂict occur on rules that impose
relatively little structure or restriction on amendment possibilities? This project moves
beyond the literature on special rules in several different and important ways. For
example, in this paper we systematically examine partisan conﬂict on open rules as an

explicit procedural component of party image building (Cox and McCubbins 1993).

195

Finally, I hope to expand previous work relating leadership strategies and special
rules to other House legislative committees (see Marshall, Prins, and Rohde 1998). The
emphasis of this work would relate to how special rules affect committee autonomy.
Steve Smith (1989: 57-58, 74-85) has asserted that the increase in special rules has
actually provided greater autonomy to certain committees. But in an institution where
committees have multiple principals, the more intriguing question seems to be, autonomy
with respect to whom (i.e. ﬂoor, party, leaders)? Some of the data I have collected will
let me say more about how special rules have affected committee autonomy in the
postreform era, and more importantly from a theoretical standpoint, I think I will be in a
position to talk about the conditions under which legislative committees might have
increased autonomy and inﬂuence in the legislative process. Certainly, I think the line of
argument used here can be useful in understanding committee autonomy, in that
committee autonomy probably depends to some extent on the policy preferences of the

majority party membership and the legislative committee.

196

APPENDICES

197

APPENDIX A
Exogenous Variables Used in the Logit Analysis
Control Variable:

l.) Referral - Dummy variable, zero indicating single referral and one indicating
multiple referral.

Informational Variables:

2.) Bill scope - A count of the number of “key” words from the legislate data base for
each bill. Collected from hot bill options.

3.) Committee heterogeneity - This variable was computed as the signed difference
between the standard deviation of the W—Nominate scores for the committee(s) the bill
was referred to and the entire chamber.

4.) Number of Laws Cited - A count of the number of laws cited and/or repealed by the
relevant bill.

5.) Number of Minority Party Cosponsors - The number of minority party cosponsors
on the bill.

6.) Committee outlier - Computed as the absolute difference between the median of the
committee and the median of the chamber.

Distributive Variables:

7.) Distributive content - This variable represents the ratio of the number of states listed
from the legislate data base (from key words) divided by the total number of legislate key
words plus the number of states.

8.) Bill urgency - Dummy variable coding whether or not the bill extends the debt limit
ceiling, continuing resolution, supplemental, or emergency appropriations.

Rules Committee Variables:

9.) Rule median - Computed as the absolute difference between the median of the Rules
Committee and the median of the legislative committee(s) that the bill was referred to.

10.) Legislative proﬁle - This variable takes on the value one if the median of the Rules

Committee and the median member of the legislative committee are on the same side
of the ﬂoor, and zero otherwise.

198

 

Partisan Variables:

11.) Majority party cosponsors - The number of majority party cosponsors on the bill.
12.) Party median - A dummy variable that takes on the value zero when the median of
the party conference is to the left (or more liberal) of the majority party contingent of the

legislative committee and the value one when the party median is to the right (or more
conservative) of the majority party contingent of the legislative committee.

199

APPENDIX B

 

 

 

Party Median Variable
Petty Median Vuiabln Spatial
Description GOP committee median
Liberal
’ Conservative
GOP committee
median
L ibe n1 | Conservative
CM! W PM)? “M

200

Variable

Variable
Coded 1

 

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