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LIBRARY
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This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

SETTING THE STAGE: PARTY AND PROCEDURE IN THE
PRE-FLOOR AGENDA SETTING OF THE US. HOUSE

presented by

CHARLES JEFFREY FINOCCHIARO

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for the

PhD. degree in Political Science

 

 

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SETTING THE STAGE: PARTY AND PROCEDURE IN THE
PRE-FLOOR AGENDA SETTING OF THE US. HOUSE

By

Charles Jeffrey Finocchiaro

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Political Science

2003

ABSTRACT

SETTING THE STAGE: PARTY AND PROCEDURE IN THE
PRE-FLOOR AGENDA SETTING OF THE US. HOUSE

By

Charles Jeffrey Finocchiaro

In recent years, a growing body of research has sought to account for the
role and impact of political parties in the US. Congress. This dissertation
focuses on the role of party leaders in pre-ﬂoor decision making in the US.
House of Representatives. In particular, it seeks to bridge two somewhat
disparate literatures, one documenting the changes in the legislative process that
have occurred since the reforms of the 19703 and the other examining the
increasing role of parties and partisanship in Congress. I argue that
congressional leaders have at their disposal a variety of procedural tools with
which to affect the substantive content of legislation prior to ﬂoor consideration,
and that it is the pre-ﬂoor stage at which they enjoy the ripest opportunity for
inﬂuence.

Three areas of the pre-ﬂoor legislative process are considered. With a
theoretical foundation grounded in conditional party government theory, I
consider which bills are acted upon in House committees. The results indicate a
systematic relationship between favorable action on legislation and the
institutional context, party afﬁliation of the sponsor, and other sponsor-level
characteristics. The results hold while controlling for variables drawn from

competing theories of legislative organization.

Next, I consider the leadership’s decision to bypass the committee system
altogether and bring legislation directly to the ﬂoor. This trend has been
increasing in the post-reform House, and possesses implications not only for
committee power but for party power as well. A series of case studies are
employed to delineate the conditions under which bypass occurs and to
demonstrate its appeal to the majority party under particular circumstances.
Additionally, this procedural track is contrasted with the more commonly studied
discharge petition.

Finally, this dissertation revisits the use of restrictive rules in setting the
ﬂoor agenda of the House. While rules have been at the forefront of the debate
about the signiﬁcance of parties, I argue that looking at them in isolation runs the
risk of incurring selection bias in statistical estimates. In light of this, two extant
models of restrictive rules are re-examined using a censored probit model. The
results suggest that while there is some evidence of bias resulting from sample

selection, the primary results are by and large unchanged.

Dedicated to

my wife Lauren

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this dissertation has consumed the better part of two years—even
longer if I were to include the time spent thinking about it and developing the idea
prior to formally stating it in my proposal. Over the course of this period of time in
particular, and my graduate school career in general, a number of people have
contributed to the completion of this project. Compiling a list of such individuals
carries with it the risk of overlooking some. To them, and to those friends and
family who were not directly involved but were an encouragement nonetheless, I
sincerely apologize for the written oversight and thank them for their role, which
will not been forgotten.

My formal training in graduate school starts and ends with my advisor and
dissertation chair, David W. Rohde. Dave introduced me to the analytic way of
studying politics, and throughout my time at Michigan State and as a Fellow in
the Political Institutions and Public Choice (PIPC) Program which he heads, has
continually challenged me to consider each question with a strong theoretical
base and to logically develop and test the implications. This approach is one that
he not only taught in an abstract fashion, but that he also modeled for me in
numerous collaborative endeavors. For his impact on my way of thinking, for his
constantly open door, and for the ongoing pleasure of working with him, I am
thankful to Dave for his impact on my career and on this dissertation.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the other members of my dissertation

committee as well. This list has grown over the past two years due to turnover in

the department. However, I count myself a beneficiary of this growth, as each
member has contributed to making the ﬁnal product much improved. I would ﬁrst
like to thank Jeff Jenkins, who like Dave, shareswith me a great interest in
Congress, has collaborated with me on research, and has impacted my
scholarship immeasurably. For their contributions, I also sincerely thank Ken
Williams, Burt Monroe, Edward Duane, and Bill Reed.

Others have factored prominently into my training and development along
the way, although I did not have the privilege of working with them as members
of my dissertation committee. I am grateful to Larry Heimann, Jim Granato, and
Tse—min Lin for the training they gave me in methodology. I would also like to
thank Darren Davis, Greg Bovitz, and Tim Nokken for the times we spent
discussing American politics and various research projects. Others who have
impacted me over the years include Bob Lowry, Scott Gates, Brian Silver, Paul
Abramson, Ada Finifter, and Chuck Ostrom.

A list of acknowledgments would not be complete without mentioning my
graduate student colleagues. My paths crossed with a number of people, all of
whom I count it a pleasure to have known. These include Kirk Randazzo, Chris
Bonneau, Matt Kleiman, Shane Szalai, Erik Herron, Misa Nishikawa, Becky
Tothero, Ben Kleinerman, and Phil Kloha. Many of my fondest memories of
graduate school occurred in the FIFO ofﬁce. Through the years, I have had the
privilege of interacting with, getting to know, and frequently collaborating with a
host of bright and affable people associated with this program. Among them are

Mark Hurwitz, Brandon Prins, Roger Moiles, lndridi lndridason, Justin Fox,

vi

Eduardo Leoni, Ryan Vander Wielen, Suzanne Gold, and Jeremy Duff. A few
people stand out due to their proximity to my year of admission and/or our shared
interests. I am grateful to Mark Souva for his friendship and for the engaging
conversation our time together always carried with it. Bryan Marshall paved the
way for the students of Congress that were to follow him, and has been a great
friend and collaborator. And ﬁnally, I am grateful to Jamie Carson for his
camaraderie through our time in graduate school and for his partnership in many
projects. It has been a tremendous pleasure to have someone so good-natured,
with whom I share many of the same interests, as an ofﬁce-mate, a colleague,
and a friend.

The ﬁnancial support of the Dirksen Congressional Center, in the way of a
grant funded by the Caterpillar Foundation, aided in the collection of data
employed in this dissertation. I am grateful to Ryan Vander Wielen, Eduardo
Leoni, and Laura Romzek for their work in gathering data on my behalf.

I conclude these acknowledgments by thanking the family and friends who
have been at my side with an encouraging word, with understanding, and with
patience. Without them, this dissertation would never have been completed. I
thank my family at Holt Baptist Church, my parents and my wife’s parents, and
our siblings. Above all, I am forever grateful to Lauren, my life’s partner and
constant companion. Her ability to know when to give me a swift kick and when
to say nothing, her abiding love and patience, and her interest in my professional
endeavors are a living example of the principles embodied in I Corinthians 13.

For Lauren’s impact on my life, this dissertation is dedicated to her.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................. x
LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................. xi
CHAPTER 1

Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1
The Party Debate ....................................................................................... 2
Placing This Work in the Larger Context .................................................... 6
Outline of the Dissertation ........................................................................ 11

CHAPTER 2

Committee Agenda-Setting in the US. House of Representatives:

The Asymmetric Distribution of Policy ................................................................ 13
Introduction .............................................................................................. 1 3
Perspectives of Committees and Theories of Legislative
Organization ............................................................................................. 1 6

Preferences, the Outlier Debate, and Committee
Organization .................................................................................. 19
A Theory of Committee Agenda Setting .................................................. 24
Empirical Implications/Predicting Committee Action ................................ 30
Distributive and Informational Predictions ..................................... 31
Partisan Predictions ............................................. _ ......................... 38
Controls ......................................................................................... 40
Data and Measures .................................................................................. 42
Dependent Variable ...................................................................... 43
Independent Variables .................................................................. 44
Results ..................................................................................................... 49
Discussion and Conclusion ...................................................................... 56

CHAPTER 3

Committee Power in the Contemporary Context: An Examination

of Committee Bypass in the House .................................................................... 68
Introduction .............................................................................................. 68
Income Taxes, the Child Tax Credit, and Partisan Politics in
the 108th House ........................................................................................ 71
Committee Prerogative and the Legislative Process ............................... 73
Committee Bypass and the Contemporary Congress .............................. 77

Outright Bypass ............................................................................. 78
Bypass by Referral/Drafting .......................................................... 8O
Bypass in a Multiple Referral ........................................................ 83
Nominal Bypass ............................................................................ 84
Skirting the Committee System Via Special Rules ....................... 85
Summing Up: Committee Bypass in Perspective .......................... 87

viii

Tracing Committee Bypass in the House ................................................. 89

The Issue of Committee and Party Power ............................................... 94
Conclusion ............................................................................................... 96

CHAPTER 4 -

Suspensions, Special Rules, and Selection Effects: A Uniﬁed Model

of Agenda Setting in the US. House ............................................................... 103
Introduction ........................................................................................... 103
Suspension of the Rules ....................................................................... 105
Restrictive Rules .................................................................................. 113
Sample Selection and the Uniﬁcation of Legislative Agenda Setting 116
Data and Method .................................................................................. 120
Results .................................................................................................. 122

Krehbiel’s lnforrnational Model and the Uniﬁed Model ............... 122
Marshall’s Partisan Model and the Uniﬁed Model ...................... 126

Discussion ............................................................................................. 129

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 137
The Groundwork ................................................................................... 137
The Findings ......................................................................................... 140
Extensions ............................................................................................ 144

REFERENCES ................................................................................................ 147

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1: Success of Bill Sponsors by Committee Status, 105th

Congress (1997-1998) ........................................................................................ 59
Table 2.2: Success of Bill Sponsors by Party, 1051th Congress

(1997-1998) ....................................................................................................... 60
Table 2.3: Party Afﬁliation of Sponsors on Bills Reported by Committee,

105th Congress (1997-1998) .............................................................................. 61
Table 2.4: Party Afﬁliation of Sponsors on Bills Reported by Committee,

105th Congress (1997-1998) .............................................................................. 62
Table 2.5: Probit Analysis of Bill Reporting, 105th Congress (1997-1998) ......... 63
Table 2.6: Party Afﬁliation of Sponsors on Bills Reported by Committee,

93rd Congress (1973-1974) ................................................................................ 64
Table 2.7: Summary Statistics for Data Used in Probit Estimation ..................... 65
Table 2.8: Lateness of Session Variable ............................................................ 66

Table 3.1: Methods of Committee Bypass, 97th - 105th CongreSses
(1981-1998) ........................................................................................................ 98

Table 3.2: Conﬂict on Bills Bypassing House Committees, 97tln -— 105th
Congresses (1981-1998) .................................................................................... 99

Table 3.3: Minority Party Rolls on Passage of Bypassed Bills Considered
Under a Special Rule, 97th — 105th Congresses (1981-1998) .......................... 100

Table 3.4: Committee Member Voting on Legislation Bypassing Committee... 101

Table 4.1: Predicting Procedural Choice in the House: An Informational
Rationale .......................................................................................................... 132

Table 4.2: Predicting Procedural Choice in the House: A Partisan
Rationale .......................................................................................................... 133

Table 4.3: Description of Variables in Krehbiel’s Model of Restrictive Rules... 134

Table 4.4: Description of Variables in Marshall’s Model of Restrictive Rules... 135

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1: Number of Bills Introduced and Reported‘by DW-NOMINATE
Score, 105th Congress ....................................................................................... 67

Figure 3.1: Method of Committee Bypass by Congress ................................... 102

xi

Chapter 1: Introduction

On August 5, 1993, House Democratic leaders were struggling to find the
votes necessary to secure passage of the momentous budget reconciliation bill
that was the centerpiece of President Bill Clinton’s young administration. As the
allotted time for the recorded vote expired, the party’s leadership successfully
pressured freshman Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-PA) into voting in
favor of the legislation despite her pledge to vote against any new tax increases,
thus securing the narrowest of victories by a 218-216 margin (Cloud 1993).1 Of
course, party pressure is rarely as obvious or publicly prominent as was the case
in this instance. However, party leaders frequently face some degree of
uncertainty with regard to expected outcomes on the ﬂoor of the House. Thus, it
is not uncommon for them to take advantage of available means in order to
secure passage of favored legislation. Other avenues for such behavior include
holding the allotted time for a vote open beyond the customary length, as
occurred in 1987 when Speaker Jim Wright (D-TX) postponed announcement of
the outcome of a vote on a deﬁcit-reduction package until he was able to round
up the necessary votes (Wehr1987), and having on hand a number of pocket or
“if-you-really-need-me" votes which members have offered should the leadership
ﬁnd themselves a few votes short (King and Zeckhauser 2003).

These examples highlight an interesting and important aspect of

congressional politics—the role of party leaders in inﬂuencing members’ voting

 

1 Margolies-Mezvinsky’s decision to tow the party line was not without cost, as she lost her bid for
reelection to Jon Fox, who made the budget vote a centerpiece of his electoral challenge in the
1994 midterm election.

behavior on the ﬂoor. However, instances in which roll call votes are so narrowly
divided are relatively rare in the House of Representatives, and party leaders do
not often ﬁnd it necessary to twist arms or call on the faithful in order to secure
the Ieadership’s favored result. That is not to say that the inﬂuence of
congressional party leaders should be considered inconsequential. In light of
numerous observations like the Margolies-Mezvinsky vote and events not unlike
it at various stages of the legislative process, students of Congress have focused
a signiﬁcant amount of attention on the role played by parties in the institution. In
fact, in recent years a number of researchers have staked out opposing claims
regarding the degree of inﬂuence enjoyed by party leaders in the US. House. A
recurring question has been whether the leadership is capable of compelling or
encouraging members to vote against their preferences in order to secure
broader partisan goals. Questions of this nature have frequently employed data
on members’ ﬂoor voting behavior and have recently been accompanied by an
examination of issues relating to the capacity of roll call-based measures to

speak to the relative power and/or inﬂuence of internal party structures.

The Party Debate

The primary challenger of the party school is Keith Krehbiel, who in
numerous works has argued that parties are little more than rough institutional
collectivities emerging from members’ commonalities in preferences.2 In

response, others have offered evidence of signiﬁcant party behavior and

 

2 See Krehbiel (1991, 1993, 1997, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2000).

inﬂuence that goes beyond members’ preferences.3 In essence, scholars are
attempting to disentangle the usually unobserved inﬂuence of members’
preferences and party pressure on the observed behavior of roll call voting.
While the debate regarding the utility of roll calls to measure partisan inﬂuence
has motivated increasingly thoughtful applications of vote-based measures, it
seems unlikely that the debate will be resolved in the very near future. However,
a related question that has received signiﬁcantly less attention deals with what is
perhaps a more important domain for party inﬂuence—the pre-ﬂoor agenda
setting stage.

While reasonable arguments can be offered to explain a variety of
theoretical perspectives bearing on the degree of party inﬂuence at the ﬂoor
stage, where most observers would expect parties to be inﬂuential some
proportion of the time, pre-ﬂoor maneuvering on the part of leaders is critical to
determining what will occur once members are faced with an issue on the ﬂoor.
For example, depending on how the agenda is structured, it may not be
necessary to enforce party discipline if the alternatives are arrayed in such a way
as to evoke outcomes consistent with the party’s goals by allowing individual
members to act on their own preferences (e.g., Riker 1986).4 Furthermore, on
votes that are starkly partisan, such as those to adopt special rules, the costs of

defecting are likely to be large enough to induce members with peripheral or

 

3 See, for instance, Ansolabehere, Snyder, and SteWart (2001 ); Lawrence, Maltzman, and Smith
(1999); Wilson (1999); and Snyder and Groseclose (2000).

This is especially likely to hold, if unconventional means are employed, as party and committee
leaders enjoy informational advantages over their counterparts that allow them a leg up on the
potential impact of procedural maneuvers. One might argue that the ﬂoor would be unlikely to
allow restrictive rules, for instance, in those cases where they keep a relevant alternative off the
agenda. Such an argument presumes knowledge on the part of the ﬂoor that such a relevant
alternative exists, and for many issues, this may not be the case.

even signiﬁcant concerns to tow the party line. However, even in the absence of
such considerations, it is majority party leaders who determine (with a few
caveats) what will be considered on the ﬂoor in the ﬁrst place. The leadership
possesses two signiﬁcant types of agenda control: positive (moving business
onto the agenda) and negative (keeping issues off the agenda). While Cox and
McCubbins (1999) have examined negative agenda control (which is roughly
consistent with the cartel theory of legislative parties and thereby constant across
time), pre-ﬂoor agenda setting is predominantly characterized by positive agenda
control.

Despite a recent ﬂourishing of research on parties in the US. Congress,
Krehbiel (1998) asserts that “[t]he single, most signiﬁcant problem in the modern
study of the role of parties in lawmaking is the absence of a well-articulated
(preferably formal) theory about the consequences of intralegislative party activity
on collective choices of legislatures” (165). He goes on to suggest that “when it
comes to knowing precisely the conditions under which party activity occurs and
knowing precisely the consequences of party activity on lawmaking, we remain
largely in the dark” (165-6). An analysis of leadership and partisan activity at
the pre-ﬂoor juncture, the stage at which we would be most likely to expect party
leadership inﬂuence, may yield a more complete picture of just how the majority
party in Congress utilizes the prerogatives it enjoys to advantage members in the
achievement of the party’s objectives.

Of course, the legislative environment has undergone some dramatic

changes during the post-war era, changes which have not left the parties

unaffected. Indeed, the impetus for certain of the alterations arose from within
the parties. Scholars have examined factors such as the increasingly important
role played by party leaders, subcommittees, the Rules Committee, and various
procedural techniques. However, there has been comparatively little systematic
investigation of the conditions under which legislative leaders employ
nontraditional means to bring legislation to the ﬂoor and shape its mode of
consideration. One example of such work is that of Krutz (2000a, 2001a, 2001b),
who examines omnibus legislation and considers the conditions under which this
vehicle is likely to be employed. However, omnibus legislation is only a portion of
that which traverses the bounds of the “textbook” Congress (Shepsle 1989). We
know somewhat less about other types of nontraditional legislative behavior,
which Sinclair (2000) terms “unorthodox lawmaking.” And perhaps more
importantly, there has been little examination of the role that party leaders play in
this area, which is largely under their purview. While Sinclair’s work is signiﬁcant
in that it identiﬁes the existence of such activity, there has been little work that
attempts to systematically analyze earlier stages of the legislative process where
the means and opportunity for partisan inﬂuence in a variety of different ways is
vast

The primary aim of this dissertation is to paint a richer picture of the
interplay between parties and procedural options in the early stages of the
legislative process in the US. House of Representatives. I examine three

questions surrounding parties and procedure that have received little attention,

and hope to draw out their implications for theories of parties in Congress and for

our understanding of the changing nature of the legislative process.

Placing This Work in the Larger Context

Because of the somewhat unconventional organization of this dissertation
as three related yet distinct essays, there is some literature that guides the entire
work while other works bear more directly on particular essays. In light of this, I
present here a brief review of the two primary strands of literature on work the
dissertation is grounded. The ﬁrst is that of parties in Congress, a large and
ever-expanding body of work. This is followed by a brief review of the research
on the changing nature of the legislative process in Congress.

As noted above, scholars have examined congressional behavior at the
ﬂoor stage rather extensively, and have even begun to look atsubsets of bills at
earlier stages of the process as well. However, to date there has been little
consideration of the larger context in which legislative deliberation occurs. Of
course, examining particular aspects of the institution to the exclusion of others
risks losing focus of a signiﬁcant amount of congressional action and, perhaps
more importantly, the mode of this action. For instance, it is important to realize
that the bills on which conﬂictual recorded votes occur are a minority of the
number that pass the House, despite the common conception of Congress as a
conﬂictual body (see, 9.9., Rohde 1995; Carson, Finocchiaro, and Rohde 2001).
Similarty, looking for evidence of party inﬂuence only on bills for which restrictive

rules were assigned or roll call votes were taken runs the risk of failing to account

for other dimensions of party inﬂuence. Here, I attempt to account for the wide-
ranging role parties play in agenda setting in Congress. As Rohde (1991, 1995)
and others have argued, we should not expect party and committee leaders to
seek partisan ends on all of what occurs in Congress. Rather, other interests
and goals are likely to weigh much heavier in certain domains. One of the
central goals of this work is to sort out these various motivations and to provide a
better understanding of the context in which a variety of procedures are
employed to achieve various partisan ends.

The literature on parties in Congress is quite broad and extends over a
lengthy period of time. In fact, there are noticeable eras in the study of the
congressional party system. While Woodrow Wilson (1885) may have been
among the ﬁrst political scientists to discuss the role of party leadership in
Congress (albeit in the context of the committee system), subsequent
scholarship has paid more attention to parties as a specific and individual unit of
analysis. Early studies fall into the behavioral tradition, and include such works
as Turner (1951 ), Truman (1959), Jones (1968, 1970), Peabody (1967), and
Ripley (1964, 1967, 1969).

Later, students of Congress began to consider the changing role of parties
in Congress, frequently basing their analyses around roll call voting in the House.
For a time, interest focused on the decline in party voting and an apparent
decline in partisanship in the House (see, e.g., Brady, Cooper, and Hurley 1979;
Cooper and Brady 1981; Collie and Brady 1985). However, subsequent work,

motivated in part by the increasing frequency of party activity in the House,

began to reconsider the prevailing explanations of party government in
Congress. Rohde (1991) was among the ﬁrst to document and describe the
causes contributing to the resurgence of partisanship in the postrefonn House of
Representatives. At about the same time, Kiewiet and McCubbins (1991) and
Cox and McCubbins (1993) advanced important studies of party government. In
recent years, interest and research on US. legislative parties has ﬂourished as
scholars have analyzed both contemporary and historical accounts of
partisanship.5

A related but distinct body of work focuses speciﬁcally on the activities and
inﬂuence of congressional leadership. Obviously, leaders are elected by their
parties, so the general topic of parties and the narrower subject of party
leadership are somewhat difﬁcult to disentangle. However, a distinct literature on
congressional leadership dates back at least to Robert Peabody’s (1976)
Leadership in Congress. Other work, such as that of Sinclair (1983, 1992, 1995)
and Cooper and Brady (1981 ), has built upon this tradition and extended the
discussion to more recent periods. A common characteristic of much of this work
is a strong emphasis on qualitative and interpretive understandings of the role of
congressional leaders. Such an approach is wholly consistent with this area of
legislative politics in large part because of the difﬁculty in ﬁnding appropriate data
(leaders frequently do not operate in the limelight) and the small N in leaders.

This work is also motivated by recent reviews of the literature on parties in

Congress. Evans and Oleszek (1999) suggest that the principal-agent model of

 

5 Prominent among this body of work are Aldrich and Rohde (1997-1998, 2000b), Binder (1997),
Cox (2001), Cox and Magar (1999), Dion (1997), Jenkins (1999, 2000), and Schickler (2000,
2001). See Binder (2001) for a party-based interpretation of Schickler (2000).

party leadership, which is prevalent among research in this area, should be
adapted to account for the context within which leaders make choices. For
instance, they note the importance of time as a constraint facing party leaders in
that we might expect different behavior in the late summer of a presidential
election year as opposed to the spring following a congressional election.
Furthermore, they note the presence of “semiroutine rhythms of the lawmaking
process” that could be usefully integrated into models of leadership activity (3).
Among the other points raised by Evans and Oleszek (1999) are the potentially
disparate preference distributions a leader may face at various points in the
legislative process—for example, between the committee of jurisdiction and the
ﬂoor. Such divisions, when they occur, are likely to impact the nature and extent
of leadership involvement. Similarly, in his review of recent positive theoretical
research on congressional parties, Smith (2000) suggests theutility of analyses
focusing on the emergence and activity of party leaders. Research in this vein,
he argues, would “strengthen the empirical basis for claims about the functions of
parties as solutions to problems of cooperation and collective action among
legislators” (212).

The goal here is to examine areas of the congressional process in which
party and committee leadership activity and inﬂuence are quantiﬁable and to
consider a number of hypotheses related to their activity in this context. Thus, it
is necessary to take into account the avenues and arenas in which the behavior
of party leaders is likely to be evident. Of course, the activities and operations of

congressional party leaders are varied and occur at any number of places. For

example, the majority and minority party leadership play a signiﬁcant role in
assigning members’ committee seats, both historically (see, e.g., Polsby,
Gallaher, and Rundquist 1969; Lawrence, Maltzman, and Wahlbeck 1998; and
Krehbiel and Wiseman 2001) and in the contemporary Congress (see, e.g.,
Rohde and Shepsle 1973; Shepsle 1978; Smith and Ray 1983; Deering and
Smith 1997; Cox and McCubbins 1993). Additionally, the majority party
leadership, via its contingent on the Rules Committee, dominates scheduling and
agenda setting on the ﬂoor of the House (see, e.g., Oppenheimer 1977, Rohde
1991, Cox and McCubbins 1993, Sinclair 1994, Dion and Huber 1996, Maltzman
1998). Recent research has focused on the role of communication and the
strategies employed by party leaders to get their “message” to the electorate
(see, e.g., Lipinski 1999, Evans and Oleszek 2000, Evans 2001). However, as
alluded to earlier, an additional arena for inﬂuence (and the one to be explored
here) deals with the role of party leaders in shaping the legislative process prior
to a bill reaching the ﬂoor.

The analysis is guided in large part by conditional party government theory
(Rohde 1991; Aldrich 1995; Aldrich and Rohde 1997-1998, 2000a, 2001), which
views party leaders as agents who are interested in pursuing partisan goals
under certain conditions and in certain circumstances. 6 This stands in contrast
to a view of party leaders as individuals with invariable power (e.g., party cartel
theory) or as mere windrow dressing (e.g., majoritarian theory), both of which

suggest a constant level of party effects (or non-effects) across all of what occurs

 

6 A related though somewhat different conception of party leadership is offered by Cooper and
Brady (1981). Their basic thesis is extended in Brady, Brody, and Epstein (1989) and Brady and
Epstein (1997).

10

in Congress. In comparison, the expectation here is that certain bills will evoke

partisan interests and others will not.

Outline of the Dissertation

Although the legislative process is rather ﬂuid and does not ﬁt into a linear
schema as well as it did at one time (see, e.g., Shepsle 1989), there are a
number of points at which the process is subject to the intervention of party
leaders. This dissertation focus on three important junctures or stages of the
pre-ﬂoor legislative process.

First, in Chapter 2 I examine how committees go about deciding which
bills to report to the ﬂoor. This is an important and early agenda setting move in
the legislative process, and offers the potential to tell us much about the role of
partisan and other inﬂuences within House committees.

I Second, I consider the increasingly common tactic of bypassing the
committee system. Due to a handful of well-publicized cases in the 104th
Congress, this behavior is often associated with partisan legislating of the Newt
Gingrich model. Chapter 3 attempts to offer a more thorough treatment of the
subject, characterizing the variety of means and motivations for its use and
discussing the implications for theories of committee and party power.

The third essay, Chapter 4, addresses a theoretical and methodological
question surrounding the use of special rules in the House. This topic has

received a signiﬁcant amount of attention in the context of the competing theories

11

of legislative organization. I suggest that existing models may suffer from
selection bias, and incorporate a fuller model of legislative agenda setting.
Finally, Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation. A In it, I brieﬂy revisit the
foundations for the project—touching on the prior literature and the way in which I
attempt to ﬁll some gaps in existing research. I then turn to some of the main
implications and review the signiﬁcant ﬁndings. The chapter concludes with

some of the questions raised here that will be of use for further study.

12

Chapter 2

Committee Agenda-Setting in the us. House of Representatives:
The Asymmetric Distribution of Policy

“. . .the practical effect of [the] Committee organization of the House is to consign to each
of the Standing Committees the entire direction of legislation upon those subjects which
properly come to its consideration. As to those subjects it is entitled to the initiative, and
all legislative action with regard to them is under its overruling guidance. It gives shape
and course to the determinations of the House. ” —Wilson ([1885] 1913: 70)

Introduction

Congressional committees are generally the clearinghouses for thousands
of bills in any particular session of Congress. On average, more than 5,000 bills
were introduced in each two-year period during which the US. House of
Representatives met in the 19903, with less than 15 percent of these measures
moving through the legislative process to ﬁnal passage (Ornstein, Mann, and
Malbin 2000: Table 6-1). Of course, the institution has neither the time to nor the
broad interest in considering all of the measures that are introduced, and many if
not most bill sponsors realize that their product has little chance of further
consideration once it is assigned a number and referred to a committee. For
many House members, they have obtained their goal by simply introducing the
bill and preserving their subsequent opportunity to claim credit for some degree
of legislative initiative on a particular issue. Thus, while we know and more or
less understand what becomes (or perhaps more appropriately, does not
become) of the vast majority of bills introduced in Congress, a more interesting

question is what goes into committee decisions to act on and in some cases

13

report (that is, recommend) particular bills to the larger body in which they are
members, the House chamber. This issue is important because most studies of
congressional organization assume committee agendas to be relatively
exogenous to subsequent stages of decisionmaking, such as the Rules
Committee’s determination of the type of special rule that is to govern ﬂoor
consideration of a bill. That is, while various theories consider questions such as
whether individual bills, based on a set of characteristics, will receive a restrictive
or open rule, they most often do not directly address which bills among the many
possibilities will arrive at the rule-granting stage of the process. At times this
process is loosely modeled or brieﬂy touched upon, but it is rarely if ever the
focus of speciﬁc and detailed analysis.

Of course, the committee system has undergone signiﬁcant change in the
course of congressional history. The quote at the opening of this chapter draws
attention to committee behavior at one extreme: that of complete committee
autonomy. The bypassing of committees is relatively rare, particularly when it
comes to signiﬁcant legislation (see Chapter 3), and committee dominance of the
House, though characteristic of certain periods of congressional development,
has not been the general norm. However, it is important to ascertain the relative
inﬂuence of various power centers in the House over its system of standing
committees. This chapter seeks to address this and other questions relating to
committee decisionmaking, taking particular note of the context (or contexts)

within which committees operate. As students of politics and Congress have

14

noted, institutional constraints and rules of procedure hold signiﬁcant importance
in determining outcomes (Riker 1982).1

The chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section, I discuss the
development of the literature on congressional committees, focusing particularly
on theories of legislative organization. I then draw out some aspects of this
literature that merit further attention, including the notion of committee agenda
setting. In the second section, I brieﬂy review the literature on committee-
decision making, which is in varying degrees distinct from the literature on
committee organization. ltum next to the issue of multiple referral and describe
how this aspect of the legislative process relates to committee decision making
and the agenda-setting process. In the subsequent sections, I link the preceding
literatures and develop a theory to explain the choice of bills upon which a
committee will take action, and then employ the theory to derive hypotheses that
are tested empirically using data drawn from the 105th Congress. In the
succeeding section I link my ﬁndings to those of others regarding jurisdictional
fragmentation and consider recent developments in the era of Republican control
of the House. I conclude with a discussion of the prominent ﬁndings and some

avenues for future research.

 

' Not surprisingly, this fact weighs prominently on the mind of political practitioners as well.
Representative John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat and former chairman of the House Commerce
Committee, is frequently quoted in saying that “If you let me write procedure, and I let you write
substance, l’ll screw you every time" (Phil Duncan, ed., Politics in America 1996: 689).

15

Perspectives of Committees and Theories of Legislative Organization

Since the dawning of modern political science, and in particular its
theoretical and empirical application to the structure and functioning of American
politics, students of Congress have contemplated the role of congressional
committees. Wilson ([1885] 1913) is often quoted and even more often cited on
the subject. However, his work was one among many that focused on the
subject of congressional committees in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. For
instance, as Maltzman (1998: 14) documents, a number of scholars at the time
believed that congressional committees were at the behest of the larger body
from which they were drawn.2 These works as a group considered committees,
and the Congress more generally, from the perspective of what has come to be
known as “old institutionalism.” This perspective is characterized by largely
descriptive understandings of the functioning of political institutions.

However, as legislative scholars, along with colleagues in other sub-ﬁelds
of the discipline, made the shift from the “old” institutional approach to that of
behavioralism, the focus and approach to studying committees changed.
Analyses began to consider the implications of various institutional apparatuses,
behavioral motivations, and incentive structures on the modes of operation in
Congress and the decision making taking place within committees. For instance,
Polsby‘s (1968) seminal article offers insights into the central role of seniority in
committees, and later work (e.g., Polsby, Gallaher, and Rundquist 1969) extends
the study of seniority to earlier periods of congressional history. Others, such as

Jones (1961, 1962), consider the role of representation in committees and

16

subcommittees. A common theme linking many of these studies and others is
the prominent place given to behavioral norms that seemed to be characteristic
of the textbook era of Congress (see, for instance, Abram and Cooper, 1968;
Goodwin, 1970; and Gertzog, 1976). Fenno’s (1966) inﬂuential study of the
appropriations committees takes a similar, somewhat sociological approach.
And of course Cooper’s (1970) discussion of the development of the committee
system stands as a prominent, characteristic approach to other studies of the
penod.

Beginning in the 19703, the study of congressional committees began to
. move in a decidedly positive (that is, formal or deductive) direction. A large body
of work dealing with issues of instability in voting among individuals under a set
of basic assumptions regarding rationality and incentives began to be applied
both generally and later more speciﬁcally to the legislative setting of the US.
Congress.3 Bridging the gap between behavioralism and the new institutionalism
of contemporary legislative scholarship are such foundational works as Fenno
(1973) and Mayhew (1974), both of whom prominently characterize members of
Congress as rational, goal-oriented actors seeking to achieve particular ends.
Other prominent examples in the sub-ﬁeld of congressional politics during the
19703 that deal with committees from a rational choice perspective are
Ferejohn’s (1974) work on pork barrel politics, the examinations of committee

assignments by Rohde and Shepsle (1973) and Shepsle (1978). Some writings,

 

2 See, for instance, McConnachie (1898), Alexander (1916), and Luce (1922).
3 Prominent in this body of literature, which was motivated at least in part by the theoretical work
of Arrow (1951), Black (1958), and others, are Plott (1967), McKelvey (1976), and Riker (1980).

17

even of a more normative nature, became couched in the positivist tradition (see,
for instance, Fiorina, 1977).

These and other works set the foundation for what was to become a
burgeoning literature applying the positive, or “new” institutionalist, approach to
congressional committees and legislatures more generally.4 The approach lent
itself to the consideration of numerous facets of legislative behavior, and scholars
considered accordingly everything from congressional elections to institutional
development to committee organization and institutional design.5 A signiﬁcant
topic of interest at about the same time was the issue of institutional reform, and
the effects the reforms of the 19703 would have on the policy process. Though
much of this research was not grounded in the rational choice paradigm,
subsequent work came to view the reforms through such an analytic lens (see,
e.g., Rohde 1991, Adler 2002).6

Issues surrounding the organization of Congress, and its committee
system in particular, have been a topic of enduring interest among congressional
scholars. Motivated by early work suggesting that committee members might be

considered “high demanders” of certain policy outputs, thus leading to potential

 

See Shepsle (1993) for a review of the development of the new institutional economics literature
as it grew out of these and other works.
‘ In contrast to the “old” institutionalism, which tends more toward “description and prescription
than to articulation of causes and consequences” (Krehbiel 1991: 1), the new institutionalism
seeks to ground our understanding of institutions in the endogeneous behavior of goal-oriented
political elites (Rohde and Shepsle 1978; Shepsle 1986; Soltan, Hauﬂer and Uslaner 1998).

Note that I use the terms institutional design and legislative organization, which is an example of
the former, interchangeably.
6 While the literature on congressional reforms is vast, a sampling of the relevant works include
Davidson (1990) and Galloway (1951) on the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946; Davidson
and Oleszek (1977), Ornstein (1975), Rieselbach (1978, 1994), Schickler, McGhee, and Sides
(2001), and Welch and Peters (1977) on the reforms of the 19703; and Aldrich and Rohde (1997-
98, 2000b), Davidson (1995), and Evans and Oleszek (1997a, 1997b) on the reforms of the mid-
19903.

18

policy biases within committees (see, e.g., Niskanen 1971 ), subsequent research
continued to grapple with the evidence for this claim and its theoretical
signiﬁcance for legislatures. Shepsle (1978), Davidson (1981), and Shepsle and
Weingast (1984a) all present evidence supporting the notion that members seek
assignment to committees which offer electoral beneﬁts to them, and thereby
contribute to the committee system in general being composed of “preference
outliers.” The question then became one of discerning the degree to which such
members were able to exert signiﬁcant control over legislative outcomes, giving
rise to the literature on committee power (e.g., Shepsle and Weingast 1987,

Denzau and MacKay 1983) and legislative organization.

Preferences. the Outlier Debate. and Committee Organization

The widespread presence of committee outliers is not universally
accepted, however, and a considerable amount of attention has been given to
testing this claim. In fact, this lies at the heart of the competing theories of
legislative organization. Krehbiel (1990, 1991) was among the ﬁrst to challenge
the notion that committees are in fact composed of preference outliers. His work
gave rise to an enduring debate on the organizational motivation for
congressional committees. At the same time, signiﬁcant attention was give to the
question of how best to conceptualize and measure the preferences of members

of Congress.7

 

7 The debate regarding preferences, while relevant to the analysis here, Is somewhat tangential.
Some of the foremost studies in this vein of the literature include Hall and Grofman (1990),
Snyder (1992), Krehbiel (1994), Groseclose (1994), Londregan and Snyder (1994), and
Maltzman (1997).

19

There are three primary theoretical perspectives regarding committee
organization in Congress, each relating to various goals and incentives upon
which committee members and members of the chamber at large are said to take
action and arrive at mutually beneﬁcial solutions.8 A brief outline of the three
theories is presented here, as a full treatment of each would take more space
than is warranted by the subject of this chapter.

Proponents of a distributive theory of legislative politics hold that members
seek after seats on committees that deal with legislative issues of particular
interest to their constituents. Such institutional positions offer members the
opportunity to garner distributive beneﬁts that will be of use to them in credit-
claiming and reelection. The expectation of distributive theory is that this type of
behavior occurs across committees in Congress, with each panel focusing on
legislation of particular interest to its membership and deferring to others on less
salient measures. As such, an institutional logroll occurs, essentially promoting a
gains-from-exchange mode of lawmaking (Weingast, Shepsle, and Johnson
1981; Weingast and Marshall 1988). There are a number of implications or
corollaries to distributive theory. Among them are the expectation that
committees will be composed of non-median members (outliers) and that
restrictive rules will be employed on distributive legislation in order to prevent the

unfolding of logrolls at the ﬂoor stage.9

 

8 Some have suggested a place for a fourth view, based on the idea that committees emerge and
survive principally to balance the interests of one chamber against the other (Hammond and
Miller, 1987; Tsebelis and Money, 1997; Dierrneier and Myerson, 1999). See Groseclose and
King (2001) for a review of this “bicameral rivalry" theory, along with an insightful evaluation of the
competing theories.

9 Recent work in the distributive vein includes Adler (2000, 2002) and Adler and Lapinski (1997).
Students of Congress have also noted, however, the electoral benefit some members may

20

In many ways a direct critique of distributive theory, Gilligan and Krehbiel
(1987, 1988, 1989, 1990) and Krehbiel (1989, 1990, 1991, 1997) have put
fonrvard the view of committees as “exclusively instruments of the legislature that
perform for the legislature" (Krehbiel 1991: 80). Rather than being composed of
preference outlying high demanders whose primary goal is to secure distributive
gains, committees serve as agents of the larger body from which they are drawn.
That is, they act as specialized agents in procuring detailed policy information
that is of use to the chamber in making more informed decisions. Much of the
informational literature focuses on the ways in which more efﬁcient information
transmission occurs between the committee and the ﬂoor. Through a somewhat
intricate signaling process, non-committee members determine the reliability of
the information with which they are presented. Some of the propositions drawn
from informational theory are that the committee and ﬂoor medians should not
diverge dramatically from one other and that the bills proceeding to the ﬂoor in an
information-rich context should be more likely to receive protection from
amendment via restrictive rules.

The third theoretical perspective posits that political parties exert
signiﬁcant inﬂuence over the organization of Congress and the policy outputs it
produces. (Rohde, 1991; Kiewiet and McCubbins; Cox and McCubbins, 1993;

Aldrich, 1995; Aldrich and Rohde, 1997-98, 2000a, 20001).1o Party theory holds

 

achieve by maintaining a record of ﬁscal conservatism or by building a reputation as a “pork
buster" (Sellers 1997, Bovitz 2002).

'° It is important to note that there are different strands of party theory. Some purport that parties
operate as cartels, essentially bypassing the minority party altogether (e.g., the work of Cox and
McCubbins), while others argue that inﬂuential parties emerge under certain conditions,
particularly when the majority party is cohesive and diverges from the minority. The latter is
known as conditional party government, whose primary proponents are Aldrich and Rohde.

21

that the majority party organizes the House in such a way as to advantage itself
and its members vis-a-vis the minority party. For instance, the prestige
committees are stacked with a higher ratio of majority party members so that the
issues that are of particular importance to the majority will be more favorably
handled in committee. Similarly, the majority party uses the Rules Committee to
structure debate and the amendment process so as to seek favorable outcomes
on the ﬂoor. Rather than the median member of the chamber as the institution’s
pivotal member, most party theorists would argue that the majority’s median
member or some conglomeration of its leadership (or both) are the critical
actors.11

As is evident from the preceding review of the contending theories of
legislative organization, there are a variety of motivations that congressional
institutions, and the committee system in particular, have been hypothesized to
meet. Such motivations (e.g., informational efﬁciency/expertise, the distribution
of gains from trade, and partisan policy outputs) underlie the various theories and
their expectations regarding the organization of the committee system, the rules
process, and post-ﬂoor procedures (such as conference committees). However,
an aspect of the legislative process that has largely escaped the attention of
scholars is the activities that occur within House committees. While the theories

have something to say about how institutional apparatuses can be shaped to

 

There is an ongoing dialogue between the two in which many of the distinctions are being ﬂeshed
out (see, for instance, Cox and McCubbins 2002, Finocchiaro and Rohde 2002).

'1 Of course, the party school is not without its critics. See, for instance, Krehbiel (1993, 1999a,
1999b, 2000), Schickler (2000), and Schickler and Rich (1997). These and other works are part
of a burgeoning literature contesting the inﬂuence of parties in a variety of congressional
contexts—many beyond the area of committee politics. Responses to the preceding works have
been made by a host of scholars.

22

realize certain goals, they have less to say about just what lies beneath those
goals (of course this varies both within and across the three dominant
perspectives).

Consider, for instance, the informational theory, which is most often linked
to the institutional good provided by policy expertise and specialization, a good
that in itself may be related little if at all to individual policy choices within
committees. Krehbiel (1991) holds that:

“Informational theories, like distributive theories, are individualistic in

their axiomatic foundations, but informational theories uniquely

embrace the notion of policy expertise as a potential collective
good. If obtained and shared, individuals’ policy expertise redounds

to the whole, that is, to all legislators. As in the distributive

perspective, informational theories view legislatures as arenas of

individual distributive conﬂict. But unlike the distributive

perspective, informational theories also view legislatures as
organizations that may reap collective benefits from specialization”

(5)-
Interestingly, then, even informational theory seems to suggest that the
predominant motivation of individual members is the realization of distributive
interests. While in theory this distributive pie could be policy that need not be
zero-sum in its division, such conﬂict (deﬁned as distributive in nature) is more
often conceived of as a divide-the-dollar scenario in which individuals compete
over limited resources. Thus, the incentive exists to engage in logrolls to protect
the mutually agreed-upon division. The critical distinction between a pure
distributive scenario, which underlies that type of theory, and that of an
informational rationale, is that the chamber (by way of its median member and

majoritarian nature) imposes some degree of constraint upon members’

23

distributive tendencies in the interest of more moderate (or middling) policy
outputs and higher levels of informational efﬁciency.

The theories are more closely linked to how and when a committee
chooses a ﬁnal product. It seems to be assumed that the committee can choose
from among a variety of products, and the choice tends to be over whether or not
to report, what type of signal to send, and how such choices vary under different
circumstances (e.g., the heterogeneity of the committee, the type of rule in force,
etc.). What seems to be exogenous to the models is the particular issues which
are to be addressed, the potential for competition between committees (most
models assume a single referral context), and the choice of which legislative
vehicle (or bill) is to be employed. Of course, committee rules govern the extent
to which individual measures may be modiﬁed and even broadened, but for
simplicity I assume that the committee chair maintains the right to govern such
choices, and that the interesting question is which among many bills and issues

he or she chooses to place on the agenda.

A Theory of Committee Agenda Setting

A multiplicity of goals and incentives operate within Congress, some at the
individual member level, others at the institutional level, and some at both.
Theories of legislative politics, and those relating to institutional design in
particular, often (and appropriately) focus on just one level for analysis. At their
core, however, each theory must wrestle with and make assumptions about the

larger collectivity (if a micro-level theory) or the individual members composing

24

the body (if a macro-level theory). It is from this point that I begin, and discuss
the importance of linking individual-member goals to the theories of organization.
From the various perspectives, what should we expect to observe in terms of
committee agenda-setting? What do individuals, most particularly individual
committee members, want to obtain from the committee system? Thus I begin at
the level of individuals, and proceed with the hope of uncovering how the various
theories suggest policy goods should be distributed by House committees.

Few would argue with the notion that the positive handling of a member’s
legislation is a beneﬁt to him or her. This is an electoral and policy good with
which an individual can seek to better him or herself. That is, it may be a tool for
electoral credit-claiming (and thus part of the reelection goal), it may be a means
of institutional advancement, or it may simply be a component of the basic goal
of enacting good public policy.12 While each of these goals has a solid
foundation in the literature on legislative activity (see Fenno 1973, Mayhew 1974,
Hall 1996, and Wawro 2000), it is less important here to distinguish which among
them (or the relative balance between them that) is most characteristic of
Congress than it is to note the inherent value in having one’s legislation advance
through the legislative process.

In Mayhew's (1974) view, credit-claiming is most effective when a member
of Congress is able to reasonably assert that she was personally responsible for

some “good” done by government or a governmental unit either at her behest or

 

'2 A frequently heard refrain from the lips of John Dingell (a House Democrat from Michigan, and
the longest-serving member in the 107 " Congress) in his primary contest against fellow
incumbent Lynn Rivers was the fact that not one piece of legislation bearing his opponent’s name
as its sponsor had been passed into law. For that matter, not even one had been reported out of

25

due at least in part to her initiative (53). Mayhew goes on to suggest that a locus
for such activity, though perhaps largely obscure from the eyes of voters, is the
congressional committee, which sits in prime view of important political actors
both within and without the institution (60-61, 92). The logic here is similar to that
of Arnold (1990), who posits the notion of “attentive publics” who by virtue of their
interest and activity are able to translate legislative activity into electoral effects.13
It is one thing to argue that positive action on one’s legislation is a “good”
that members’ seek in attaining diverse goals in Congress. It is quite another
thing to determine how such “goods” are distributed among many actors seeking
to obtain them—certainly more actors than opportunities. That is, given the
many constraints operating on Congress, not the least of which is time, nowhere
close to all measures can even be considered, let alone reported by committees.
Thus, there must be some mechanism (or mechanisms), by which committees
navigate the array of potential alternatives before them. As discussed at length
in a preceding section of this chapter, students of Congress have noted that
committees are organized to serve the interests of some center or centers of
power. While just whom it is that committees serve remains an issue of dispute,
the three primary theories of legislative organization may offer insight into this
arena of legislative politics. However, these perspectives have not been directly

applied to this stage of the legislative process. Scholars have examined

 

committee (Welna 2002). While this fact is not likely to have turned the tide in the election, it
underscores the relevance of such considerations to members’ electoral calculus.

‘3 A related strand of research points out the relationship between the process by which
legislators carry out the business of Congress and the public's approval of the institution (see, for
instance, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1995). Others have offered more direct evidence that
congressional behavior impacts the public image of the institution (Durr, Gilmour, and Wolbrecht

26

committee composition, rule choice, voting behavior, and other dynamics of the
policy-making process to assess the explanatory power of the competing
theories, but to date there has been little consideration given to how the theories
may help us understand the decision making that occurs within committees.
More speciﬁcally, the factors affecting committee choices may be linked to the
various theories, and an additional beneﬁt of such an analysis may be that this
stage of the process offers insights into the relative power of the three
perspectives. Before beginning, however, it is necessary to consider the
implications of each in developing a theory of committee decision making.

Informational incentives may be a component of committee action, but
they are not a motivation for committee action. The literature does not deal
much, if at all, with how electoral goods should be distributed among members.
While it does suggest that members of the relevant committees should beneﬁt
from the efﬁcient transmission of information to the ﬂoor via the distribution of
goods contained in a measure that is preserved on the ﬂoor by virtue of
restrictive rules, at ﬁrst pass it seems to have little to say about other possible
asymmetries in the committee decision making process. Thus, perhaps the
theory is agnostic on which measures should be selected for consideration. If
this were the case, then one might expect to ﬁnd a relatively even or proportional
distribution of sponsors according to party, seniority, specialization, etc.

On the other hand, it is quite possible that at even this early stage of

legislative agenda setting, goods are distributed according to an informational

 

1997) and that party fortunes follow shifts in the preferences and opinions of the public (De Boot
and Stimson 1995).

27

rationale. Such an approach would likely integrate factors relating to members’
informational expertise, a good that both the committee and more importantly the
chamber is interested in encouraging. Thus, this perspective might hold that
members with more expertise in an issue area, those who are more accurate
reﬂections of committee and chamber preferences, and those whose measures
seem to be widely supported should achieve greater rates of success. Of
course, the latter may be more of a cue for legislative potential, and as such may
be better construed as a control variable than one that is directly related to the
informational theory. Although the process by which issues are generated in the
informational rationale is somewhat unclear, it seems plausible to assume that
the process is either random or accrues on the basis of general issue importance
nationally. That is, if there is a logic to the way in which committees select issues
for action, it is likely to be in response to the degree to which particular issues
may be of beneﬁt to committee members (both in credit-claiming, chance of
passage, electoral visibility, and perhaps response to the chamber).

Distributive theory, on the other hand, does provide some insight into
issue selection. The assumptions underlying much of the theoretical work on
gains-from-exchange suggest that members seek to build either minimum
winning coalitions or universalistic coalitions. The baseline, however, is that
measures are chosen according to the degree to which they contribute to
members distributive interests. Those that touch favorably upon more issues of
interest to more members of the House are thereby more likely to face a friendly

audience than those that do not. One need look no further than the "Christmas

28

tree” bills that consistently make their way from the Transportation and
Infrastructure Committee to the House ﬂoor to see that pork attracts votes (and
committee members). This dynamic is also evident in the roster of this particular
committee, whose membership tends to swell during Congresses in which
transportation reauthorization legislation is due for consideration. ‘4

Finally, partisan theory holds that committees are organized so as to
extract partisan gain from the committee system and the chamber as a whole.
Thus, it seems plausible to assume that committee decisions, or at least
decisions made by the majority party contingent and chair, are likely to be
conditioned upon partisan considerations. Committees are likely to take up bills
related to the party’s interests and will likely seek to beneﬁt majority party
members and those who fall closer to the party’s positions ideologically.

In line with previous work, I hold to the view that there are multiple
domains (or motivations) at work in Congress and that these are often not in
competition with one another, and may at times even be encouraged.
Additionally, my expectation is that committee politics are multidimensional,
although parties and other features of Congress may impose constraints on the
dimensionality of observed behavior in the institution (Rohde 1994, 1995; Aldrich
and Rohde 1997; Maltzman 1997; Carson, Finocchiaro, and Rohde 2002; Talbert
and Potoski 2000, 2002). Consider, for instance, the majority party’s interest in

obtaining distributive goods, a desire which may not preclude cooperation with

 

1‘ I thank Dave Rohde for pointing me to the interesting case of the Transportation Committee in
the 105m Congress, whose membership rolls, while increasing and decreasing over time, grew to
74 members in 1997—more than any other standing committee in Congress—most likely due to
the opportunity to procure pork in the reauthorization legislation (Congressional Quarterly 1997).

29

the minority party. It has been shown elsewhere that multiple domains may be at
work even within individual bills—with partisan interests winning the day in some
instances, and distributive interests in others (Hurwitz, Moiles, and Rohde 2002).
Therefore, it seems reasonable to expect that such expectations may all be
important at various junctures. Even more importantly, it may be reasonable to
expect that the majority party, for instance, may reward specialization among

members of the majority party.

Empirical Implications/Predicting Committee Action

Based on the preceding discussion and other factors for which it may be
desirable to control, I offer a number of hypotheses regarding the conditions
under which committees (and their chairs) are likely to act on particular pieces of
legislation. I proceed from the assumption that committee decision makers view
bills and positive action on them as opportunities for policy initiative that may be
viewed as responses to important issues (to themselves, to others in the
legislature, and those outside the legislature), as goods that may be allocated
among members for credit-claiming purposes, and means to achieve speciﬁc
goals (including personal goals, partisan goals, and distributive goals). Of
course, their decision making is constrained by a host of factors, including the
likelihood of a measure’s subsequent success in the House (and beyond), the
lack of an inﬁnite amount of time to consider all of what one might like, and the
need to establish personal and committee credibility (more of an informational

rationale for signaling purposes).

30

Distributive and lnfonnational Predictions

Distributive theory suggests that members have an interest in collecting
goods that are of use to them, and as such they “self-select” onto committees
that trafﬁc in such goods. While the degree to which committees are
representative of the chamber and/or are composed of “preference outliers” has
been the subject of signiﬁcant dispute, it would seem reasonable to suggest that
members would like to realize distributive gains and the more gains that accrue,

the better off they will be. As such, distributive theory would suggest that:

Hypothesis 1: Bills with greater degree levels of distributive content are more
likely to attract the attention of committees than those with less of a distributive

component.

In contrast to distributive theory, informational theory holds that members’
predominant interest lies in receiving and transmitting useful signals regarding
public policy via the committee system. In this view, the legislature is designed
so as to encourage individual committee members to transmit such information to
the ﬂoor. The primary beneﬁciary of this process, in the view of informational
theorists, is the Chamber’s median member. Thus, the theory is said to be one of
majoritarianism.

There are a number of predictions regarding the legislative process that

ﬂow from this framework, as described at length by Krehbiel (1991 )—particularly

31

in his analysis of restrictive rules. Many of the expectations translate fairly well
into the context of committee decisionmaking. First, he argues that conﬁrmatory
signaling on the part of divergent members increases the efﬁciency of information
transmission, and thereby the attractiveness of the bill. Others, too, have argued
that cosponsorship is a means of signaling on the part members of Congress
seeking informational cues or shortcuts (see, e.g., Kingdon 1989, Young and
Wilson 1993, Kessler and Krehbiel 1996). Thus, one measure of such signaling
on a particular piece of legislation is the degree to which the minority party
supports it, as captured by the number of minority party cosponsors. This logic

provides the next hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2a: The greater the number of minority party cosponsors on a bill, the

more likely it is to be reported by the committee(s) of referral.

At the same time, it may be true that in the partisan context in which
committees are controlled by the majority party, minority party support is
indicative of the underlying division between the two parties. In this scenario, the
greater the degree of conﬁrmatory signaling (particularly in the presence of little
majority party support), one might expect to see a decreased likelihood of
legislative success. If this perspective were to hold true, then the expectation
would be opposite of that which Krehbiel proposes. In this case, the alternative
hypothesis holds the following, with the null that minority cosponsorship has no

effect:

32

Hypothesis 2b: The greater the number of minority party cosponsors on a bill, the

less likely it is to be reported by the committee(3) of referral.

Another component of informational theory is the premise that the
legislature places a premium on policy expertise. Krehbiel (1991) argues that
committees with higher levels of expertise should be more protected on the ﬂoor
than those with less specialized knowledge of an issue area. A corollary of this
conception of the legislative process that may be applied to the committee
process is that individual members with higher levels of issue-specific expertise
should be more likely to achieve positive action on bills they sponsor than those
with lower levels of specialization. As such, there is a degree of deference to
senior members who have obtained the beneﬁts of years of experience in dealing

with and legislating on a particular issue.

Hypothesis 3: The greater the expertise of the bill sponsor, the more likely the bill

is to receive favorable action in committee.

Any study of legislative action in the contemporary House must grapple
with the issue of multiple referral. The practice of referring legislation to multiple
committees in the House is rooted in the institutional reforms of the early and
mid-19703. Davidson, Oleszek, and Kephart (1988) suggest that the change

“was intended to bring the wisdom and perspective of several different

33

committees to bear upon complex public issues, to make the committee system
more ﬂexible in considering policies that cut across jurisdictional boundaries, and
to encourage intercommlttee cooperation and contain jurisdictional conﬂicts” (5).
In contrast to other reforms of the period, the move to multiple referral was
thought to be relatively inconsequential in that its proponents simply sought to
capture the expertise of various committees in what had become a highly
fractionalized and diverge jurisdictional framework.15 While multiple referral was
not commonly employed at the outset, its use rose somewhat in subsequent
years. In recent Congresses, about 20 percent of all bills and resolutions are
referred to more than one committee.16 Of course, many of the most important
and complex issues traverse the multiple referral process and sometimes appear
in the form of omnibus bills (Krutz 2000a, 2001a, 2001b; Sinclair 2000a).

Of particular importance here, however, is the fact that the existence and
employment of this procedure has implications for decisions on the part of
congressional committees, the chamber as a whole, and the majority

leadership.17 In much the same way that there are opposing expectations

 

‘5 Lest one think that jurisdictional issues are so simple, signiﬁcant research since the 19703 has
documented the degree to which members ferociously seek to protect and acquire turf and the
resultant rise in fragmentation of the committee system (Jones, Baumgartner, and Talbert, 1993;
King, 1997; Baumgartner, Jones, and MacLeod, 2000; Adler and Still, 2000; Adler, 2002).

‘6 For data on the frequency of multiple referrals, see Davidson, Oleszek, and Kephart (1988)—
94th to 100th Congresses; Cooper and Young (1993)—101st and 102"d Congresses; and
Finocchiaro (2000)—103"d to 105th Congresses. It is also worth noting that a component of the
Republicans’ reform agenda upon assuming majority status in the House in 1995 was modifying
multiple referral procedures (see Evans and Oleszek 1999b). Evans and Oleszek (1997b)
provide an enlightening discussion of the Republicans’ interest in wholesale changes to the
committee system, and the difficulties the party encountered in achieving significant
modiﬁcations.

‘7 The literature that considers the strategic nature of committee decision making in the context of
multiple referral has modeled a variety of contexts, with differences based on the actors included
and the type of multiple referral. For instance, in his study of the differences in committee power
under single and multiple referral, Young (1996) examines joint and sequential referral, while

34

regarding cosponsorship depending on the theoretical perspective one were to
adopt, there is some degree of divergence in views of the potential effect of
multiple referral on the likelihood of a bill being reported by a committee.
Krehbiel (1991), in his analysis of the use of restrictive rules, notes the potential
attractiveness to the ﬂoor of bills considered by multiple committees. Such bills
are appealing because the process by which they moved through the legislative
process introduces greater heterogeneity. Thus, the ﬂoor is willing to cede more
protection to committees’ products on the basis of the more efﬁcient information
transmission that occurs under multiple referrals. Committees are essentially
kept more honest in this context. King (1997) echoes this perspective.
Translating this logic to a committee’s decision of whether or not to report a bill to
the ﬂoor, we might say that because of the added protection from amendment
that predominates in the multiple referral context, reporting such a bill is more

attractive to a committee. Stated as a hypothesis:

Hypothesis 4a: Bills referred to more than one committee are more likely to be
reported to the ﬂoor by committees of referral than those that were referred to

only one panel.

Others have suggested that the introduction of multiple referral has
impacted the way in which committees interact over turf issues (see King for a

discussion of the nature of jurisdictional disputes in the House) and the efﬁciency

 

Bawn (1996) focuses exclusively on joint referrals in her analysis of the strategic response of
committees and the role of party leaders. Additionally, Austen-Smith ( 1993) incorporates both

35

with which the House as a whole is able to process legislation.18 For instance,
Collie and Cooper (1989) argue that multiple referrals allow the House to employ
“the expertise of its committees in far more ﬂexible and efﬁcient ways” (264),
while others have noted the corresponding inefﬁciency and fragmentation that
may occur as a result of involving additional panels in a bill’s consideration. On
this latter point, Davidson and Oleszek (1992: 136) note that “the most frequently
claimed effect of multiple referrals” is that the number of veto points facing a bill’s
enactment is increased.

Young (1996) presents the most thorough formal analysis of the impact of
multiple referral on committee power, both in terms of making proposals
(reporting a bill) and exercising gatekeeping power. He employs a series of
spatial models that yield a number of interesting insights regarding the referral
process in the House. Of central interest for the analysis here, he finds that with
joint referrals (by far the most common type of referral) the number of points in
equilibrium is larger relative to sequential and single referral. Because each
committee acts independently in exercising its gatekeeping power, ﬁnding a point
preferred by all interested parties is usually more difﬁcult under multiple referral
(although the effect is lessened in the presence of a closed rule). Thus, in
accounting for the alternative perspective on the effect of multiple referral, the

alternative hypothesis is stated as follows. Once again, the null hypothesis

 

joint and sequential referral into his model of information transmission in the House.

‘8 Due in large part to the Senate’s weaker rules on germaneness and the permeability of
committee jurisdictions, even at the ﬂoor stage, multiple referral has had a comparatively smaller
impact on that body’s mode of deliberation and the manner in which it manages its legislative
workload (Davidson 1989).

36

counterpart to Hypotheses 4a and 4b is that multiple referral has no impact on a

committee’s choice of whether to report a bill to the ﬂoor.

Hypothesis 4b: Bills referred to more than one committee are less likely to be
reported to the ﬂoor by committees of referral than those that were referred to

only one panel.

The ﬁnal hypothesis drawn from the informational literature seeks to
account for the potential role of ideology in explaining members’ success at
achieving positive action on legislation they sponsor. In numerous works,
Krehbiel has argued forcefully for the position that Congress is organized as a
majoritarian institution in which the Chamber’s median member holds the balance
of power. His central challenge to distributive and partisan theorists has been to
demonstrate non-median policy outcomes and/or behavior that can be explained
as a function of anything other than members’ underlying policy preferences.
Applied to the committee context, Krehbiel argues that committees composed of
policy extremists are less likely to achieve success than those who are closer to
the chamber or committee median. Because the median member is the pivotal
voter regardless of the context, whether in committee or on the ﬂoor, divergence
from this position is not likely to endure.19 This expectation gives rise to the

following hypothesis:

37

Hypothesis 5: Bills sponsored by members who are more ideologically divergent
from the committee median are less likely to be reported to the ﬂoor than those

that are sponsored by members closer to the median member.

Egrjiiag Predictions

At its core, the partisan theory laid out in the preceding section of this
chapter holds that committee action, and particularly the choice of which bills
among many to act on, is fundamentally an electoral good (with obvious policy
implications) that accrues to members of the majority party. That is not to say
that there is no role for members of the minority party to receive some share of
the goods produced by the committee system. In fact, a large body of literature
suggests that all members of Congress have an interest in seeing to the interests
of their colleagues regardless of party status. Such an approach helps to explain
the signiﬁcant universalistic tendencies that hold forth in many domains of
congressional activity (Niou and Ordeshook 1985; Collie 1988; see also Carson,

Finocchiaro, and Rohde 2001).

Hypothesis 6: Bills sponsored by members of the majority party are more likely to
receive positive action in the committee(s) to which they are referred than those

sponsored by minority party members.

 

‘9 Of course, the pivotal voter is not the median member under supermajority rules (Krehbiel,
1998). However, most committee decisionmaking, and that of the House in normal
circumstances, proceeds under simple majority rule.

38

A purely majoritarian theory would see the inﬂuence of cosponsors from
the two parties as described above. Broader support across opposing factions is
an indication that the measure cuts across the ideological spectrum, and thus
should be more likely to satisfy the median House voter. However, a partisan
perspective is likely to take an alternative view. Recall that partisan theories
posit a legislature in which a member of the majority party (who lies away from
the ﬂoor median) holds the position of power in terms of policy. Thus, in line with
partisan expectations, there are different predictions for the cosponsorship
variables in this context (see Hypothesis 2b above).

In much the same way that the expectations drawn from partisan theory
regarding the effect of minority party cosponsors differ from those of
informational and majoritarian theories, the two approaches engender contrasting
hypotheses regarding the inﬂuence of ideology. While Krehbiel’s remote
majoritarianism entails the Chamber’s median member (or, in the committee
context, possibly the committee median) controlling the equilibrium space for
policy proposals, party theory holds that such power lies away from the median
and somewhere within the majority party caucus. Most suggest the pivotal
member(s) to be either the party’s median or some conglomeration of the
majority leadership (speaker, speaker plus other top leaders, etc.). Thus,
partisan theory offers the following expectation, while the null maintains no

ideological effect.

39

Hymthesis 7: Bills sponsored by members who are more ideologically divergent
from the majority party median/committee median/chair are less likely to be
reported to the ﬂoor than those that are sponsored "by members closer to the

pivotal member.

Finally, it may be the case that if majority party speciﬁc beneﬁts evidence
themselves in the analysis, that particular components of the other theories apply
more directly to the majority party than to the legislature as a whole. That is, it is
possible that specialization matters only within the majority party, or that the
distributive content of majority-sponsored legislation has an impact on its
subsequent likelihood of success. To control for this potentiality should strong
majority party estimates emerge in the empirical analysis, a series of interaction

terms will be introduced to capture majority-speciﬁc effects. .

Controls

I turn next to the factors likely to constrain and inﬂuence committee Chair’s
decisions regarding whether to take action on a bill or issue. First, given the
limited time frame within which a committee may act, as time passes I suggest
that action is less likely (Grant 2001). It is well-established that from introduction
to passage, most legislation takes months to process. Therefore, I control for the

possibility that:

40

Hypothesis 8: The later it is in a session of Congress, the less likely it is for action

to be taken on a bill.20

Second, there are some items that might be considered “must-pass”
legislation. In this context, one might envision committees as serving a broader
institutional constituency, or seeking to offer an institutional good. Realistically,
in such a context the committee has little choice over whether or not to act. It is
quite rare, although not unheard of, for members to entertain (and even follow
through on) the thought of shutting down the machinations of government.21
Such must-pass items, following Krehbiel (1991) and others, include what one
might consider essential or emergency legislation such as appropriations bills,
emergency and continuing appropriations, and measures to extend the debt
ceiling. In the next section, I develop more completely just how this notion is

quanﬁﬁed.

Hypothesis 9: Measures with some degree of urgency are more likely to appear

on the agenda than others.

While not directly linked to any of the theories of legislative organization, it
is fairly well established that members both strive for and employ positions of

power to advance their goals (Fenno 1973), a component of which is likely to

 

2° It is worthwhile to note that each of these hypotheses are formulated such that all other factors
are considered to be equal. That is, I would expect lateness of session to have an impact ceteris
paribus. Controlling for other factors will allow me to establish the impact of each of the
hypotheses in the context of a larger model.

41

hinge at least in part (whether directly or indirectly) on positive legislative action
on measures one has sponsored. Given the advantages accruing to those in
positions of power, it seems reasonable to expect that such members would be
more likely to have a higher likelihood of committee action for their bills. This
leads to the third of the general claims to be made regarding committee agenda

setting.

Hmthesis 10: Bills sponsored by members holding a position of institutional

power are more likely to achieve success in committee than others.

Data and Measures

For the empirical analysis, I compiled a dataset of all bills introduced in the
House and referred to one or more committees during the 105th Congress (1997-
98).22 A total of 4,874 bills met these characteristics, though when matched up

with the available variables, the number of exploitable legislative measures falls

 

2' In the ﬁrst Bush administration, the government shut down brieﬂy. The better-known case of
government shutdown occurred near the end of the ﬁrst session of the 104"1 Congress in 1995.

The 105‘" Congress was chosen for two primary reasons. First, it is a fairly recent Congress,
thus placing the analysis in the contemporary era of congressional politics. The most logical
alternatives are the 104th Congress and the 106‘" Congress. The former is problematic in that It
was arguably the most partisan Congress in more than 80 years, while the latter presented data
collection difﬁculties due to the fact that the LOCIS data extends only to the end of the 105'".
While it is always preferable to consider more than one Congress, the amount of data collection
involved precludes such an endeavor here. In choosing between breadth of time and depth of
examination, this analysis errs on the side of the latter. The expected gains in looking at all bills
in one Congress will likely outweigh the cost of potentially time-bound results. The issue of the
degree to which the analysis presented here is time-bound is revisited in the conclusion to this
chapter. Additionally, the choice was made to analyze only bills (not resolutions of the various
sorts) so as to make a comparison between policy proposals, thus weaning purely procedural
measures and those that are predominantly symbolic in nature from the others.

42

slightly.23 For each bill, a series of characteristics related to the sponsor (such as
party afﬁliation, seniority, committee membership, and ideology) and the bill
(such as the committees to which it was referred, the number of Democratic and
Republican cosponsors, distributive content, and urgency) were coded. The
primary sources for the data are the Library of Congress Information System
(LOCIS), THOMAS (online datasource for Congress maintained by the Library of
Congress), and Keith Poole’s NOMINATE online data archive. This section
describes the rationale underlying the choice of data as well as the coding
scheme for the variables included in the analysis. Table 2.7 contains basic

descriptive statistics for each of the measures included in this analysis

Dependent Variable

The analysis is focused on determining which factors lead to a greater
likelihood that a bill will be reported out of a House committee. As such, the
variable of interest is the decision to report or not report. For each bill in the
dataset, l coded whether or not it was reported to the ﬂoor by one or more House
committees. A total of 524 measures made it to this stage of the legislative

process in the 105th House.24 Because the dependent variable is dichotomous in

 

23 Certain of the sponsor-level variables are not available for each bill. For instance, because
delegates to the US. House of Representatives are allowed certain privileges (like introducing
legislation and holding committee seats) but not others (such as voting), there are bills meeting
the criteria for inclusion in the dataset that for other reasons are excluded from the analysis.
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (Democrat, District of Columbia), one of the more active and
prominent members without voting privileges, introduced 34 bills 1n the 105h Congress. One of
these was reported out of committee. However, because she IS not allowed to vote, no
NOMINATE scores are available for her and thus her bills are dropped from the multivariate
analysis.

24Of course, signiﬁcantly more measures were reported by House committees and/or considered
on the House ﬂoor in the 105th Congress. Among these are resolutions, concurrent resolutions,
joint resolutions, and Senate bills. For the reasons mentioned above, such legislation is not

43

nature, I employ the probit technique drawn from maximum likelihood (Aldrich
and Cnudde, 1975; Maddala 1983; Greene 2000). In this context, logit would
also be appropriate, but the two methods yield identical coefﬁcient estimates in

terms of substantive and statistical signiﬁcance.

[giependent Variables

Many of the variables coded for the bills in the dataset follow the coding
scheme of previous committee research. For instance, Krehbiel (1991)
describes at great length and in precise detail the logic underlying the
informational variables and the methods employed to collect them.25 While some
of these measures are at best proxies for the principal dynamic of interest, they
appear to work well in capturing the essence of the informational expectations.
The variables relating to the partisan expectations are more straightforward.26

Lateness in Session — To control for the possibility that bills introduced
later in a session of Congress are less likely to be acted upon due to impending
time constraints, the month in which each bill was introduced is coded using a

continuous count. Thus, measures in introduced in January of 1997 are

 

included in this analysis. The ﬁndings here relate only to the committee process in the House as
it deals with substantive policy questions.

25 See Marshall (2002) for a revisionist account of many of Krehbiel’s central ﬁndings. Marshall
employs much the same data as that of Krehbiel in dealing with restrictive rules, while
demonstrating a rather consistent majority party domination of the process.

2" See Dion and Huber (1996), Krutz (2000b), and Marshall (2002), among others, for
applications of some of the variables presented here, along with other variants, to assorted
aspects of the committee system in Congress.

44

assigned a value of “1 those in February of 1997 a “2”, January of 1998 a “13,”
etc.27 Table 2.8 presents a summary of this variable.

Urgency— Following Krehbiel (1991) and others, urgency is captured with
a dummy variable that distinguishes those bills that dealt with extending the debt
limit, emergency/supplemental appropriations, and continuing appropriations.
Measures that mentioned one of these items in their title are coded “1”, with all
others receiving a “0.”

Institutional Power/Position - Bills sponsored by House members
holding a position of institutional power are captured by two dichotomous
variables. The ﬁrst is coded “1 ” when sponsors were a committee chair (majority
party), ranking member (minority party), or member of the top party leadership.
Top party leadership encompasses the Speaker, Majority Leader, and Majority
Whip of the Republican Party and the Minority Leader and Minority Whip of the
Democratic Party. The second is a dummy variable coded “1 ” for those bills
whose sponsors held a seat on the committee of referral.

Distributive Content- If in fact bills are more appealing to members as
the degree to which they offer distributive goods increases, then operationalizing
this aspect of the legislation in the dataset is important. Krehbiel (1991: 170)
employs a relatively straightforward proxy that is based on the keywords
describing bills. When a state is “speciﬁcally and directly affected by the
proposed bill,” it is listed among the subject keywords. Thus, bills mentioning

more states, particularly when comparatively few other subject terms are used,

 

27 There are three gaps in the variable due to recesses: December 1997, November 1998, and
December 1998. See Table 2.8.

45

are likely to be more laden with pork. Following Krehbiel, this variable is a ratio
of the total number of states mentioned divided by the total keywords (including
the individual states).28 As such, the higher this ratio, the greater the distributive
content of the legislation.29

Minority & Majority Cosponsorship — The degree of minority support for
a particular piece of legislation is measured by the number of minority party
members who have attached their names to it as cosponsors. As noted in the
hypotheses section, the expected effect of this variable differs in accordance with
the theoretical perspective one adopts. The number of majority cosponsors
indicates the degree of majority party support.

Specialization/Legislative Expertise - The degree to which a member
has acquired particular knowledge of an issue area, and is thereby more likely to
obtain deferential treatment for his or her legislation, is at least in part a function
of the length of time that member has served in the House. More jurisdiction-
speciﬁc measures could be employed, for example the length of continuous
service on each committee, but due to the size of the dataset and the fact that
most members serve on more than one panel, this is the most straightfonrvard

approach. It is also a close approximation to the other alternatives. Thus, this

 

2" This variable diverges from Krehbiel’s (1991) in that he used the LEGl-SLATE database, which
is no longer available. I adopt the subject keywords assigned to each bill by the Congressional
Research Service, as reported in both LOCIS and THOMAS.

29 I reviewed the top bills of the 105th House according to distributive content—serving as a
validity check of the appropriateness of the measure. Interestingly, the bills achieving the highest
levels of distributive content in this dataset differ somewhat from the type of bills Krehbiel (1991)
ﬁnds (see p. 170, Table 5.3). This is likely due in part to the fact that my data excludes joint
resolutions, which are usually the vehicles for pork-laden continuing and supplemental
appropriations. Additionally, it may be true that the CR8 and LEGl-SLATE subject term keywords
differ to some extent in their scope and usage. Nevertheless, it is apparent from an examination
of these bills that measures scoring highly on the distributive content measure deal with the types
of issues that are at their core highly concentrated, distributive type issues.

46

variable is coded simply as the square of the number of terms the member of
Congress has served in the House, with “1” denoting a freshman. The most
terms served among members introducing legislation is 24, with 3 terms being
the model category. The number of terms is squared so as to account for the
generally supposed non-linearity of the effect of seniority. Most studies assume
a pattern of diminishing marginal returns when it comes to tenure.

Multiple Referral — The process by which a bill that is multiply referred
traverses the legislative process is inherently different from that of a measure
sent to a single committee. As such, it is quite likely that this procedure has an
impact on the mode of decision making in House committees. To control for this
expectation, again noting the caveat that there are two divergent theoretical
perspectives as to its impact, a dichotomous variable coded “1” for bills referred
to two or more committees is employed.

Ideological Divergence — The various perspectives on committee
organization, and the partisan approach to understanding committee decision
making laid out above, each maintain hypotheses regarding the degree to which
various members’ ideological perspectives will be represented in the House
committee system. In operationalizing ideology, and the divergence between
segments of the House membership, Poole and Rosenthal’s (1997) NOMINATE
scores are employed.30 NOMINATE scores as a class are scaled measures of

members revealed preferences based on roll call votes. Of course it is

 

3° More speciﬁcally, DW-NOMINATE scores are the measures adopted here. These scores allow
for direct comparisons between individual members. The data and documentation, which Keith
Poole generously makes available via his website, can be accessed at:
http:/lvoteview.uh.edu/default_nomdata.htm.

47

impossible to discern whether they indicate, or even closely reﬂect, members’
underlying, unrevealed true preferences. The interaction between personal
preference, district pressure, and party pressure, along with the possibility of
uncertainty, make this question a supremely difﬁcult one to disentangle (see
Rohde 1994).31

With this caveat in mind, students of Congress have used NOMINATE
scores with a large degree of success in ascertaining the degree to which
ideological like-mindedness (or conversely, dissimilarity) has an impact on
legislative behavior (see, for instance, Jenkins 1999, 2000). Nearly all
contemporary studies of Congress employ one or another variety of NOMINATE
scores. In this case, the variable for ideological divergence is the absolute
difference between the ﬁrst dimension DW-NOMINATE score of the bill sponsor
and that of the median member of the committee to which the bill was referred.
In the case of multiple referral, the average of the committee medians is
employed. Figure 2.1 plots the distribution of bills introduced and reported by
members based on their DW-NOMINATE score.32

Majority Party Sponsorship - Because of the expectation that the
majority party functions within the committees system so as to beneﬁt members

of the majority caucus, it is necessary to identify those bills sponsored by

 

3‘ This is not to say that scholars have not attempted to do so. See the burgeoning literature on
party effects in voting (Lawrence, Maltzman, Smith 1999; Wilson 1999, Snyder and Groseclose
2000).

32 Note that the bimodal nature of the distribution reﬂects the underlying distribution of members
according to ideology.

48

members of the House majority. Thus, a dummy variable is coded “1” for bills

whose primary sponsor is a member of the majority party, and “0" otherwise.33

Results

By examining the data for this analysis in tabular fashion, it is immediately
evident that a number of potentially important patterns exist. While most bills
introduced in the 105th Congress received no further action subsequent to
referral to a committee (nearly 90 percent), measures sponsored by members of
the committee of referral saw a signiﬁcantly higher rate of success. Table 2.1
shows the success rate for committee and non-committee members. Of those
bills whose sponsors held a seat on the relevant committee, about 18 percent
were reported to the ﬂoor. In contrast, only about one in twenty bills sponsored
by non-committee members made it past the committee hurdle. Thus, of the 524
bills that made it out of committee in the 105th Congress, nearly 75 percent were
sponsored by House members with a seat at the table of the panel on which their
measure was to be considered. These general ﬁndings comport well with Hall’s
(1996) signiﬁcant work on the role played in committee by members of various
institutional positions, party afﬁliation, expertise, and electoral security. More
speciﬁcally, he ﬁnds that members in positions of committee power are more
likely to exert effort and have an inﬂuence on the eventual products of their

committee.

 

33 The “other" category of course includes minority Democrats. It also includes one independent,
Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who while technically non-affiliated, is practically speaking a member
of the Democratic caucus. Sanders introduced 20 bills in the 105th Congress, none of which
received favorable committee action.

49

In much the same way that committee membership is an inﬂuential factor
on a bill’s likelihood of success, the party affiliation of the sponsor plays an
important role. Preliminary support for the hypothesis that majority party
members receive a disproportionate share of the beneﬁts from committee
consideration of their legislation is offered in Table 2.2. The data presented in
the table show that bills sponsored by majority party Republicans were more than
three and a half times more likely to be acted upon and reported than those
sponsored by Democrats.

One of the questions raised in the theoretical section of this chapter dealt
with the possibility that multiple domains of interest are at work in the committee
system. That is to say that it is quite possibly the case that, at least at times,
distributive and partisan interests may be at work on particular bills or across the
committee system in general (Rohde, 1994; Hurwitz, Moiles,. and Rohde, 2002).
One way to get at this idea is to examine the distribution of bill sponsorship
across committees for those measures that were reported to the ﬂoor.

Deering and Smith (1997) have categorized committees according to the
predominant focus of their activity and the difﬁculty in attaining a seat. Their
typology includes: prestige, policy, constituency, and unrequested. Seats on
prestige committees are generally reserved for more senior members of the
House who have proven loyal to their party (Aldrich and Rohde, 2000a, 2000b).
Because of the national scope of the issues with which these committees deal,
and the centrality of their role to majority party success, they have also been

called “control” committees. They tend to be stacked in favor of the majority

50

party at a ratio exceeding that of the chamber as a whole. Constituency
committees are at the opposite extreme, more often dealing with legislation that
is less partisan in nature. Members are said to seek after such seats in the hope
of procuring legislative pork for their constituents.

If the preceding characterization holds true, it may be possible to observe
differences across committees in terms of the extent of partisanship underlying
members’ success. Table 2.3 presents the proportion of bills reported out of
committee broken down by the party afﬁliation of the sponsor. Heading the list
according to the proportion of reported bills sponsored by majority party
members are many of the prominent prestige committees. Appropriations and
Budget both reported only Republican-sponsored measures, while 47 of the 48
bills reported by Ways and Means were sponsored by members of the majority
party.34 Near the bottom of the list in terms of majority-partydominance are
Agriculture, Resources (formerly Interior), and Transportation (formerly Public
Works). Each of these panels are quite well-known for their frequently bipartisan
interest in constituency issues. Thus it is not surprising to see higher proportions
of Democrats beneﬁting from the classic logroll.

Table 2.4 breaks the data down by committee type, allowing for a more
direct comparison of the variance in the partisan nature of committee success. It
is perhaps even more evident in this table that there is a declining progression of

majority party asymmetry as one moves from the prestige committees down to

 

3‘ While at ﬁrst glance the 75 percent ﬁgure corresponding to the House Rules Committee seems
paradoxical given this committee’s central function as an arm of the majority party leadership in
structuring ﬂoor debate, it is important to remember that the lion's share of the work done by
Rules occurs in the form of resolutions. The data employed here contains only House bills.

51

the constituency committees, although the balance is still consistently skewed in
favor of the majority party. Majority party overrepresentation in the balance of
bills reported out of House committees is quite distinct in the tabular data
presented, though its extent appears to be a function at least in part of the
committee context. In light of this, there is reason to expect a mix of the
variables drawn from the contending theories of legislative organization to display
signiﬁcant results in the multivariate analysis that follows.

To accurately assess the degree to which the competing theories and the
corresponding hypotheses described in the previous section explain committee
decisions regarding the reporting of bills, it is necessary to include all of the
explanatory variables in a multivariate statistical model. Table 2.5 presents
probit estimates based on a model where the dependent variable is dichotomous
in nature, taking the value of “1 ” for bills reported out of committee, and “0”
otherwise. The bottom panel of the table, which reports the diagnostics of the
model estimates, suggest that as a group the variables included are highly
signiﬁcant and improve upon a naive model.

Turning to the individual coefﬁcient estimates, which for ease of exposition
are broken down at the bill and sponsor level, most are statistically signiﬁcant
and in the predicted direction. The change in predicted probability (A P) is
presented as a gauge of the substantive signiﬁcance of the variable. This value
is based on the change in probability when ﬂuctuating the variable of interest
from its non-modal to modal value (in the case of dichotomous variables) or from

one standard deviation below the mean to one standard deviation above the

52

mean (for continuous variables), holding all other variables at their mean or
mode.

The impact of the control variables as evidenced in the coefﬁcient
estimates is largely as hypothesized, save for one variable (urgency) which was
dropped due to the small number of realizations of this measure (N = 11) and the
fact that it perfectly predicts failure. Bills introduced earlier in the Congress are
signiﬁcantly more likely to be reported from the committee to the ﬂoor than those
introduced later. This supports the expectation that the workload of Congress,
and the time necessary to handle a piece of legislation, has an impact on
potential success. Bills introduced in January of 1997 (the ﬁrst month of the
105th Congress) were nearly three percent more likely to be reported to the ﬂoor
than those introduced in April of 1998.35

In contrast to the negative impact of the passing of time, members holding
positions of institutional power beneﬁt signiﬁcantly in the handling of their
legislation. Representatives who chaired or sat as the minority ranking member
on a committee were about four percent more likely to see their sponsored
legislation reported to the ﬂoor. Of even more importance, however, is the fact
that holding a seat on the committee of jurisdiction raises the likelihood of
positive action on a member’s legislation to more than 13 percent. Thus,
members appear to beneﬁt from a seat at the table in terms of the prospect of

success at the committee stage in the House.

 

35 While the change in predicted probability for this variable and others seem rather small, recall
that the likelihood of any one bill being reported from committee is minute. The baseline
probability in this model is 4.6 percent.

53

Turning to the variables relating to the expectations of the various theories
of legislative organization, the ﬁndings are mixed. The distributive measure
corresponding to the degree of distributive content in a piece of legislation is
signiﬁcant in a positive direction. As predicted, as the distributive content of a bill
increases, so does its likelihood of being reported to the ﬂoor. For example, a
measure with no distributive content is about three and one-half percent less
likely to be reported than a bill with a distributive content ranking it one standard
deviation above the mean on this variable.

The cosponsorship variables lend support to the idea that this form of
signaling is important in framing and inﬂuencing committee decision making as
well. As the number of majority (Republican) cosponsors for a bill grows, so
does its likelihood of being reported. In contrast, minority (Democratic)
cosponsorship is a detriment to legislative success. Higher numbers of minority
cosponsors are associated with lower levels of committee reports. The
magnitude of the effect of these variables is quite similar, although the direction
of their impact is opposite. A change from zero party cosponsors to about two
and one-half dozen carries with it a one and one-half percent change in the
likelihood that a bill was reported out of committee.

The ﬁnding regarding minority cosponsorship is particularly important in
that the informational and partisan theories make different predictions about its
effect. lnfonnational theory holds that members prefer greater heterogeneity in
the committee process, one gauge of which is minority cosponsorship. As such,

the more minority support for the measure, the more likely it should be to achieve

success. On the other hand, the partisan theory laid out above posits that bill
success is likely to be a function of the majority party’s interests. The higher the
level of majority party support, the greater the likelihood of success; and the
higher the level of minority party support, the lower the likelihood of success.

Two other variables relating to informational predictions, multiple referral
and seniority squared, failed to obtain statistical signiﬁcance in the estimates
presented here. The coefﬁcient for seniority is in the predicted (positive)
direction. However, the coefﬁcient for multiple referral is negative. Recall that
informational theory suggests a positive effect for multiple referral, once again
based on the attractiveness of the heterogeneity present in the multiple referral
context. Other work, however, as described eartier suggests that multiple referral
may be a detriment standing in the way of positive committee action. The
ﬁndings here do not allow for a clear interpretation of which of the two
perspectives, if either, holds true in the committee context.

Finally, in line with informational theory and the majoritarian principle, the
degree of ideological divergence between the bill sponsor and the median
member of the committee(s) of referral has a signiﬁcant impact on whether a bill
is to be reported out of committee. As the degree of divergence increases, the
likelihood of positive action on the part of the committee decreases. In this case,
a member diverging just slightly from the committee median (a difference of just
less than 0.100 in DW-NOMINATE scores) is about two and one-half more likely
to see his or her bill reported out of committee than a member who is signiﬁcantly

further from the committee median (a difference of nearly 1.000). Thus, the

55

underlying preferences of members do seem to play a role in committee decision
making. This ﬁnding will be discussed in greater detail below.36

Lastly, the analysis yields insight into the question of whether there is an
effect speciﬁc to the majority party status of a bill’s sponsor in the likelihood of
committee action on legislation. The results in Table 2.5 indicate that there is.
Bills sponsored by members of the majority party are about three percent more
likely than those put forward by minority party members to achieve success in
House committees. Once again, while the magnitude of this variable, along with
most others in the analysis, it indicates a non-trivial change in members’ potential
for gains from the committee system. When considered in tandem with other
variables, such as the fact that it is predominantly majority party members who
are less divergent from the median members of committees, the effect of majority

party status is even more pronounced.

Discussion and Conclusion
This chapter has sought to apply theories of legislative organization, and a
new perspective of committee decision making, to a previously unexamined 1-
stage of the legislative process: the decision of committees regarding which of
the bills referred to them should be reported to the House ﬂoor. While this
context differs from that of prior studies in the literature on legislative and

committee organization, the theories generate valuable insights into this aspect

 

3" It is also important to note that the ideological divergence variable and the majority sponsor
variable are highly correlated (at about r = 0.8). While this is not as high as the correlation
between party and straight NOMINATE scores or other variants of the divergence measures, it is
still high enough to indicate the presence of signiﬁcant collinearity.

56

of congressional politics. And each perspective seems to explain a degree of the
variation that occurs within House committees. However, there is an overarching
partisan dynamic that comprises much of what committees decide to do, and in
many ways the distributive and informational perspectives seem to have majority-
party speciﬁc effects. For instance, preferences matter, but they matter most
within the majority party caucus. Similarly, distributive measures are attractive to
members, but further analysis not presented here reveals that it is those
distributive measures sponsored by members of the majority party that are most
likely to achieve legislative success.

Certainly important questions remain. For one, this analysis focuses on
just one Congress (the 105'“) and one chamber within that Congress (the
House). For this reason, there is a possibility that the ﬁndings may be time
bound. While a complete analysis of an additional Congress is beyond the scope
of this project, Table 2.6 presents the distribution of party sponsorship on bills
reported by committees in the 93Ird Congress. This summary data indicates that
patterns similar to those discovered above for the 105“" Congress appear to be at
work in an earlier, signiﬁcantly less partisan period of House history.

Furthermore, this analysis only considers one stage of the legislative
process in the House—committees” decisions of whether or not to report bills to
the ﬂoor. It seems reasonable to suspect that extending the scope of the view
presented here to the subset of bills passed by the House would yield a similar
partisan distribution, but that cannot be said with certainly. Future research will

beneﬁt from extending the scope of analysis in such ways, as well as applying

57

the perspectives presented here to the Senate, which is a signiﬁcantly less
majority-centric body.

In sum, however, the ﬁndings presented here offer students of Congress
concerned with the manner in which legislative politics is organized and govern
additional fruit for consideration. While lending credence to the notion that
committees, just as the Congress, operate on multiple dimensions, one can say
with a degree of certainty that one of the more signiﬁcant dimensions is that of

partisanship.

58

Table 2.1: Success of Bill Sponsors by Committee Status,
105"1 Congress (1997-1998)

 

 

Bill Status Not Reported Reported
Non-Committee Sponsor 95.2% 4.8%
(N=2598) (N=132)
81 .7% 18.3%

Committee Sponsor
(N=1750) (N=392)

 

59

Table 2.2: Success of Bill Sponsors by Party,
105‘" Congress (1997-1998)

 

 

Bill Status Not Reported Reported

Democratic Sponsor 95.8% 4.2%
(N=1999) (N=88)

Republican Sponsor 84.4% 15.6%

(N=2351) (N=436)

 

60

Table 2.3: Party Afﬁliation of Sponsors on Bills Reported by Committee,
105‘" Congress (1997-1998)

 

 

Committee Democratic ‘ Republican N
gaonsor Sponsor
Prestige:
Appropriations 0.0% 100.0% 14
Budget 0.0% 100.0% 3
Rules 25.0% 75.0% 8
Ways and Means 2.1% 97.9% 48
Policy:
Banking 5.6% 94.4% 18
Education 5.1% 94.9% 39
Energy and Commerce 4.4% 95.7% 69
Foreign Affairs 5.6% 94.4% 18
Government Operations 37.1% 62.9% 62
Judiciary 14.8% 85.2% 115
Constituency:
Agriculture 22.2% 77.8% 18
Armed Services 0.0% 100.0% 9
Resources 17.8% 82.2% 135
Science 4.6% 95.5% 22
Small Business 14.3% 85.7% 7
Transportation 35.7% 64.3% 56
Veterans Affairs 6.3% 93.8% 16

 

61

Table 2.4: Party Afﬁliation of Sponsors on Bills Reported by Committee,
105'“ Congress (1997-1998)

 

 

Committee Type Democratic Republican N
Sponsor Sponsor

Prestige 4.6% 95.5% 66

Policy 14.6% 85.4% 280

Constituency 20.7% 79.3% 242

 

62

Table 2.5: Probit Analysis of Bill Reporting,
105‘" Congress (1997-1998)

 

 

Variable Coefficient ' Robust Standard A P
Error

Bill Characteristics:

Month of Introduction -0.0213** 0.0039 -0.028

Urgency --3 - --

Distributive Content 4.5368“ 0.6292 0.035

Democratic Cosponsors -0.0053** 0.0018 0015

Republican Cosponsors 0.0055“ 0.0014 0.015

Multiple Referral -0.0349 0.0666 --

Sponsor Characteristics:

Committee Leader 0.3217“ 0.0811 0.041

Committee Member 0.7525“ 0.0562 0.131

SeniorityA2 0.0006 0.0005 --

Ideological Divergence -0.2847* 0.1541 -0.023

Majority Party 0.4215“ 0.1317 0.029

Constant -1 .8393“ 0.1643

N 4780

Log Likelihood -1345.8035

Wald X2 358.26“

% Correctly Predicted 89.01

Pseudo R2 0.1762

 

Note: Dependent variable is coded 1 if the bill was reported by committee, 0 otherwise.
Coefﬁcients are probit estimates generated in State 7.0 using the Clarify suite of commands

(King, Tomz, and Wittenberg 2000; Tomz, Wittenberg, and King, 2001).
Signiﬁcance: ** p > 0.05 * p > 0.10.
a Dropped from model due to perfect prediction of failure.

63

Table 2.6: Party Afﬁliation of Sponsors on Bills Reported by Committee,

93'" Congress (1973-1974)

 

 

Committee Republican Democratic N
Sponsor Sponsor
Prestige:
Appropriations 0.0% 1 00.0% 3
Rules 0.0% 100.0% 2
Ways and Means 14.0% 86.0% 43
Policy:
Banking 6.3% 93.8% 32
Education 2.9% 97.1% 35
Energy and Commerce 8.9% 91.1% 56
Foreign Affairs 0.0% 100.0% 25
Government Operations 12.5% 87.5% 24
Judiciary 3.2% 96.8% 31
Constituency:
Agriculture 22.9% 77.1% 35
Armed Services 18.2% 81.8% 33
Interior (Resources) 25.3% 74.7% 79
Merchant Marine 8 Fisheries 8.7% 91.3% 46
Public Works (Transportation) 11.4% 88.6% 35
Post Ofﬁce 8.0% 92.0% 25
Science 0.0% 100.0% 9
Veterans Affairs 0.0% 100.0% 11

 

64

Table 2.7: Summary Statistics for Data Used in Probit Estimation

 

 

Variable Dichotomous Variables: ”Frequency of Values
0 1
Urgency 4,863 1 1
Multiple Referral 3,872 1,001
Committee Leader 4,173 699
Committee Member 2,730 2,142
Majority Party 2,087 2,787
Continuous Variables: Descriptive Statistics
Mean Std. Dev. Min. Max.
Month of Introduction 9.719 6.776 1 22
Distributive Content 0.016 0.052 0 1
Democratic Cosponsors 9.108 21.366 0 202
Republican Cosponsors 7.248 19.144 0 212
3eniorityI~2 50.228 66.923 1 576
Ideological Divergence 0.510 0.424 0 1 .602

 

 

 

 

 

65

Table 2.8: Lateness of Session Variable

 

 

Lateness Number of Bills
Variable Month Introduced
1 January 1997 496
2 February 1997 405
3 March 1997 323
4 April 1997 283
5 May 1997 246
6 June 1997 353
7 July 1997 266
8 August 1997 6
9 September 1997 210
10 October 1997 206
1 1 November 1997 294
12 December 1997 0
13 January 1998 48
14 February 1998 164
15 March 1998 314
16 April 1998 173
17 May 1998 190
18 June 1998 215
19 July 1998 187
20 August 1998 142
21 September 1998 134
22 October 1998 219
23 November 1998 0
24 December 1998 0

Total 4874

 

66

Figure 2.1: Number of Bills Introduced and Reported
by DW-NOMINATE Score, 105th Congress

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[:1 introduced (3 Reported by Committee
724 — Pa —
.1 =
F")
4 I“?
l l
-10 -8 -6 -4 -2 1 3 5 7 9
-9 -7 -5 -3 -1 2 4 6 8 10
Liberal Moderate Conservative

67

Chapter 3

Committee Power in the Contemporary Context:
An Examination of Committee Bypass in the House

“As political power has become concentrated in the hands of a few at the top of the
Republican leadership, committees have become increasingly marginalized. Bills have
been brought to the ﬂoor which have never been reported by the committees of
jurisdiction. When bills have been reported, the House leadership has arbitrarily
changed them to its liking before the bill comes to the ﬂoor. The committee structure is
being replaced by webs of personal inﬂuence that binds [sic] Members to their
leadership, and weaken the value of their individual votes. The minority objects to these
efforts to bypass the collective, considered judgment of committees through tactics that
discourage members from obtaining information and participating in thoughtful
discussion, negotiation, and compromise.” —Rep. George Brown, California Democrat
(Congressional Record 1996, page H5577)

Introduction

The previous chapter of this dissertation focused on the role of
committees operating in their most traditional and common context—framing
proposals and sending them to the ﬂoor. As such, signiﬁcant consideration was
given to the question of just who it is that the committees in the House of
Representatives serve. Framed in the context of the debate on legislative
organization, the results suggested that committee behavior is rather consistent
in allocating disproportionate beneﬁts to members of the majority party, as well
as to others who hold key institutional positions and possess certain individual
characteristics. While the analysis in Chapter 2 does not directly speak to the
question of the policy consequences of committee decisionmaking, it is at
minimum suggestive of the potential for majority party inﬂuence in policymaking.

Furthermore, it is quite evident that when viewing the allocation of policy

68

emanating from committees, there are stark partisan effects in terms of the
majority party’s ability to take advantage of the electoral goods in the form of
credit claiming that accrue from successful legislating at the committee stage.
More speciﬁcally, if one believes that useful information can be drawn from
sponsor-level characteristics, then the distribution of policy along these lines
correlates quite well with partisan inﬂuence in the contexts where such behavior
is to be most expected.

This chapter addresses the other side of the committee coin. Rather than
focusing on what bills make it out of committee, the analysis here deals with the
small sample of legislation that bypasses the committee system altogether.
While most legislation proceeds through what is considered the traditional or
textbook legislative process, there are a small (and in recent years growing)
number of measures that do not ﬁt neatly into this schema.

Why focus on the measures traversing the legislative process in this way?
For one, theories of committee power generally assume that committees enjoy
vast prerogative over the issues falling within their jurisdiction. For example, in
studying the use of restrictive rules, most scholars assume that rules are
important in that they allocate amendment rights over legislation that the
committee would otherwise dominate. Thus, committees are seen to be the
managers of particular areas of policy. However, when legislation is handled
outside the bounds of the committee system, it is possible (though not
necessary) that committees stand to lose their authority over policy—at least for

the moment on the bill at hand. Thus, when bills bypass committee, it is

69

important to consider who wins and who loses, and what implications there might
be for theories of power in Congress. That is, coming to a fuller understanding of
the reasons behind committee bypass, the circumstances under which this tactic
is more likely, and the ﬁnal outcomes can tell us something about the organizing
rationale of the institution.

A second reason to consider the unconventional tactic of committee
bypass is due to its increasing frequency in recent years. For some time,
scholars have noted the changing nature of the legislative process in Congress-—
and the House of Representatives, in particular. Placing this analysis in that vein
of inquiry will serve to paint a more complete picture of the shifting mode of
operation in Congress. When it occurs, at least on major legislation, committee
bypass is often associated with strenuous procedural objections by the minority
party and sometimes the majority party contingent on the bypassed committee.
Members often maintain that such a tactic undermines the division of labor in
Congress and the quality of deliberation provided by the institution. Thus, the
ﬁndings here regarding the frequency of such activity may generate some
insights of interest to those dealing with such questions.

This chapter proceeds as follows. In the ﬁrst section, the evolution of
legislation dealing with the child tax credit in the 108th Congress is reviewed.
This incident provides a useful example of the politics surrounding agenda
setting in the House, and the interplay between party and committee politics.
The subsequent section reviews the relevant literature and seeks to place this

study within the broader context of research on committees. Next is a section

70

characterizing the various ways in which committee bypass may occur in the
contemporary Congress, with corresponding miniature case studies. That is
followed by an empirical glance at the use of this unconventional tactic
throughout a nearly 20-year period of House history. The penultimate section
revisits the question of committee power in the context of committee bypass, and

the ﬁnal section concludes.

Income Taxes, the Child Tax Credit, and Partisan Politics in the 108"1 House

For many years, Republicans have had the relatively simple position of
seeking to reduce taxes. A centerpiece of President George W. Bush’s
administration, and the focus of his economic policy in particular (at least to this
point), has been the provision of income tax cuts alongside reductions of other
taxes paid by American citizens and businesses. Not surprisingly, Republicans
in Congress have gone along with the President in seeking to move such
legislation toward enactment. In some cases, members of the President’s party
in the House have gone even further than he sought. Traditionally reserved for
the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, changes in tax policy have
increasingly been written and overseen by senior party leaders. Some prominent
revisions to the tax code in 2003 provide a case in point as to just how involved
the leadership is in the details of writing and presenting legislation to the full
House, often without the formal approval or input of the committee with

jurisdiction.

71

Amid much partisan and inter-chamber strife leading up to the Memorial
Day recess, Congress passed (and President Bush later signed) HR. 2, the
ﬁscal year 2004 budget reconciliation bill that included tax cuts amounting to the
third deepest cut in American history (Ota 2003a). Fully expecting to bask in the
glow of their ﬁrst major legislative accomplishment since regaining uniﬁed control
of Congress, Republicans were caught off-guard when it was revealed that the
legislation failed to accelerate the increased child tax credit for low income
families. Democrats quickly pressed their opponents on the issue of fairness and
equity, leading the Senate to adopt legislation expanding the tax credit to those
left behind in the earlier law (Allen 2003). House Republicans were less apt to
move, however, and eventually folded the extension to low income families into a
bill extending the increase in the size of the tax credit that was part of the budget
reconciliation and providing additional tax breaks for military personnel (Ota
2003b). While the Senate bill was budget-neutral, the House bill was not and
came with a much larger price tag. Furthermore, despite the vociferous
objections of House Democrats, the refund to lower income families would not be
sent in advance but would rather have to be claimed on their 2004 income tax
returns. Additionally, the higher income families added to the qualification for the
tax credit would not have to wait for the refund (Firestone 2003).

The ﬁnal outcome of this exchange remains unclear at this point.
Currently, the legislation is mired in a conference committee on which Majority
Leader Tom DeLay is seated, with the intention of holding his conferees to the

House’s proposal. More important for the discussion here, the vehicle for

72

adopting the changes to the child tax credit (HR. 1308) was handled entirely
outside the formal committee process. Initially passed by voice vote under
suspension of the rules without committee consideration in March of 2003, the
ﬁrst draft of the legislation was a catchall bill providing tax breaks for a variety of
businesses and for families of astronauts killed on space missions (Barshay
2003). When a majority of the Senate determined to extend the child tax credit,
HR. 1308 was the vehicle and language to this effect was inserted along with
and in lieu of some of the existing provisions in the bill. Thus, when the House
decided to tackle the issue, it did so via a special rule that had the effect of
further amending the legislation to incorporate the broader tax provisions noted
earlier. The House actions and framing of the ﬂoor debate were brought about
by the senior Republican Ieadership’s tactical maneuvering on how to handle the
issue. Interestingly, the debate was managed not by the chair of Ways and
Means, but rather by members of the Rules Committee. This is one simple and
recent example of how the leadership can (and does) bypass the standing

committee system when they ﬁnd it in their interest to do so.

Committee Prerogative and the Legislative Process

Committees have long been one of the most prominent features of
Congress, if not its most recognizable characteristic. While students of the
institution have attempted to ascertain exactly what gave rise to the introduction
of committees (see, e.g., Gamm and Shepsle 1989), it is quite evident that these

subdivisions of the larger unit enjoy privileged status. Committees serve a

73

variety of ends. For individual members, they are a means to achieve a variety
of goals, including power or prestige within the chamber, the opportunity to
impact public policy, and the attainment of beneﬁts that can aid in reelection
(Fenno 1973). For the collectivity, committees help in the division of a large sum
of labor, each focusing on a narrow piece of the larger pie of issues coming
before Congress.

For all of their work, committees are provided certain rewards, or returns
on their investment. Many observers have noted the incentive structure
surrounding committee membership and behavior. As much of this literature has
been discussed at length already, I will only brieﬂy revisit the key points here.
One of the tenets of this body of research holds that committees specialize in a
particular policy area, and in return for this specialization are awarded control
over the issues falling into their jurisdiction. There is of course a diversity of
views regarding just what it is that the membership at large seeks to obtain from
this institutional framework—whether it is gains from exchange, information, etc.
However, many scholars assume that this structure protects the work of
committees and provides them with what has come to be known as gatekeeping
power. Gatekeeping simply means that a committee controls the ﬂow of
legislation to the ﬂoor of the House, and can close the gates to legislation it
opposes while opening the gates for preferred legislation.

Studies of the manner in which Congress makes decisions have
frequently built into their formal, theoretical models the notion that committees

enjoy such gatekeeping power. For instance, in their inﬂuential study of

74

committees, Denzau and Mackay (1983) make this central assumption.
Subsequent to this work, many others have availed themselves of a similar
theoretical construct.1 A similar approach is evident in the non-formal literature
as well, where many assume that committees enjoy such a prerogative.

A3 research on committees has advanced, however, there has been a
realization (or perhaps more precisely, an incorporation) of the fact that these
units in Congress do not in reality maintain complete leeway over the issues
falling within their jurisdiction. Krehbiel (1995: 913) has argued that the
discharge petition is a credible threat that undercuts the universal power of
committees to dominate a policy area.2 In this context, the majoritarian nature of
the ﬂoor is said to hold sway over the legislative process. In Krehbiel’s view,
prior models of legislative choice that did not account for the discharge procedure
thus likely overstate the power of committees.

Krehbiel and Rivers (1988) challenge the often-cited notion of committee
power and propose a method for testing the existence of such a norm in
Congress.3 And Krehbiel (1996) and Shipan (1992) raise questions about the

degree to which jurisdictional interests take precedence over members’

 

1 See, for instance, Weingast and Marshall (1988), Shepsle and Weingast (1984b) and Snyder
(1992). Note that Groseclose and Krehbiel (2002) challenge the notion that gatekeeping
permeates U.S. legislative bodies (at both the national and subnational level) and ﬁnd no
evidence for the granting of gatekeeping rights in legislatures outside the United States.

2 Of course, the broader point Krehbiel seeks to make regarding the role (or lack) of partisanship
in the context of the “A to Z” discharge petition has been challenged by Binder, Lawrence, and
Maltzman (1999) and Aldrich and Rohde (2000a).

3 Perhaps not surprisingly, this method has been challenged as well—see Wilkerson (1991) for a
critique.

75

underlying policy preferences.‘ On the other side of the coin, Shipan (1996)
documents a case, dealing with the Senate’s extension of daylight-saving time,
where jurisdictional interests appeared to be relevant, although only for members
of the committee that were deprived of their traditional committee inﬂuence.
While much attention has been focused on the discharge petition as a
means for undermining committee power and restoring majoritarian mechanisms
of procedural choice and substantive policy choice, it is important to consider the
frequency of its use. While some of the power of the discharge certainly arises
from the periodically credible threat of its use, it is a tactic that is employed only
rarely in the House. Beth (2001) documents the fact that action seldom occurs
on measures subject to a discharge petition. In fact, over the period from 1931 —
2000, fewer than one bill per Congress has been discharged from a committee.
When contrasted with bypass of committees by other means, the
discharge is quite evidently an even more irregular element of the legislative
process than might be imagined based on the amount of attention it has received
in recent years. Given the greater frequency of other means of committee
bypass, it is important to consider why such behavior occurs and exactly who
beneﬁts from it. While there are many reasons that likely give rise to bypass, one
of the probable reasons for its use on many occasions is grounded in the notion
of party power. The majority party, in controlling the committee system and
organization in general, chooses to circumvent committees when it is in its

interest to do 30. Further, other reasons for bypass may be unrelated to party

 

‘ Krehbiel (1996) deals with the smoking ban on domestic airline ﬂights, a case which has
received a large amount of attention in this context. Other studies of this legislation include
LaRue and Rothenberg (1992) and Shipan (1995).

76

government, and have more to do with institutional efﬁciency. In such cases, it is
likely that the committee, or at least its chair and any other members who care,
are on board with the bypass decision. The next section considers these and
other issues in more detail, providing a sketch of the various rationales

underlying the use of this unconventional mode of legislating in the House.

Committee Bypass and the Contemporary Congress

The fact that committees are periodically bypassed in handling particular
pieces of legislation is nothing new in Congress. In fact, in the earliest
Congresses, the ﬂoor reigned supreme by setting up ad hoc committees to deal
with bills on a case-by-case basis. Over time, with the advent of the standing
committee system, these subunits of the larger chamber came to enjoy more
inﬂuence over issues on a recurring basis. However, there have been and
continue to be times during which some segment of the broader membership
ﬁnds it desirable to forgo one or even all of the body’s committees.

While at ﬁrst glance, it would appear that bypassing a committee is a
relatively straightforward action to characterize, in actuality there are a variety of
ways in which a bypass may occur. In her study of unorthodox lawmaking in
Congress, Sinclair (2000) describes three prominent vehicles for bypassing the
committee system: through a discharge petition that has the effect of extracting a

bill from a recalcitrant committee, at the direction of the majority party leadership,

77

and by employing a task force to handle a speciﬁc issue or piece of legislation.5
In her discussion, she notes that the reasons underlying the leadership’s choice
of moving legislation through this route are quite varied (‘15).

For the purposes of this analysis, a ﬁner categorization of the means of
committee bypass is useful as a foundation before turning to issues of
measurement and examination. There exist at least ﬁve distinct categories in
which such activity may be classiﬁed, excluding the discharge petition. The
remainder of this section presents these typologies along with corresponding

examples from the House.

Outright Bypass

While most casual observers generally think of the House bypassing its
committee system through a discharge petition, the action is much more
frequently taken by less formal means. For all practical purposes, bypass most
commonly occurs when the leadership decides to schedule a bill for ﬂoor
consideration before a committee has acted upon it. The circumstances in which
this transpires with the committee’s consent will be discussed in greater length
below. In this section, I consider the scenario in which the leadership chooses to
overtly circumvent one or more committees in order to serve the party’s interest.

One such example occurred in the 105th Congress. Republicans, anxious
to demonstrate their concern about and action on the issue of education,

advanced a number of legislative initiatives that sought to improve education.

 

5 Sinclair (1981) is the earliest source for more detail on the logic behind the use of task forces in
the House of Representatives, and Oleszek (1999) presents a more recent update incorporating
events occurring under Republican majorities.

78

One means by which the party attempted to reach this goal was through
increased access to private schools. The proposal, HR. 2746, would have
allowed states the opportunity to hold back a portion of the federal money they
receive under Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and apply
these funds toward scholarships that would permit economically disadvantaged
families to send their children to private schools. This legislation would have
effectively put into place the ﬁrst federally sponsored voucher program.

In considering the voucher legislation, the Republican leadership
apparently realized that they did not have the votes in the Education and the
Workforce Committee to advance the bill out of that panel and to the ﬂoor (Katz
1997). In light of that, they scheduled the bill for ﬂoor consideration under a
closed rule (H.Res. 288) without the approval of the committee with jurisdiction.
Democrats vociferously pointed out the unusual tactics surrounding the
scheduling of HR. 2746. During the debate over the rule, Tony Hall of Ohio, a
member of the Rules Committee, noted that “HR. 2746 was introduced just 2
days ago. There were no hearings, committee markups, or committee reports.
This closed rule effectively guarantees that no Member will have a chance to
offer amendments” (Congressional Record, October 31, 1997, pg. 9817).

William Clay, ranking member on the bypassed Education and the
Workforce Committee, claimed to be “appalled at the arrogant and dictatorial way
that [the bill was] brought to the ﬂoor.” He went on to say:

I urge my colleagues to defeat the previous question and defeat

this rule. The majority party has run roughshod over the entire

democratic process. A previous Republican speaker this morning
said that this is not a vote on vouchers, but it is a vote to permit

79

debate on the issue of vouchers. How misleading. This rule

continues that farce. This bill has never had a public hearing in

either the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Youth and Families or

on the full Committee on Education and the Workforce. This bill has

never been marked up by the committee. There was no debate, no

discussion, no public involvement, no give-and-take. Clearly,

Madam Speaker, the doors of democracy have been slammed

shut” (Congressional Record, October 31, 1997, pg. 9823).

In this case, the Republican leadership won the procedural debate, and
the restrictive rule was adopted on a highly partisan vote. However, the
leadership did not win on the substance of the debate. A handful of moderate
Republicans defected from the Ieadership’s position and voted against the
voucher legislation. Thus, while the party was able to move its agenda to the
ﬂoor without the consent of the authorizing committee, it was unsuccessful in

appealing to the broader membership.6

Bypass by Referral/Drafting

On occasion, the proponents of an initiative enjoying broad support (at
least enough to warrant passage should it be given a vote on the ﬂoor) are faced
with a hostile committee of jurisdiction in which the legislation is certain to die
should it arrive there. One strategy pursued by members facing such a scenario
is to attempt to draft the legislation in such a way as to bring to bear the
jurisdiction of an alternative committee composed of members less averse to the

proposal. Stewart (2001: 343) describes what is perhaps the most well known

 

6 Interestingly, as Katz (1997) points out, it was a particularly bad day for Republicans' education
agenda. As the House was voting down the voucher bill, the Senate defeated a bill that would
have put into place tax breaks for educational savings accounts that could be used toward the
cost of public or private school tuition. Other bipartisan legislation moving forward at about the
same time did achieve success—HR. 2616, a bill aimed at improving and expanding charter
schools, was eventually enacted into law later in the Congress.

80

example of this sort in the case of the civil rights legislation introduced in 1963.
This legislation faced a very difﬁcult course in both the House and Senate due to
the power of entrenched conservative Southern Democrats and like-minded
Republicans.

While it seems natural that a bill dealing with civil rights would fall to the
Judiciary Committees of each chamber for consideration, the path of this
legislation was anything but routine. In the Senate, the Judiciary Committee was
chaired by James Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi and a staunch
opponent of civil rights legislation. In light of this, the authors of the Senate bill
drafted it in such a way that it touched on the constitution’s commerce clause,
thereby bringing it under the jurisdiction of the Commerce Committee, a panel
chaired (not coincidentally) by the more liberal and pro-civil rights Warren
Magnuson of Washington. In the House, a similar state of affairs was in place,
although the major players sat in opposite places. There, the Commerce
Committee was chaired by Democratic Representative Oren Harris of Arkansas,
who like Eastland was an Opponent of the legislation. The Judiciary Committee,
on the other hand, was headed by Emanuel Cellar of New York, who was
strongly in favor of the civil rights bill. The legislation proceeded successfully in
this case thanks largely to the favorable committee venues obtained in each
chamber.

A more recent example of artful drafting aimed at sending legislation to a
preferred committee was evident on the issue of access to public school

buildings by religious student groups. In March of 1984, the Senate rejected a

81

constitutional amendment to allow prayer in schools. In the aftermath of this
defeat, proponents advanced a proposal to cut off federal funds to schools that
bar religious student groups from using school facilities for meetings if the school
allows other student groups to use the facilities (HR. 5345). According to
contemporaneous reports, “the bill was drafted to bypass review by the Judiciary
Committee, where,” according to a member of the Education and Labor
Committee, “it ‘would have been killed’” (Hook 1984). In this case, as well as that
of the 19603 civil rights legislation, bypassing the committee of jurisdiction by
artfully drafting a bill meant success for the sponsors.

After the positive report of the Education and Labor Committee (by a 30-3
margin), HR. 5345 was voted on under suspension of the rules. The outcome of
the vote was 270-151, just short of the two-thirds necessary for passage under
the expedited procedure. The choice of suspension as the vehicle, however,
appears to have been because of the favorable amendment environment it
carries with it. Carl Perkins, the Democratic Chairman of the Education and
Labor Committee, sought the suspension route because of growing opposition
and amendment threats on the part of more liberal colleagues. The main
opponent of the bill was Democrat Don Edwards, who chaired the House
Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights (Cohodas 1984).
However, the fact that about 64% of the House voted in favor of the bill indicates
its fairly extensive appeal, and when the Senate broadened the access language

to apply to all student groups, the House agreed and allowed the bill to be

82

incorporated into HR. 1310, which dealt with improving math and science

educaﬁon.

Bypass in a Multiple Referral

The House’s move in the mid-19703 to allow bills to be referred
simultaneously to more than one committee provides another occasion where a
committee (or committees) may be bypassed. For example, there have been
instances in which the Speaker sets a time limit for a committee to complete its
work on joint referral, with the panel’s failure to act resulting in an automatic
discharge of the bill. When Republicans modiﬁed the multiple referral process in
1995 to eliminate joint referrals (where each committee of referral enjoys equal
prerogative over a bill), they put into place a system in which multiply referred
bills would have a lead (or primary) committee, with all the other panels on the
referral designated as secondary. The procedure calls for the automatic
discharge of secondary committees that fail to act within a reasonable period of
time after the primary committee makes its report.

While there are certainly tactical opportunities offered by the new
procedural context, of probably more signiﬁcant substantive importance is
bypass that occurs due to the fact that competing committees are working on the
same legislation under a multiple referral. A good case in point is the
development of product liability legislation in the 104th Congress. Both the
Judiciary and Commerce Committees reported legislation to the ﬂoor that would

overhaul the nation’s laws governing producer liability for problems resulting from

83

faulty products. It was left to the Rules Committee to arbitrate the differences
and work out a compromise between the two committee chairs—Henry Hyde of
Illinois and Thomas Bliley of Virginia. The ﬁnal version looked much more like
the Judiciary Committee’s bill than that of Commerce (Masci 1995, Masci and
Freedman 1995). While the exchange was conducted at the highest levels of
committee and party leadership, and thus with at least the tacit approval of both
committee leaders, it is evident that the work of the committees was to varying

degrees undone prior to the bill coming to the ﬂoor for consideration.

Nominal Bypass

By far the most common type of detour around the committee system is
the situation in which the leadership essentially works the will of the committee
by bringing a bill straight to the ﬂoor. As in many of the other examples
discussed here, there are a variety of reasons this might occur. For instance, if a
bill had been considered by the committee in a previous Congress (or for that
matter, had been previously passed), there may be little reason to exert any
committee effort in holding another markup session to review and report the bill.
Such was the case in the House in 1988 with its consideration of S. 557, a bill
that would overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling in Grove City College v. Bell. In
that case, the high court ruled that enforcement of certain civil rights legislation
could be applied only to speciﬁc programs with federal government involvement
at institutions receiving federal aid. The legislation was brought to the ﬂoor under

highly restrictive terms of debate with no committee action—requiring an

84

extended colloquy on the ﬂoor in order to replace the traditional committee report
that would accompany legislation and allow for subsequent interpretation.
However, proponents argued that committee action was unnecessary in light of
the fact that the House had passed very similar legislation on two recent
occasions. The bill passed by a wide margin of 315-98 (Cohodas 1988).

Periodically, legislation lacks controversy to the degree that consideration
by the full committee is not necessary. In 1993, the House passed HR. 890
under suspension of the rules by a margin of 409-1 after favorable action in the
House Banking Financial Institutions Subcommittee. The legislation dealt with
allowing more time for depositors to make a claim for lost funds that were
protected by federal insurance, and was primarily in response to the problems of
long-term depositors who were not aware of the failure of their bank or thrift. A
feature of the bill that added to its attractiveness and ease of passage was that it
would not increase the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) budget in
that the calculation of loss risk had already been incorporated into the pre-

existing framework (Taylor 1993).7

Skirting the Commmeﬁystem Via Special Rules
On occasion, the leadership ﬁnds it attractive to bypass the work of a
committee by modifying its product prior to ﬂoor consideration or simply allowing

members the opportunity to add amendments containing legislation the

 

7 The path of the legislation authorizing the minting of commemorative state quarters (HR. 3793)
followed a similar trajectory to that of the FDIC insurance extension. The bill enjoyed wide
support, would be revenue positive for Treasury, and received unanimous approval by voice vote
in the Domestic and lntemational Monetary Policy Subcommittee of the House Banking
Committee (00 Weekly1996).

85

committee had bottled up. The latter strategy, while common in the Senate due
to that body’s lack of germaneness rules on the introduction of amendments,
requires direct intervention in the House. An example of both of the House
strategies are presented here.

One of the planks of the Republicans’ well-known Contract with America
from 1994 was a pledge to bring to a vote a constitutional amendment
establishing term limits for members of Congress. Leading up to the vote on the
House ﬂoor, there were signiﬁcant divisions within the Republican caucus
regarding the details of how the limits should be established.8 The Judiciary
Committee marked up H.J.Res. 2, and included some language (such as
applying the limits to just consecutive service) that the leadership decided to
forgo (Babson 1995). Instead, the Rules Committee set forth terms of debate
allowing for a series of substitute amendments with the leadership’s preferred
legislation, more closely mirroring the original language of H.J.Res. 2, the base
bill for amending purposes. While a majority of House members voted in favor of
term limits in 1995, the margin was narrow and not close to the 2/3 necessary for
a constitutional amendment.

The Rules Committee can also bypass or forgo committee prerogative (at
least in terms of its gatekeeping power) by what it does not do. For instance, by
providing an open rule that allows amendments, or waiving standing rules of the
House that would prohibit certain types of amendments on the ﬂoor, the Rules

Committee can essentially leave the door open for members to step in and offer

 

‘ There were, of course, some highly publicized opponents of term limits within the caucus as
well, including then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, Conference Secretary John Boehner of
Ohio, Conference Vice Chair Susan Molinari of New York, and Henry Hyde

86

amendments that undercut the work of a committee (or challenge the
committee’s attempt to keep the ﬂoodgates closed).

A very good example of this occurred in 1990, when Oklahoma’s
Democratic House member Mike Synar made an end-around of the House
Interior Committee on the issue of fees for cattle grazing on public lands. For a
number of years, Synar had been attempting to reduce the subsidies enjoyed by
ranchers in western states. His position appealed to both conservatives who
sought a lesser role for government intervention in the marketplace (and budget-
minded members who saw increased dollars as a result of heightened fees) and
to environmentalists concerned with the preservation of public lands.

While the general orientation of the House was receptive toward the
proposal, the Interior Committee stood directly in Synar’s path. The panel, which
is dominated by rural interests, was unwilling to consider the proposal. Thus,
Synar found a more welcoming audience in the House Rules Committee, which
allowed him to attach the proposal as an amendment to the Interior Department
appropriations bill for ﬁscal year 1991 (HR. 5769). His measure, which called for
a steady increase (eventually reaching 500 percent) in the fees imposed on
ranchers who use public lands to graze their cattle, passed the House on a 251-

155 vote (Pytte 1990).

Summing Up: Committee Bypass in Perspective

While each of the sections above describes a means for bypassing House

committees, it is important to note that the motivation for doing so varies. To

87

obtain the same goal (for instance, choosing preferred legislation for
consideration on the ﬂoor), the leadership may opt for different procedural tactics.
In some circumstances, they may engage in a nominal bypass of a committee in
order to keep an issue out of the public limelight or to protect a preferred
proposal from modiﬁcation. In other circumstances, as described earlier, the
nominal bypass may be simply a function of time pressures or the apparent lack
of need for an accompanying committee report due to the straightforward nature
of a piece of legislation.

Certain changes in Congress have carried with them implications for the
frequency and role of committee bypass. At times, bypass is difﬁcult to observe.
For example, there has been an increasing trend toward incorporating
authorizing language into appropriations bills. In this case, appropriators (and
often the leadership as well) forgo the authorizing committees entirely—
frequently raising the ire of the members who technically hold jurisdictional
authority over an issue. Also, with the increasing degree of polarization evident
in the contemporary Congress, it should come as no surprise that the majority
party sometimes ﬁnds it appealing to bypass a committee in order to score quick
points on an issue. For example, in the 105th Congress, House Republicans
called up HR. 3097, a bill to repeal the tax code. The bill had received no action
by the Ways and Means Committee, had no hope of obtaining the ﬁlibuster-proof
sixtieth vote in the Senate, and was not even managed on the ﬂoor by Bill
Archer, the Republican chair of the authorizing committee (Hosansky 1998).

However, the tactic on the part of House Republicans seemed to be that of

88

simply using their domination of the agenda to highlight stances that would
resonate with their core constituency and emphasize their differences with the

minority Democrats.

Tracing Committee Bypass in the House

The previous section documented a number of ways in which committees
in the House may be circumvented, with legislation passing directly to the ﬂoor
absent the formal or informal input of these important subunits of the chamber.
While miniature case studies such as those presented are informative for
illustrative purposes, and offer evidence for the various motivations underlying
the decision to bypass the committee system, it is desirable to look in greater
depth, and in a more systematic fashion, at the trends in this behavior over time.

At the outset, it is important to note that studying committee bypass in a
systematic way is challenging in that this behavior is inherently idiosyncratic.
While it would be going a bit too far to say that there are as many conditions
under which committees are bypassed as there are occasions in which a panel is
circumvented, the previous section clearly shows the diversity in means and
motivation for such actions. In light of this, I examine empirically those cases in
which a committee is formally bypassed—that is, when a bill is brought to the

ﬂoor without the committee of referral reporting.9 In seeking to ascertain the

 

9 As in the other chapters of this dissertation, the focus here is simply on House bills—resolutions
fall into a somewhat different class of legislation, and Senate bills that are considered in the
House, because they often have a House bill as a counterpart, are likely to give numerous false
positives of committee bypass.

89

prevalence of such behavior in the House, I consider the 97th to 105th
Congresses, or the period from 1981 to 1998.

Before turning to the data, a few points on what this analysis does not
(and cannot) deal with are merited. The search criteria employed here are based
on available electronic resources through Thomas (the Library of Congress
online source for legislative data on Congress) and Scorpio (the predecessor to
Thomas, accessed through a telnet interface). With these tools, one can search
for bills reaching particular stages of the legislative process, such as a committee
report, a passage vote, etc. Naturally, any search device such as this is limited
in its capacity for ﬂexibility. As such, I cannot look for bills that fall into categories
not captured by the mechanism’s categorization scheme. For example, Thomas
does not make available a search for bills brought to the ﬂoor for consideration-—
the only related category is whether a measure was adopted or failed of passage
on the ﬂoor. Thus, it is impossible to ascertain with this instrument which bills
were initially brought to the ﬂoor without committee consideration, but were
subsequently pulled from consideration prior to a vote on passage.10

However, the data can tell us something about the trends in bypassing
committees over nearly two decades. Table 3.1 presents the number of bills
without formal committee approval that were nonetheless brought to a vote on

the House ﬂoor. As a whole, the number of these bills is higher at the end of the

 

1° The number of such instances is undoubtedly quite small, but it is highly likely that such things
do occur on occasion. More frequent are cases in which the leadership pulls from the ﬂoor a bill
proceeding through the traditional legislative process. The supplementation of this study of
committee bypass with a detailed search of secondary sources such as 00 Weekly aids in
overcoming this problem (at least on a case-by-case basis), while at the same time lending
further credence to the claim that such events are quite rare. However, it is not unreasonable to
surmise that there are occasions in which the leadership is forced to pull a bill from the ﬂoor due
to outrage on the part of committee members that their panel was bypassed.

90

period than it was at the beginning, ranging from 34 in the 97th Congress to 120
in the 105‘“. The sum of such measures in any individual Congress exceeds the
number of bills circumventing the committee system by‘a discharge petition from
the entire period (1931 to 2000) examined by Beth (2001).11 Thus, while the
discharge petition has garnered most of the scholarly attention surrounding the
circumvention of committees, it is rarely observed empirically.12

Table 3.1 breaks down the number of bypasses per Congress according
to the various means of scheduling in the House. This categorization offers
some initial insight into the circumstances under which this activity is undertaken.
For instance, a bill called up under unanimous consent is obviously non-
controversial in that a single member could stymle its progress. Thus, it is very
unlikely that committees are taken advantage of in this context. And as the table
indicates, a large number of bypassed bills are scheduled by unanimous
consent. In three of the nine Congresses examined here, unanimous consent
was the most common means of bypass.

Over the entire period, consideration of bypassed bills under suspension
of the rules was most frequent. A total of 366 bills out of the 673 that formally
circumvented the committee system were brought to the ﬂoor via suspension.

While not requiring the same degree of unity as unanimous consent,

 

'1 Interestingly, over the period from 1981 to 2000 (97"‘ to 106th Congresses), there were only
three successful discharge petitions—one in the 102nd Congress and two in the 103'“. In each of
these cases, however, when the petition was entered (i.e., received the requisite 218 signatures),
the House opted to consider the bill by unanimous consent rather than moving ahead with a
formal vote on discharge (Beth 2001: 20). A recent exception to this pattern occurred with
campaign ﬁnance reform legislation in the 107"1 Congress. HR. 2356 was discharged and
brought to the ﬂoor despite strong objections from the Republican leadership (Foerstel 2002).

'2 Again, this does not mean that it is not important. As others have argued, the mere existence
of the discharge petition may be inﬂuential enough to alter the actions of committees and their
leaders.

91

suspensions also possess a supermajority requirement for success, and thus are
still likely to be somewhat bipartisan in nature. Their role has been increasing in
the House in recent years, and the level of consensus on such bills has been on

the rise as well.”

The ﬁnal category is special rules, whose use in the context of
committee bypass rose dramatically in the 104th and 105th Congresses.“ In fact,
in these two Congresses, the number of special rules connected with bills not
acted upon in committee yet ﬁnding their way to the ﬂoor matched or exceeded
that of bills arriving at that juncture via unanimous consent.

Figure 3.1 offers a slightly different perspective on the data shown in
Table 3.1. It presents the percentage of each of the three primary types of
bypass by Congress as a share of the total. Here the trend is somewhat more
visible, with unanimous consent dominating early on, only to be supplanted by
suspensions over the remainder of the period. Note, as well, the .up tick in
special rules during the last two Congresses.

While the method of calling up legislation is informative, what is perhaps
an even more interesting question is to the degree to which bills bypassing
committees exhibit controversy at the ﬂoor stage. Table 3.2, which displays the
percentage of bills evoking a roll call vote on ﬁnal passage and of those, the

percentage exhibiting conﬂict, offers some insight into this question. For the

purposes here, conﬂict is deﬁned as an instance in which fewer than 90 percent

 

‘3 On these recent trends in suspensions, particularly as they relate to their prominence in the
House and the impact on party voting, see Wolfensberger (2002) and Crespin, Rohde, and
Vander Wielen (2002), respectively.

1‘ Note that the “Other” category encompasses comparatively obscure scheduling procedures
such as the Consent Calendar, calling up legislation due to its privileged nature, etc.

92

of the members vote in agreement. A 70 percent threshold is similarly employed
for the sake of avoiding the potential pitfalls inherent in an arbitrary cutoff level.

The ﬁrst point that should be recognizable in the table is that there are
relatively low levels of conﬂict on suspensions, at least when compared to special
rules, as indicated by the fairly small proportion of the former that are roll called.
This ﬁnding, while not particularty distinct from the same general relationship on
bills that do not bypass committee, does underscore the tendency for special
rules to be employed on controversial legislation.

Also of interest is that the actual number of bills subject to a roll call vote
on ﬁnal passage increases over the time period for both procedural paths. For
suspensions, the number of bills requiring a roll call increased from four in the
97th Congress to 30 in the 105"“. In a similar vein, three bills brought to the ﬂoor
via a special rule in the 97th Congress were roll called on passage, while by the
105th Congress, 20 such votes were taken. Consequently, while there is not an
apparent temporal pattern in the percentage of each category that is subject to a
roll vote, it is quite evident that the sheer number has increased dramatically over
the period examined here.

What does this trend indicate? For one, it likely corresponds to the
increasingly partisan atmosphere in which the House operates. Since the early
19803, the majority party has become progressively more effective in their
agenda setting capacity. Thus, it should not be surprising to ﬁnd that even in the

context of committee bypass, the leadership seeks to press its procedural

93

advantage over the minority. One way in which this conjecture may be examined
more directly is by looking at the roll rates on ﬁnal passage of such bills.

An entity, often times a party or committee, is said to be “rolled” when an
opposition group successfully pushes forward legislation the group of interest
opposes. Thus, a roll is said to occur when a majority of one group (say the
majority party) successfully votes in favor of a motion over the objections of a
majority of a competing group (in this example, the minority party). If in fact the
majority party uses its procedural prowess to its advantage, then we would
expect to ﬁnd it rolling the minority on these bypassed measures. The data in
Table 3.3 bear out this expectation. In no instance was the majority party rolled,
and the minority was rolled with some regularity on bills that circumvented the

committee system.

The Issue of Committee and Party Power

While the preceding discussion has drawn attention to the evolution of
committee bypass in the contemporary Congress, and has documented a
number of cases (and manners) in which the tactic has been employed, the
relationship between committee power, party power, and the prerogative of the
ﬂoor has not been given much attention. In light of the literature seeking to
explain the existence (or absence) of committee power, it is worthwhile to
consider the degree to which bypass is evident as a direct limit on committee
gatekeeping power. To reiterate, the assumption that mechanisms exist which

allow the ﬂoor to extract legislation from committees is at the heart of the

94

scholarly interest in the discharge petition. In this section, I brieﬂy revisit a few of
the cases discussed earlier and show that in fact committee preferences were
standing in the way of broader membership preferences on the issue at hand.
However, the tool of choice was not a discharge petition, but rather intervention
on the part of the leadership to bring about action on legislation that would have
otherwise been stalled.

The history of school access legislation (HR. 5345) is a case in point.
Recall that this is the bill that was artfully drafted to go to the Education
Committee rather than Judiciary. The claim of the bill’s authors was that it would
not have had the votes on the latter committee to make it to the ﬂoor.
Examination of the vote on passage of HR. 5345, as reported by the Education
Committee, indicates that this belief on the part of the sponsors was indeed
probably true. The ﬁrst section of Table 3.4 presents the breakdown of voting on
ﬁnal passage according to party and committee status. Clearly, in the aggregate
members of the two committees held differing opinions on the issue of allowing
religious groups access to public schools. In this case, at least, bypass was a
strategy that undercut what would normally have been the committee with
jurisdiction.

A similar pattern is true for two other pieces of legislation discussed
earlier: Mike Synar’s amendment to levy higher cattle grazing fees on western
ranchers and House Republicans’ school voucher initiative. In each instance, a
majority of the committee with jurisdiction opposed the language, yet leadership

involvement created a path to the ﬂoor. In the case of Synar’s amendment, the

95

House agreed with him in overturning the Interior Committee. However, on
school vouchers, the opposition within the Education and the Workforce
Committee was simply a preview of opposition on the ﬂoor, and the leadership

was unable to convince a majority of members to vote for the bill.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have attempted to add to the richness of the growing
contemporary understanding of the changing nature of congressional politics by
examining what has become an increasingly important procedural avenue for
legislation in the House. While other research has paid signiﬁcant attention to
various unconventional procedures such as the discharge petition, there has
been comparatively little focus on the other, more common means of bypassing
the standing committee system. This study ﬁlls this gap by categorizing the
various ways in which such detours around committees may occur, and
considering the implications of this activity on theories of committee power.

The section containing the case studies provides the foundation for further

examination of the various means by which committees are bypassed in the

 

House. This chapter took an empirical look at just one means of bypass—where
the committee is formally circumvented without completing a report. However, it
would be equally (if not more) interesting to conduct an in-depth examination of
House special rules to determine the degree to which committee products are
modiﬁed prior to ﬂoor consideration. In her study of the unconventional

processes of legislating in Congress, Sinclair (2000) identiﬁes such post-

96

committee adjustment as an increasingly common practice on major legislation.
However, we know little beyond her observations of major legislation about just
how common the course of action is and the underlying rationale behind its use.
Finally, this analysis lays the groundwork for the further development of a
study of the role of party power in the context of the committee system. While it
is tempting to think of committee bypass by the party leadership as often
resulting from divisions between the party caucus and/or the leadership on the
one hand, and one of its committees on the other, this is probably not the most
common cause. Rather, there are a host of other factors that may give rise to
the party ﬁnding it advantageous to forgo committee action. Foremost among
these motivations are likely the desire to keep an issue from being openly aired
for public consumption, an action which has certain implications for the quality of
legislative deliberation, and the desire to frame ﬂoor consideration in a way that

is advantageous the party.

97

Table 3.1: Methods of Committee Bypass,
97th - 105'“ Congresses (1981-1998)

 

 

Congress Unanimous Suspension Special ' Other Total
Consent of the Rules Rule

97 21 (62%) 8 (24%) 4 (12%) 1 (3%) 34
98 42 (56%) 29 (39%) 4 (5%) 75
99 30 (46%) 30 (46%) 6 (9%) 66
100 17 (25%) 42 (63%) 6 (9%) 2 (3%) 67
101 23 (28%) 51 (62%) 6 (7%) 2 (2%) 82
102 23 (25%) 56 (62%) 6 (7%) 6 (7%) 91
103 28 (49%) 24 (42%) 5 (9%) 57
104 11 (14%) 47 (58%) 23 (28%) 81
105 21 (18%) 79 (66%) 20 (17%) 120
Total 216 366 80 1 1 673

 

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99

Table 3.3: Minority Party Rolls on Passage of Bypassed Bills
Considered Under a Special Rule,
97‘" - 105th Congresses (1981-1998)

 

Conﬂss Minority Rolls

 

97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105

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100

 

Table 3.4: Committee Member Voting on Legislation Bypassing Committee

 

H. R. 5345 (1984) — School Access
Education and Labor: 21 — 14 (Dem. 9 — 13, Rep. 12 — 1)

Judiciary: 14 — 17 (Dem. 5 — 15, Rep. 9 — 2)

Synar Amendment to H. R. 5769 (1990) — Cattle Grazing Fees

Interior and Insular Affairs: 16 — 18 (Dem. 15 - 7, Rep. 1 — 11)

H. R. 2746 (1997) - School Vouchers

Education and the Workforce: 22 - 23 (Dem. 0 — 19, Rep. 22 — 4)

 

Note: Votes are drawn from the ﬁnal passage (or adoption) votes on the House ﬂoor.

101

 

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102

Chapter 4

Suspensions, Special Rules, and Selection Effects:
A Uniﬁed Model of Agenda Setting in the U.S. House

Introduction

The legislative process in the House of Representatives is not a neat,
linear process. The path from introduction to enactment for the handful of bills
that successfully navigate this course varies considerably from bill to bill. And as
time has passed, the number of viable progressions has, if anything, only
increased. The traditional “textbook” legislative process, if it ever truly existed,
has been replaced by a legislative process characterized by unorthodoxy and
diversity (see, e.g., Shepsle 1989, Sinclair 2000a). One area in which this
diversity is readily apparent is in the scheduling of legislation for ﬂoor
consideration in the House. No longer are committees guaranteed a seat at the
table, and highly restrictive rules have become commonplace for major
legislation. In light of the importance of these changes, and the potential impact
they have for altering the balance of power within the chamber, students of
Congress have paid signiﬁcant amounts of attention to particular aspects of the
legislative process. One area where this is clearly evident is in the domain of
restrictive rules. With the increase in partisanship in the mid-19703 and the rise
to prominence of restrictive rules shortly thereafter, a multitude of studies have
grappled with the strategic importance of the Rules Committee and its products,

which govern the mode of consideration for individual bills on the ﬂoor.

103

 

Of course, there is much more involved in ﬂoor scheduling than simply
special rules. In fact, most bills brought to the ﬂoor for consideration arrive there
not via a special rule, but rather through a motion to stispend the rules and pass
the bill. The decision of whether to schedule a bill by suspending the rules or via
adoption of a special rule is necessarily a choice between alternatives. If the
route to the ﬂoor proceeds through the Rules Committee, a subsequent choice
over whether to use a restrictive rule is encountered. However, existing models
of ﬂoor scheduling that examine special rules in isolation fail to consider the
selective, two-stage nature of agenda choice. That is, they attempt to explain the
choice regarding the restrictiveness of special rules absent the preceding choice
between the two primary routes to the House ﬂoor.

This chapter seeks to contribute to the literature on legislative organization
in two ways. First, by incorporating bills brought to the ﬂoor via the suspension
procedure, it is possible to ascertain whether and to what extent existing models
may suffer from selection bias resulting from considering only bills brought to the
ﬂoor via a special rule. If the two processes are related, then the omission of one
stage from consideration of the other may hamper the inferential capacity of the
separate models. Second, in the context of a more fully speciﬁed model, this
chapter offers a more comprehensive treatment of the topic of suspension of the
rules and the motivations for using this procedure as opposed to the more
commonly examined vehicle of special rules. Signiﬁcantly less research has
been done on suspensions (see, e.g., Bach 1990), much of which covers fairly

brief periods of time and does not offer a fully strategic account of their use.

104

By reexamining Krehbiel’s (1991) rules data for the 98th and 99th
Congresses and Marshall’s (2002) data for the 97th and 98th Congresses in
conjunction with data on bills that were considered under suspension in the same
period, the question of whether signiﬁcant bias exists as a result of sample
selection is addressed directly. The multivariate MLE models are estimated
using censored probit, providing evidence of the degree of selection bias and at
the same time painting more thorough picture of the two processes side by side.

The chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section, a review of the
literature on suspension of the rules is presented, along with some expectations
regarding the conditions under which this mechanism is likely to be employed.
The subsequent section brieﬂy revisits the restrictive rules literature and the
primary hypotheses contained therein. Next, an overview of the issue of sample
selection issue is provided, followed by a discussion of the data and method
employed in this analysis. The ﬁfth section describes the empirical results. The
chapter concludes with a brief summary of the ﬁndings, the main implications,

and some areas for future research.

Suspension of the Rules

The ability of the House to suspend its standing rules in order to consider
legislation out of regular order is a long-standing component of parliamentary
practice in that body. The current procedure for considering a bill under
suspension of the rules allows for 40 minutes of debate equally divided between

opponents and proponents, prohibits amendments (except for those incorporated

105

 

into the motion by the committee of jurisdiction), and requires a two-thirds vote
for passage. The motion is in order on particular days of the week (Mondays,
Tuesdays, and the last six days of the session), and the right of recognition is
reserved to the Speaker.1

While the procedure as it currently stands is relatively straightforward, it
has evolved over time. Bach (1990) discusses the history of the suspension
motion, tracing it back to its roots in 1822 when the House ﬁrst allowed its rules
to be suspended by a two-thirds vote. For some period of time, the traditional
employment of suspensions involved bringing up a bill for consideration out of
the regular order of business, with the vote on passage occurring separately and
later. This is in contrast to contemporary practice, in which the motion deals with
suspending the rules and passing the bill. Another important innovation in
procedure deals with the Speaker’s right of recognition. At ﬁrst, the Speaker
traditionally recognized members’ indiscriminately. This, coupled with an
increasingly frequent use of the procedure for petty or simply position-taking
measures, gave rise to limitations similar to those persisting to this day dealing
with the particular days of the week on which suspension motions were in order,
the Speaker’s right of recognition, and debate rules.

Cooper (1990) identiﬁes a few distinct segments of time over which rather
stark differences in the frequency of suspension motions are evident. From 1822
until the emergence of the party era (beginning about 1880), suspensions were

ascendant in the House. With the rise to prominence of the Rules Committee

 

1 See Oleszek (2001: 112-115) for a detailed discussion of the suspension procedure in the
House.

106

during the period of strong speakers, and the expanding ability of the leadership
to employ special rules in setting the legislative agenda, the need to rely on
motions to suspend the rules diminished signiﬁcantly. "As Cooper notes, the
motion “had been transformed into a method used occasionally to deal with
relatively non-controversial matters in an expeditious manner” (32). Suspensions
remained mostly in the background of House politics through World War II, with
the exception of a few notable cases.2 The use of suspensions has increased
rather dramatically since the 19503, a trend Cooper attributes to an increasing
legislative workload and greater levels of ﬂoor uncertainty due to the changing
status of committees and the waning prerogatives enjoyed by committee
leadership over junior members (a la Smith 1989, Bach and Smith 1988). A
growing reliance by the House, and the majority party in particular, on
suspensions in the late 19703 led to criticism that it was being employed on
increasingly controversial and signiﬁcant legislation. In light of this criticism,
House Democrats changed their party rules to disallow the Speaker to recognize
suspension motions on bills estimated to cost more than $100 million in any ﬁscal
year.3 ‘-
In recent years, which have been characterized by heightened levels of
partisanship, Wolfensberger (2002) notes the rather ironic fact that more and
more bills are proceeding through suspension of the rules. He argues that the
pattern reﬂects the majority party leadership’s interest in providing an outlet to

members who have fewer opportunities for legislative initiative on the ﬂoor in the

 

2 See Cooper (1990: 32-37) for an enlightening discussion of this period.
3 On this point, and for more details, see Bach (1990: 59), Rohde (1991: 95-98), and
Wolfensberger (2002: 7-9).

107

context of major legislation that is increasingly being considered under highly
restrictive structured rules. Interestingly, according to Wolfensberger, about
three-quarters of bills enacted into law in the 106th Congress were considered
under suspension of the rules in the House.

Despite the relatively broad, and of late, growing, body of descriptive
research documenting the changes in the suspension process over time and
seeking to explain changes in its use and the procedural context surrounding its
employment, we lack a compelling treatment of the subject that seeks to place it
within the broader legislative context. Such an analysis might, for instance,
attempt to delineate the conditions under which particular pieces of legislation will
be treated under the varied alternatives for bringing legislation to the ﬂoor for
consideration. Thus, the ability to predict at the level of individual bills the choice
on the part of the leadership to employ one avenue to the ﬂoor as opposed to
another appears to be an area of Congress that is largely untapped by scholars
and one that offers the potential for a more nuanced understanding of a critical
area of legislative politics. As will be discussed in greater length in the next
section, other aspects of legislative agenda setting have received much more
attention, but the focus tends to be on one component in isolation from the
others. Finally, while the literature offers a number of intuitive explanations of the
logic underlying the choice to employ suspension of the rules, few (if any)
scholars have attempted to test these expectations in a systematic fashion.

One exception to this generalization is Grant and Hasecke’s (1999) study

of the duration from introduction to ﬂoor consideration under suspension of the

108

rules on bills introduced in the 105th Congress. Although their characterization of
the suspension procedure as one that frequently bypasses committees and
undercuts committee power (see, e.g., page 2) seemsto overstate the case
when contrasted with the studies discussed above, they do identify a few factors,
such as committee action and simplicity of the legislation, that affect the timing
and likelihood that a bill will be considered under suspension. Their study takes
a step toward integrating suspensions into the broader theories of congressional
organization, as their framework considers suspension of the rules in the context
of the committee system. However, Grant and Hasecke’s study, like most of the
work on ﬂoor agenda setting, treats other means to the ﬂoor (such as special
rules) as censored (7). As such, the focus remains on one avenue to the ﬂoor to
the exclusion of others. It seems plausible, however, to imagine that the duration
of time between introduction and passage on bills called up under a suspension
motion, while informative, may not speak as directly to the question of agenda
setting as a study of which bills proceed through which route, why, and how.
Having painted a brief sketch of the literature dealing with suspension of

the rules in the House of Representatives, it is necessary to turn to a discussion

of the factors contributing to its use on particular pieces of legislation. The
literature generally holds that suspensions are reserved for relatively minor,
sometimes inconsequential, legislation.4 This is not to say that there are not

exceptions, because cases certainly do exist in which it is obvious that either the

 

‘ This characterization likely holds for most members on most bills called up under suspension of
the rules. Of course, there are usually a small number of members who, on any particular bill,
possess intense preferences and therefore would not consider the bill inconsequential—thus its
appearance on the calendar.

109

committee or the leadership (or both) miscalculated and failed to realize potential
controversy. Cooper (1990: 83) notes a number of reasons why suspension
motions fail, including such miscalculations of broader chamber sentiment, the
occasionally troublesome nature of the limitation on amendments inherent in the
context of a suspension, and even the cascading effect of apparent controversy
on the ﬂoor.5

However, it is quite safe to say that most suspension votes evoke little
controversy, whether of a partisan nature or otherwise. In fact, most votes are
not even recorded, but rather are adopted by a simple voice vote. And, while
interesting to note, the few cases in which overt controversy was evident can
often be attributed to miscues on the part of the leadership, unforeseen
objections, or underlying tactical considerations. One case worth noting in which
the leadership used suspension for tactical purposes occurred in the spring of
1998 on campaign ﬁnance reform legislation. Rather than run the risk of voting
on a rule, which could be modiﬁed to allow votes on widely favored provisions
that were opposed by the Republican leadership, the decision was made to call
up a bill under suspension of the rules. Speaker Gingrich hoped that by doing so
he could fulﬁll his promise of allowing a vote on campaign ﬁnance reform while
determining in advance that his opponents would not carry the day. The
measure went down to defeat for a host of reasons. However, this example

dealing with the nature of consideration under suspension of the rules hearkens

 

5 Cooper (1990) notes that because of the traditionally consensual environment in which
suspensions are debated and voted upon, many members have come to accept them as routine
and generally possessing little that could lead to electoral concern. Thus, when controversy does
emerge, it catches the attention of representatives (83-84).

110

 

to a more general point on the procedure in question. That is, suspensions hold
some of the same features as restrictive rules in that they preclude amendments.
Cooper (1990: 74-75) suggests that under normal circumstances, the bills
brought up under suspension would probably be considered under an open rule
were the suspension not employed, so the fact that suspensions shield bills from
amendments is an attractive feature. Thus, it is worthwhile to bear in mind the
nature of amendment protection offered in a suspension motion, all the while
realizing that the supermajority requirement and unique amendment environment
carry with them consequent considerations for the leadership in setting the ﬂoor
agenda.

Given what we know about the history of suspension, along with the
tactical and practical considerations underlying its use in the House, what
expectations may be drawn for predicting and more fully explaining when it is
likely to be employed? It is important to realize that for bills evoking any level of
controversy, and even those with the potential to raise the objection of at least
one member, the leadership is effectively faced with scheduling measures via
either a special rule or a motion to suspend the rules.6 Given some marginal

expectation, realization, or worry of controversy, what motivates the leadership to

 

° This relationship is said to hold true effectively in that there exist a few other means by which
bills can make it to the ﬂoor for consideration. The most frequent alternative, though still
comparatively rare, is for a bill to be agreed to by unanimous consent. As the name suggests,
the objection of a single member makes this path impassible. However, there are a small number
of bills considered in this fashion in any one Congress. Additionally, though occurring very rarely,
bills may make it to the ﬂoor due to the “privileged” status they hold by virtue of their committee
reference, or by simply being pulled from one of the multiple House calendars. This analysis is
conﬁned simply to bills brought to the ﬂoor via suspensions or special rules because these two
categories encompass the lion’s share of the legislative agenda, and empirically modeling the
other types would pose a number of challenges that would seem to exceed the value added.

111

 

choose one approach in favor of the other? A series of factors can be said to be
important. First, given that the suspension motion requires a supermajority vote
for passage, controversy (particularly if it is nontrivial or partisan in nature) may
preclude the leadership from pursuing the suspension route. Thus, the behavior
related to the bill in committee is often a strong indicator of the nature of
discourse regarding the bill and the broader issues it invokes.

Second, bills with a formal stamp of committee approval are probably less
likely to be considered under suspension. This is likely due in part to at least two
factors: (1) the nature of the relationship between the party leadership and
committee leadership in scheduling bills under suspension and (2) the narrow
scope of much of this legislation. Most bills considered under suspension are
done so at the request of the chair of the committee of referral, and the details
are worked out with the Speaker and/or the majority ﬂoor leader. Because such
bills are relatively narrow in scope, they are less likely to have attracted much, if
any, attention in committee. In many cases, the committee leadership may feel
that it is not necessary to schedule a hearing on a bill of little or no consequence
that nearly allmembers will support. Thus, a committee report is not necessary,
as the relevant negotiation and decision making can be carried out between the
committee and party leadership.

Also impacting the choice of procedure regarding ﬂoor scheduling is the
scope of a piece of legislation. Bills of great detail, touching on broad federal
programs with large funding components, are both less likely to be

noncontroversial, ceteris paribus, and more likely to run into caucus rules

112

eww

regarding the acceptability of handling them under suspension. Thus, there is an
a priori expectation regarding the incidence of rules versus suspensions.

With these considerations in mind, a brief dichssion of the nature of
special rules in the House of Representatives is presented next. Because one of
the central aims of this analysis is to merge competing strands of theory into a
more encompassing model of legislative agenda setting, it is necessary to touch
brieﬂy on the primary theories and expectations of the competing theories of
committee organization and their implications for the use of restrictive rules in the

House.

Restrictive Rules

For some time, students of legislative politics in the U.S. House have
focused a great deal of attention on the role of the Rules Committee. The allure
of this committee is largely a function of the unique role it plays in setting the ﬂoor
agenda of the House through special rules it reports to the chamber that, if
adopted, govern the consideration of bills. The committee has long been seen
as an entity acting on behalf of the Speaker and the majority party leadership
(see, e.g., Oppenheimer 1977). While there have certainly been periods of time
in which this was not the case, such as when a conservative coalition of southern
Democrats and Republicans dominated the committee despite the numerical
Democratic majority, the history of the committee hints (some would say
screams) at the inﬂuence of the majority party’s interests. The critical power of

the committee lies in the nature of the special rules it reports—by ruling out of

113

 

order certain amendments and/or making others in order, many have argued that
the committee has the opportunity to sway ﬂoor outcomes from what the
Chamber’s median voter prefers.

This view of the Rules Committee, and particularly the partisan
characterization of its role, has been a matter of dispute. Alongside the
developing theories of legislative organization and the role of committees in the
House, a series of analyses of both formal and empirical orientation has sought
to place the Rules Committee as the arbiter between and servant of various
centers of power or interests in the chamber.7 The three competing centers of
power are said to be (1) members of particularistic committees with high
demands over subsets of policy, particularly in the distributive arena (thus the
term distributive theory), (2) the median member of the chamber, whose interest
lies inproducing legislation on which he or she is informed about the policy
consequences (the crux of the argument here centers on majoritarianism, a la
the median voter theorem, and informational motivations), and (3) the majority
party or some member of the majority party (often the party median). A brief
exposition of the underlying logic of each perspective is presented next.

According to distributive theory, the committee system is organized in
such a way as to allow for gains from exchange (Weingast and Marshall 1988).
In this model, the Rules Committee serves to protect cross-committee logrolls by
employing restrictive rules on distributive legislation. In contrast, informational

theory claims that committees are encouraged to specialize in particular areas of

 

7 For a good overview of the three dominant theories, as well as critiques of their shortcomings,
see Shepsle and Weingast (1995) and Groseclose and King (2001).

114

policy. The reward for specialization and the transmission of useful information
to the chamber is restrictive rules that protect the products of informative
committees (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1987, 1988; Krehbiel 1991, 1997). Finally,
partisan theory contends that committees in general, and the Rules Committee in
particular, are organized in such a way that beneﬁts accrue not to the chamber
as a whole (as with informational theory) but rather to the majority party.8 As
such, restrictive rules are most often employed to protect legislation of interest to
the majority party and carrying likely electoral implications (Sinclair 1994,
Marshall 2002). Further, Dion and Huber (1996) argue that the incidence of
restrictive rules is related directly to the preference conﬁguration of the Rules
Committee vis-a-vis the committee of referral and the ﬂoor.

Because the analysis to be presented here is principally concerned with
placing special rules within the larger context of ﬂoor agenda setting in the
House, the prior studies of restrictive rules that have focused on the mechanisms
underlying rule choice at the level of the bill-rule pairing merit most of the
attention. That is, while much has been (and continues to be) written about the
competing theories of legislative organization, for the purposes here, it is most
important to draw from existing models of rule choice at the bill level. To date,
there have been only a few studies that seek to model the restrictiveness of
special rules at the micro-level on the full sample of rules. While some studies

examine the dynamic in the aggregate (e.g., Dion and Huber 1996), and others

 

8 See, e.g., Rohde (1991) and Cox and McCubbins (1993) for general presentations of the
primary partisan perspectives. Partisan theories may differ somewhat regarding the degree to
which party interest reign supreme across all facets of congressional politics, and agenda control
in particular, but a continuing dialogue seems to be linking the assorted perspectives (Rohde
1994, Cox and McCubbins 2002, Finocchiaro and Rohde 2002).

115

look at subsets of the rules agenda dealing with “major legislation” (Sinclair
1994), two studies have taken a broad, encompassing look at all (or nearly all)
the special rules reported in one or more Congresses'(Krehbiel 1991, 1997;
Marshall 2002).9

Krehbiel, who analyzes the choice of rules in the 98th and 99th
Congresses, considers the restrictive rule phenomenon to be a product of an
informational and largely majoritarian motive in congressional organization. In
contrast, Marshall purports that there is an inherent partisan structure to the
special rules process, which he argues his data (drawn from the 97‘", 98‘“, 104‘“,
and 105th Congresses) demonstrates. For the purposes of this analysis, and to
take advantage of the slight overlap in the time series of previous studies, the
focus here is on the 97‘“, 98‘“, and 99th Congresses and the corresponding work
presented by Krehbiel and Marshall. To conserve space and for ease of
exposition, the hypotheses and primary variables of the competing theories will
be referenced in passing in subsequent sections of this chapter. Tables 4.3 and
4.4 present this information, for Krehbiel and Marshall respectively, in table

format for the interested reader.

Sample Selection and the Uniﬁcation of Legislative Agenda Setting
As noted in the introduction, one of the primary aims of this analysis is to

incorporate the two principal means by which legislation is scheduled for ﬂoor

 

9 Note that Krehbiel (1997) is essentially an extension of the model seeking to explain rule choice
presented in his earlier work (Krehbiel 1991). As he notes, there are two “minor differences”
between the later analysis and that presented in his book. In contrasting the results, Krehbiel
maintains that the “main substantive ﬁndings” and ”the thrust of the findings” are not affected
(19972935)

116

 

consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives. This step toward building a
comprehensive theory that accounts for scheduling at the bill level is important in
that, ﬁrst, procedural choices do not occur in vacuum—that is, the leadership of
Congress inherently makes a choice between the various alternatives at their
disposal. The decision with which they are faced is more involved than simply
whether a bill should be brought to the ﬂoor under a restrictive or an open rule,
although this choice receives most of the attention when people think or talk
about how the House schedules legislation. As previously noted, many more
bills are brought to the ﬂoor via suspension of the rules. Second, if the two
processes are related, and there is cause to suspect that they are, then there
exists the potential that the selection process (by which a bill is ﬁrst sorted
between suspension and special rules, and then subsequently for those receiving
a rule, re-sorted between open and restrictive) introduces bias into estimates that
model the two phenomena separately. In fact, Krehbiel (1991) alludes to this
possibility in discussing his sample of special rules:

“In light of the alternative paths that legislation may take in the

House, this sample is obviously not a random sample of all

legislation that comes to the ﬂoor. How misleading are the

inferences, given this selection bias? The bad news is that relative

to other bills, these are atypical. . .While a more comprehensive

analysis of bill-speciﬁc procedural choice that seeks to predict, for

example, bills that come up under suspension as opposed to under

a rule would be worthwhile, it is beyond the scope of this analysis”

(167).

To what degree might the choice of a restrictive versus an open rule be

related to the choice between suspension of the rules versus a special rule?

First, it seems quite plausible to assume that these two processes are affected

117

by a number of common factors. For example, in the informational perspective,
the complexity of legislation is said to be a component in determining whether a
bill ought to be awarded amendment protection on the ﬂoor. A similar, though in
this case inverse, logic plays out in determining the applicability of suspensions
in that they are generally reserved for more minor legislation with a lower price
tag. More generally, suspensions offer at least the same and often times greater
levels of amendment protection than do restrictive rules, such that they are a
viable alternative to restrictive rules in those instances in which there is a
relatively high threshold of consensus. Thus, the same types of factors that
contribute to the leadership’s predilection for restrictive rules may lead them to
employ suspensions when feasible. Second, though the two processes have
generally been considered independent of one another, it is appealing to think of
them together. While one might argue that the choices are not separate
processes—the leadership may choose from among the three alternatives
(suspension, open rule, restrictive rule) simultaneously, this view possesses
some empirical and practical limitations. Empirically speaking, one does not
know in advance what the outcome will be if the Rules Committee is asked to -l .
produce a special rule.10 When it comes to statistical modeling, employing an
estimator that considers the three simultaneously (an ordered probit, for

example) unnecessarily constrains the effect of the variables to be monotonic.

 

'0 The cost of the leadership miscalculating on a rule is much greater than misjudging support for
a suspension vote. In the former case, the vote is taken solely on the procedural question, and
there exists the potential for agenda setting power to shift to the minority party (see Finocchiaro
and Rohde 2002). On the other hand, a suspension vote ties together the procedural and
substantive question, and defeat simply kills the bill. It does not open the ﬂoor to minority party
agenda setting. I thank Dave Rohde for drawing my attention to this important distinction
between the two procedures.

118

Should these suppositions hold true, the statistical effects of failing to take
into account the nature of the relationship between these two agenda setting
processes have the potential to signiﬁcantly undermine the results of existing
analyses. The dangers inherent in selection bias are well documented in political
science and the social sciences more generally (Achen 1986, Dubin and Rivers
1989). Essentially, if one were to model two related processes separately, while
in reality they possess common factors driving outcomes, then the disturbance
terms of each of the separate equations would be correlated. In this context,
biased coefﬁcients and/or inefﬁciency are likely products. Drawing inferences
from estimates suffering from the problem of selection bias is therefore a cause
for concern. Following an emerging body of political science research (see, e.g.,
Berinsky 1999, Reed 2000), I employ a maximum likelihood technique that
explicitly tests for and addresses correlation across the error terms of two
equations—a selection equation (suspension versus special rule) and an
outcome equation (open versus restrictive rule). The model produces three
estimated parameters of interest: a vector of independent variables 81 for the
selection equation, a vector of independent variables [32 for the outcome
equation, and the correlation of the errors between the two equations p. If p is
not signiﬁcantly discernible from zero, then we are unable to reject the null of
independence between the two equations. If, on the other hand, p is signiﬁcant,

then the errors are correlated and the two processes are related.

119

Data and Method
The data employed in this analysis are drawn from two sources. For the
sake of comparability, the time period covered is the Same as that of Krehbiel
(1991, 1997), who examines the 98th and 99th Congresses (1983-1986), and
Marshall (2002), who examines the 97th and 98th Congresses (1981-1984). The
data on bills receiving special rules is the identical data employed by each of
these authors, both of whom generously provided their datasets. The variables
relating to the selection equation (and the choice between restrictive and open
rules) were collected using Thomas and Scorpio, two online sources of
congressional data offered by the Library of Congress. Included in the analysis
are all House bills considered on the ﬂoor with an eventual passage vote taken.11
Krehbiel codes a series of variables for each bill that are related to
informational and distributive expectations. These include distributive content,
urgency, the number of laws cited, and the number of Republican and
Democratic cosponsors (all of which relate directly to the bill). In addition, he : .
includes a series of variables relating to the committee to which the bill was
referred, including committee seniority, preference outlier, and heterogeneity.
Table 4.3 describes the measurement of and expectations for the variables in

greater depth.

 

1‘ For the sake of simplicity (and making the data collection more manageable), as well as for
comparison purposes, only House bills are included (that is, those bearing the preface “H.R.”). It
is predominantly measures of this type that possess policy consequences—most resolutions do
not. Further, it is primarily House bills that get considered under special rules, though there are a
few exceptions. The collection criteria employed here allow for a close match with the data
employed by Krehbiel (1991, 1997) and Marshall (2002), though there are a few discrepancies in
that their data includes some resolutions and a handful of Senate bills. The results are generally
quite comparable, however. Future analyses may incorporate more bill types.

120

Marshall’s dataset is similarly constructed, with many of the same
variables employed. While he does not incorporate distributive content (instead
using a dummy variable capturing whether or not the committee of referral is
considered a “constituency” committee) or committee seniority, Marshall’s model
bolsters Krehbiel’s framework by introducing a series of partisan variables to
allow for a more direct and parallel test of the three theories. These measures
seek to capture the position of the majority party median relative to the
committee of referral and the ﬂoor, as well as the relative position of the Rules
Committee and the distance between the median member of the referral
committee and the median of the ﬂoor. Additionally, since Marshall’s data
includes both singly— and multiply-referred legislation, a dummy variable for
multiple referral is included to capture the potential effect of bills considered in
this context. I

For the full sample of bills (i.e., those considered under either suspension
or a special rule), the following variables are collected: committee referral(s),
whether there was a conﬂictual vote to report the bill to the ﬂoor, whether the bill
was reported to the ﬂoor by the committee, and the number of CR8 subject terms
identiﬁed in Thomas. Procedural choice is binary in the context of the models to
be estimated here. That is, there is a choice between suspension and a special
rule. If the latter route is selected, then a subsequent choice is made between an
open and a restrictive rule. For the sake of comparison, and to simply replicate
the substantive results of the existing models used here as a frame of reference,

separate probit models are estimated for each of the choice criteria. Presented

121

alongside the individual probit results are the estimates of a censored probit
model that directly incorporates the nature of the choice context and the
possibility of correlation across the disturbance tenns'of the two separate

equations.‘2

Results
Krehbiel’s Infomtiongl Model and the Uniﬁed Model

Table 4.1 presents the estimates of a series of models predicting
procedural choice. In panel 1, a traditional probit model predicting the
restrictiveness of special rules, and replicating Krehbiel (1997), is displayed.13
The substantive results are generally quite consistent with those in existing
informational models. For instance, bills that cite numerous laws (and are
thereby considered more complex) are more likely to receive restrictive rules, in
line with the theory. Similarly, the heterogeneity of the signals being sent by the
committee, as indicated by the number of minority (Republican) cosponsors, is a
positive factor in inﬂuencing the use of a restrictive rule. On the other hand,
committees considered to be preference outliers relative to the chamber are
signiﬁcantly less likely to receive ﬂoor protection via a special rule. All of these
results comport with the expectations and ﬁndings of previous research on
restrictive rules from the informational perspective. Also not unlike prior ﬁndings,
urgent legislation is more likely to receive a restrictive rule, while legislation with

higher levels of distributive content is less likely to receive such protection on the

 

‘2 All models are estimated in Stata 8.0.
'3 See, in particular, Krehbiel (1997), Table 3, Model 3.

122

ﬂoor.14 The only divergent ﬁnding between the results presented here and those
of Krehbiel (1997) is the coefﬁcient for heterogeneity—it falls slightly outside the
conventional bounds of statistical signiﬁcance. However, it should be noted that
the effect of this variable is fairly susceptible to slight changes in model
speciﬁcation, as indicated by subsequent models presented in Krehbiel (1997).
As a whole, the model displayed here correctly predicts 84.4% of the cases, a
slight improvement over the model with which it is compared.

The second column of Table 4.1 presents the results of a probit model
estimating the likelihood that a bill receives a special rule as opposed to being
brought to the ﬂoor under a suspension motion. The complexity of the bill, as
indicated by the number of subjects, is significantly related to the initial choice
regarding procedure. Bills that are more involved and complicated are much
more likely to receive a rule than those that are comparatively simple.
Additionally, bills that received formal committee approval via the committee’s
reporting the bill to the ﬂoor are more likely to be considered under a special rule.
This suggests that in many of the cases where bills seem to formally bypass
committee, they end up being considered in a rather consensual venue—the
suspension of the rules. Perhaps this is not surprising in that committee leaders
have signiﬁcant leeway with the party leadership in determining bills that should
be brought up under suspension of the rules. Finally, conﬂict on the vote to
report the bill out of committee, which is the vote most analogous to the passage

vote on the ﬂoor, is positively related to the use of special rule. That is, when

 

1‘ Krehbiel (1991, 1997) discusses to varying degrees the surprising sign of the distributive
coefﬁcient, in light of the large literature which seems to hold that restrictive rules are likely to be
employed to encourage and enforce gains-from-exchange, or Iogrolling, agreements.

123

there is conﬂict in committee at a level approaching the threshold for
supermajority passage, leaders appear much more likely to go the route of
needing a simple majority vote for passage.15

Turning to the variables common to both models, which were included
under the assumption that there may be similarities in the rationale for using
suspensions in line with the rationale for using restrictive rules because they both
offer amendment protection, the results are somewhat mixed. Committee
seniority does not lead to a lower likelihood for the employment of special rules—
in fact, the opposite is true. However, more heterogeneous committees are
associated with a higher likelihood of suspensions (and inversely, a lower
likelihood of receiving a special rule). The coefﬁcient for committee outliers is
indistinguishable from zero in the suspension vs. special rule equation. As a
whole, this model predicts the bills on which special rules will be employed quite
well—the percent correctly predicted in this case is fully 83.0%.

The estimates resulting from the uniﬁed model employing censored probit
are reported in the third column of Table 4.1. This allows for comparisons
between the uniﬁed model of procedural choice and the separate probit models
of special rule vs. suspension and restrictive vs. open rule. In the censored
probit model, the two dependent variables are special rule (the selection
equation, shown in the lower portion of the column) and restrictive rule (the
outcome equation, shown in the upper portion of the column). Modeling
procedural choice in this fashion allows for the estimation of all the variables

simultaneously, and should selection bias be evident, provides more conﬁdence

 

'5 Conﬂict is deﬁned as occurring when less than 75% voted in favor of reporting the bill.

124

in the accuracy and robustness of the coefﬁcient estimates. With these
preliminary points in mind, I turn to a direct discussion of the results.

It is evident that there are some substantive differences based on the
estimation procedure. For instance, while heterogeneity as measured by
minority party cosponsorship plays a signiﬁcant role in affecting the use of a
restrictive rule in the independent probit model, the effect washes out in the
uniﬁed model. In contrast, while committee seniority, which is said to capture
committee expertise, fails to exhibit a signiﬁcant inﬂuence in the separate probit,
it is a significant positive inﬂuence in the uniﬁed model. The remaining variables
in the outcome portion of the censored probit model remain roughly consistent
with their counterparts in the simple probit in terms of sign and signiﬁcance. Not
surprisingly, there are no changes in the selection portion of the equation when
contrasted with the probit model predicting whether a suspension or special rule
will be employed. This is due to the fact that the censored probit does not
incorporate the estimates of the outcome equation into the estimates of the
selection equation.

Evidence of correlation across the two independent probit models beyond
the changes occurring at the level of individual variables is also available. The
parameter p is positive and signiﬁcant, suggesting that the factors inﬂuencing the
incidence of special rules also exert an inﬂuence on the likelihood that a
restrictive rule will be employed. Further, a likelihood ratio test that the two
simple probits are independent can be rejected with a relatively high level of

conﬁdence. Thus, based on an examination of one existing model of restrictive

125

rules, there are a few indications that the two procedural choices of interest here

are related, although to date they have been modeled independently (if at all).

Marshall’s Partisan Model and the Uniﬁed Moc_i_e_l

Having reconsidered Krehbiel’s model of restrictive rules based on
informational theory, I turn next to an examination of Marshall’s partisan model of
restrictive rules. The dependent variables in the models are the same as those
presented above: rule vs. suspension, and restrictive vs. unrestrictive rule. Table
4.2 presents results analogous to those of Table 4.1, the obvious difference
being that the baseline model is now that of Marshall. In panel 1, a probit model
replicating Marshall’s is presented, the only difference being that the model is
based just on singly referred bills (for the sake of comparability with the results in
Table 4.1).16 The general results are quite similar to those presented by
Marshall. As in his analysis, the ﬁndings related to the informational theory are
somewhat mixed: some measures are signiﬁcant while others are not.
Consistent with Marshall’s results, and the informational perspective, increased
levels of heterogeneity are associated with a higher likelihood that a bill will
receive a restrictive rule. In the estimates presented here, outlying committees
tend also to be more protected via restrictive rules, with the remaining

informational variables exhibiting no statistically discernible impact.17

 

‘6 More specifically, the model is that of Marshall (2002), Table 2, Model 4.

‘7 While one variable (committee outlier) obtains statistical signiﬁcance in these estimates, two
coefﬁcients are not signiﬁcant here though they were signiﬁcant in Marshall’s analysis: bill
urgency (a distributive measure) and majority party distance (a partisan measure). Because of
the slightly different samples employed, and the fact that I am most concerned with issues of
selection related to the choice between suspension of the rules and special rules, the differences

126

Additionally, and consistent with earlier ﬁndings, the legislative proﬁle variable
(indicating the position of the Rules Committee vis-a-vis the committee of referral
and the ﬂoor) is negative and signiﬁcant. Committees considered to be in the
distributive mold (pork barrel) are less likely to be protected via a restrictive rule,
while bills referred to committees whose median majority party member is more
moderate than the party’s median are more likely to be protected (party median
variable). As a whole, the model performs quite well—its predictive success is
greater than 90 percent.

Turning next to the probit model predicting whether a bill will be
considered under suspension or a special rule, the same basic model is
employed as that discussed previously. As a whole, the results comport roughly
with the earlier model, with two primary exceptions. First, in this case, a bill
referred to an outlying committee was signiﬁcantly more likely to be considered
under a rule than under suspension. This is not surprising in that the ﬂoor is
probably not inclined to offer the amendment protections inherent in a
suspension to a committee with which it is likely to disagree. Second, unlike the
results extending Krehbiel’s model, whether or not the bill was reported by
committee exerts no inﬂuence on the decision of rule vs. suspension at
conventional levels of signiﬁcance. As a whole, the model performs rather well,
correctly predicting 78 percent of the cases.

The estimates based on the censored probit model incorporating both

stages of the agenda-setting process are presented in the third column of Table

 

described here are not surprising and do not seem to suggest cause for concern about the
primary question.

127

4.2. Somewhat unlike the results reported in Table 4.1, the uniﬁed model based
on Marshall’s speciﬁcation in the outcome equation does not differ dramatically
from the independent probits. The sign and signiﬁcance for all variables are
consistent across the models save for one, committee heterogeneity, which is not
signiﬁcant when estimated in the context of the complete model. Further, the
estimate of p does not offer compelling evidence that the two equations are
related (p = .17). Similarly, the likelihood ratio test of independence of the
equations, which produces a p value of .25, cannot be rejected at conventional
levels of signiﬁcance.

As a whole, the results of the informational and partisan models presented
here merit scrutiny. While the substantive impact of the separate modeling
strategy appears to be modest, in that the estimates are not dramatically different
for most variables, the results suggests that there are some inherent
characteristics of the selection process leading to House ﬂoor consideration of
bills that have implications for the inferences drawn from existing models. While
the estimates do not change dramatically when incorporated into a uniﬁed model,
there is evidence that Krehbiel’s model of restrictive rules suffers from selection
bias, and that minor substantive changes occur in both Krehbiel and Marshall’s
estimates when modeled alongside suspension of the rules. While the results do
not dramatically alter our understanding of restrictive rules in the House per se,
they do suggest that future studies of procedural choice would beneﬁt by
incorporating a more nuanced approach to the variety of scheduling alternatives

athand.

128

Discussion

This chapter represents an initial step in two directions. The ﬁrst is an
attempt to build a broad model of the procedural choices underlying agenda
setting in the U.S. House of Representatives. As such, attention has been given
to the often—overlooked suspension of the rules. The second goal of the chapter,
running alongside the ﬁrst, is to ascertain whether, and if so, the degree to which,
existing models of restrictive rules may suffer from selection bias by failing to
incorporate other procedural options that may be related to them. The results
described above offer some preliminary and modest evidence that further
analysis may be warranted, in that (1) it appears possible to predict quite well the
likelihood that a bill will be scheduled via suspension of the rules and (2) the
choice regarding rule type and procedure (suspension versus special rule) are
likely not independent.

However, it is important to keep in mind a number of caveats. First, the
data employed here cover just three Congresses, and only certain types of bills.
Second, as has been noted elsewhere (see, e.g., Clark and Reed 2003: 84), the
effects of selection bias may be attenuated if the speciﬁcation of the outcome
equation is improved. Thus, if there are issues with omitted variables in existing
models of restrictive rules, they may appear under the guise of selection bias in a
censored probit. This point seems to be born out to some degree in the fact that
Marshall’s model represents a more thorough speciﬁcation of the competing

theories, and in terms of the selection effects diagnostics, does not appear to

129

suffer from the problem to the degree that Krehbiel's model does. This points to
the need to continue thinking speciﬁcally about the interplay between the theories
and the proper speciﬁcation of an encompassing model of restrictive rules, and
procedural choice more generally.

With these caveats in mind, it seems worthwhile to proceed to a larger
scale analysis in the future. Realizing the critical importance (in any context) of
proper model speciﬁcation, and particularly in the case of selection models, a
more encompassing model of restrictive rules that nests competing explanations
should be composed and tested. If one or more of the existing models of
restrictive rules omits a signiﬁcant explanatory variable, then the inferences
drawn from it may be limited. Similarly, without such a test, it is more difﬁcult to
ascertain the effects of sample selection, if any, in the broader context of
procedural choice. The results provided here indicate that there exists the
potential for selection bias in modeling House agenda setting, though the general
results of two existing models based on data from three Congresses are roughly
consistent when a censored model is employed. However, the ﬁndings suggest
that future studies should account for the interdependence of choices in ﬂoor
scheduling in the House.

Furthermore, it will be worthwhile to consider additional factors that may
play into the decision modeled in the selection equation. That is, it is possible (if
not likely) that additional explanatory variables related to the choice between
suspension and special rules may be obtained. While the predictive success of

the model as it stands is good, it is plausible to imagine that even more detail

130

may be provided about this choice process, thus offering a more complete and
rich explanation for this frequently overlooked but quite important mode of

scheduling legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

131

Table 4.1: Predicting Procedural Choice in the House:
An Informational Rationale

 

 

 

 

Variable Simple Probit Simple Probit Censored Probit
[3 (SE) [3 (SE) B (SEL

Distributive Content -1.960* 1.064 -1.821* 1.024
Urgency 1 .072“ 0.469 0866* 0.451
Laws Cited 0.093“ 0.022 0.107" 0.021
Committee Seniority 0.095 0.078 0.161“ 0.079
Preference Outlier -0.054** 0.020 -0.055** 0.019
Heterogeneity 0.081 0.055 0.045 0.056
Republican Cosponsors 0043* 0.026 0.036 0.024
Democratic Cosponsors -0.002 0.007 -0.002 0.006
Congress 0.259 0.262 0.323 0.240
Restrictive Rule a -29.672 26.428 -35.735 24.270
Committee Seniority 0.134“ 0.050 0.111" 0.050
Preference Outlier -0.010 0.009 -0.005 0.009
Heterogeneity -0.112** 0.023 , -0.114** 0.022
Subjects 0.027" 0.003 0.029" 0.003
Committee Report 0421* 0.246 0.720" 0.282
Conﬂict in Committee 0654* 0.259 0.573" 0.262
Special Rule a 1.621 ** 0.826 1.458* 0.833
p Correlation Parameter 0.640“ 0.292
LR Test of Independent Equations ()6) 3.23*
Log-Likelihood -68.254 -274.186 -335.553

N 180 669 667

 

*=p<.10;**=p<.05

132

Table 4.2: Predicting Procedural Choice in the House:
A Partisan Rationale

 

 

 

 

Variable Simple Probit Simple Probit Censored Probit
[3 (SE) [3 (SE) [3 (SE)
Legislative Proﬁle -1.322** 0.552 -1.211** 0.549
Pork Barrel -1.940** 0.569 -1.974** 0.622
Bill Urgency 0.809 0.528 0.678 0.499
# of Laws Cited -0.008 0.014 -0.007 0.014
Committee Outlier -14.221* 7.522 -19.700** 8.096
Heterogeneity 15.414* 8.142 1 1.457 8.849
Minority Cosponsors 0.020 0.025 0.030 0.026
Majority Cosponsors -0.014 0.012 -0.018 0.013
Party Median 1.626" 0.467 1.461" 0.446
Majority Party Distance -8.448 6.482 -8.958 6.647
Restrictive Rule a 1.836 1.438 2.597* 1.466
Committee Outlier 2868* 1.467 3.145“ 1.478
Heterogeneity -7.116** 1.808 . -7.200** 1.832
Subjects 0.026** 0.003 0.026“ 0.003
Committee Report 0.129 0.259 0.246 0.286
Conﬂict in Committee 0.982“ 0.308 1.045“ 0.307
Special Rule (1 -1.214** 0.262 -1.370** 0.289
p Correlation Parameter -0.411 0.296
LR Test of Independent Equations (38) 1.33
Log-Likelihood -42.683 -274.344 -304.327
N 164 543 537

 

*=p<.10;**=p<.05

133

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136

Chapter 5: Conclusion

In this conclusion, I brieﬂy revisit the motivation for the dissertation,
highlighting once again its foundations in the political science literature and the
reasons for pursuing the questions addressed here. I then return to some of the
main ﬁndings and attempt to draw out the contributions of this project to our
understanding of the contemporary legislative process of the House and the role
of party leaders in that process. I conclude with some potential avenues for
future research, several of which are natural outgrovvths of the present analysis,

while others arise from questions encountered along the way.

The Groundwork

Political parties in the U.S. House of Representatives have displayed
remarkable resilience in the 20th Century despite a variety of institutional and
electoral forces that have impacted them in a number of ways. While their
strength and prominence have most certainly varied over the course of the
century, many have suggested that contemporary political parties in the House
are more similar to their counterparts at the turn of the century than those at mid-
century. The House as it was under the leadership of Thomas B. Reed and
Joseph G. Cannon more than 100 years ago certainly possesses similarities to
the House under Newt Gingrich, an observation frequently made in the months
and years of the latter’s tumultuous rise and fall from power. Of course, even at
the peak of his power, Gingrich did not possess the broad formal powers held by

his Republican forbearers of the late 1800s.

137

Nevertheless, it is interesting to contrast the contemporary U.S. House
with a body that displays what many would consider a more complete picture of
effective party discipline—the House of Commons in the United Kingdom
Parliament. The British Prime Minister (PM), who is the leader of his party and
sits as a member of the House of Commons, enjoys signiﬁcant prerogative. The
Cabinet which he heads is effectively the executive branch of government,
although it is centered in the legislature. Because the PM (and his party) control
access to governmental posts and even the ballot, backbenchers are rather
beholden to the party when it comes to their behavior as MP3. This environment
sows very rich seeds for uniﬁed party behavior and control.1

In the past, American political scientists have often looked across the
Atlantic for insights into the potential beneﬁts of a more disciplined legislature. In
fact, at the midpoint of the 20th Century the American Political Science
Association (1950) issued a report calling for changes that would empower
congressional leaders and bring about a legislative apparatus more closely
paralleling that of Britain. While calls for such radical reform have been unmet,
the institution has not gone without encountering systemic change at various
points in time.

While it is appealing to think of the contemporary House as one of stark
partisanship and strong majority party power, it is important to bear in mind the

fact that leaders, and the parties which they head, are subject ﬁrst and foremost

 

' Of course, party control is not perfect, as evidenced in the recent vote regarding the War in Iraq.
While this is an exceptional case, and did not represent a vote of truly formal consequence in that
PM Tony Blair did not Parliamentary approval in order to enter the war, it shows that the PM is
not assured of perfect cooperation.

138

to the electorate. American legislative politics is unlikely to mirror that of Britain
for a host of reasons—not the least of which is the differences in the mode of
election for its members.2 The electoral foundations'of the U.S. Congress are the
source of party power, and power is granted only in those instances in which
members ﬁnd it in their electoral interest to do so. Thus, while it is clear that
parties are meaningful and inﬂuential to contemporary observers, it need not be
this way.

And of course, recent ﬁndings by students of the institution have been
decidedly mixed over the question of whether parties maintain inﬂuence over
substantive outcomes in the chamber. While most of these works have focused
on the latter stages of the legislative process, this dissertation turned to a more
detailed examination of the pre-ﬂoor legislative process, an arena in which I have
argued that parties and their leaders enjoy the ripest opportunities for inﬂuence.
While this work will most deﬁnitely not be the ﬁnal chapter of this evolving body of
work, its aim has been to direct attention to other avenues of leadership
participation that move toward completing the picture of party leadership
inﬂuence and activity in the House of Representatives.

In much the same way that the role of parties has varied throughout the
20th Century, the legislative process has undergone a number of signiﬁcant
changes. At times, even seemingly innocuous modiﬁcations to the standard

textbook model of operations have brought about major transformations in the

 

2 For drawing my attention to the useful contrast with Britain’s Parliament, I thank Ken Williams.
Further, I am grateful to Ken and the other members of my committee for ﬂeshing out a number of
the implications of the unique institutional traits possessed by this body and its American
counterpart.

139

balance of power and mode of operation within the chamber. Students of
Congress have focused much more attention in recent years on issues of
procedure and the importance that such matters have for our theoretical
understanding of the institution. Yet there are many more facets of the legislative
process that have escaped close scrutiny. The procedural component of this

dissertation has moved in the direction of ﬁlling that gap.

The Findings

In Chapter 2, insights generated by the competing theories of legislative
organization were brought to bear on the question of committee agenda setting.
More specifically, I examined the pattern of legislative success in the committees
of the 105th House. The chapter presents a model predicting the likelihood that a
bill would be reported to the ﬂoor based on a variety of sponsor and bill
characteristics. A central hypothesis in this chapter was that the majority party
will use its procedural advantage in committee to beneﬁt its members by taking
action on their bills. A strong majority party effect was evident, alongside other
characteristics such as ideology and institutional status.

Notably, the probit results presented in this chapter represent one of the
infrequent occasions on which both party afﬁliation and ideology are signiﬁcant.
Because the two are highly correlated (particularly in a polarized Congress such
as the 105‘"), one might have expected the results to wash out. Such a pattern is
a hallmark of the critique of party power in Congress—a recurring challenge has

been to ﬁnd instances in which party is inﬂuential above and beyond members'

140

undenying preferences. That challenge was met in Chapter 2, and the results
lend credence to the notion that parties may enjoy even more inﬂuence at the
committee stage than at later junctures in the legislative process.

Of additional interest in Chapter 2 is the fact that the ﬁndings support
those of earlier studies relating to the importance of context as it relates to
members’ activity and success in committee (see, e.g., Hall 1996). Committee
leaders (chairs and ranking members) and even their rank and ﬁle counterparts
on the committee all seemed to beneﬁt from their prime position on the panel
dealing with issues encapsulated in their legislation. Furthermore, in contrast to
the expectations drawn from informational theory, the empirical relationship
between seniority and legislative did not hold.

Finally, the probit results of Chapter 2 contained an interesting dichotomy
regarding the inﬂuence of cosponsorship. While majority party support for
legislation (via cosponsorship) was positively associated with success in
committee, minority party support exerted a negative inﬂuence. Thus, the signal

being sent by minority party approval works in the opposite way that

 

informational theory predicts. Rather than appealing to members based on the
homogeneity implied in such a situation, legislation with minority party support
was disadvantaged in the 105"1 Congress.

Chapter 3 approached the recurring issue of committee bypass. As the
other side of the committee reporting coin, such activity is much more common in
the House than is its frequently discussed sibling the discharge petition.

However, committee bypass has received little more than passing attention by

141

students of Congress. This chapter placed committee bypass into the broader
context of theories of committee power, noting its potential implications for party
power. It then moved to characterize the various conditions under which bypass
may occur, and provided an example of each. The ﬁve types of bypass noted in
this chapter are: outright bypass, bypass by referral/drafting, bypass in a multiple
referral, nominal bypass, and bypass via special rule.

The chapter concluded with a discussion of the frequency of formal
committee bypass, and the conditions surrounding its employment. One of the
interesting ﬁndings is that as time has passed, bypasses have become much
more commonly associated with signiﬁcant conﬂict on the ﬂoor. In fact, on bills
bypassing the committee system via a special rule in the two Congresses of
Republican control examined here, the minority party was rolled quite frequently.
Thus, as with other areas of House politics in the 19905, the realm of committee
bypass appears not to have been immune from the increasingly partisan and
conﬂictual mode of operation.

The ﬁnal essay deals with the issue of potential selection bias in models of

 

procedural choice in the House. More speciﬁcally, it addresses the possible
limitations of prior studies of restrictive rules which do not integrate the diverse
nature of the choice context. In this chapter, I incorporate a richer perspective of
agenda setting that takes into account the leadership’s choice between
suspension of the rules and restrictive rules as avenues to the ﬂoor. The
empirical modeling employs a censored probit to allow (and test for the presence

of) bias due to sample selection.

142

Two prior studies of restrictive rules were reexamined in this context, one
based on the informational perspective, the other on a partisan rationale.
Evidence of selection bias was present for the informational model, while the
partisan speciﬁcation failed to demonstrate such an effect. One potential
implication that may be drawn from the results is that the partisan model is more
fully speciﬁed, thus capturing some of the potential bias that inheres in the
informational consthct. This underscores the importance of fully developing
theoretical models, even in those instances in which competing perspectives may
be at work. However, in light of the fact that the substantive results of the models
were largely unchanged, it seems safe to say that no signiﬁcant selection bias
encumbered the inferences drawn from the prior analyses.

What are the broader implications of this study? One question to which
the results may be applied has to do with the future employment of partisan
tactics aimed at manipulating the agenda. For instance, is it likely that the
majority party will ﬁnd it necessary to do so given what I have found here. Due to
the institutional framework within which members operate, parties will often ﬁnd it
appealing (if not essential) to creatively structure the agenda. With strong
parties, it may be less necessary for them to engage in overt arm twisting.
However, as long as the minority party maintains the opportunity to meaningfully
participate in the legislative process through avenues such as offering
amendments to bills on the ﬂoor, the majority party stands to beneﬁt from

strategically blocking proposals on occasion.

143

How does this bear on the ﬁndings here? For one, committee bypass will
not likely be a necessary tactic for sidestepping recalcitrant committees.
Because the Republican majority has been successful in bringing committees
(and their chairs in particular) into line with the preferences of the leadership,
there will probably be few occasions on which a committee stands in the way of a
majority party initiative. On the other hand, there has been a growing trend
toward employing restrictive rules that, if adopted, bring about changes to the
legislative language of the underlying bill. As such, we might expect to see
continued skirting of the committee system in this way—not in response to

wayward committees, but rather for a host of other partisan goals.

Extensions

While this dissertation has touched on a number of different components
of the legislative process in the House, there are many things that can occur in
the history of a piece of legislation prior to its reaching the ﬂoor that have been
either ignored or somewhat downplayed in this study. For instance, in much the
same way that party leaders attempt to inﬂuence votes on the ﬂoor of the House,
committee leaders may exert inﬂuence over the voting agenda within their
committee. And there are other junctures on the way to the ﬂoor at which bills
are subject to intervention—those “unorthodox" means described by Sinclair
(2000a). Avenues of inﬂuence such as post-committee adjustment, only
tangentially touched upon here, are quite signiﬁcant in their potential for partisan

inﬂuence. Similarly, the use of conference committees to add to, delete, or

144

 

extensively modify legislation has been a long-standing prerogative of the parties
in Congress.

While these and certainly other areas offer promising opportunities for
future research, the analysis presented here also raises a number of questions
for future study which, due to the nature of this work, it was not possible to probe
in the extended form necessary. For example, while there are at least ﬁve
different ways in which the committee system can be circumvented, the empirical
glance at such behavior in Chapter 3 considers only one. It is quite likely to be
those cases in which committees are skirted or bypassed by Rules Committee
action that the majority party stands to gain the most from its intervention. That
is, while a direct bypass to the ﬂoor may be a result of a host of different factors,
such as time constraints, a relatively minor issue, etc., when the Rules
Committee steps in to modify the language of a particular piece of legislation, it is
often doing so in the hope of advancing one or more party goals. Thus, further
exploration of the role of the Rules Committee in this context is warranted to
determine just how frequently such activity occurs.

The ﬁndings in Chapter 2 regarding committee agenda setting, while
instmctive, are based on just one Congress. While the 105th is a reasonable
choice for study, the results beg for further analysis. They might be extended, for
example, to the 103rd House, the last under Democratic control, to determine
what, if any, differences exist between the two parties. Also, it would be
interesting to step back to the beginning of the post-reform Congress to ﬁnd out

whether party inﬂuence on committees extended to that earlier and very different

145

period of time in the House. The descriptive statistics presented at the end of the
essay offer some reason to think that parties were quite inﬂuential then, as well,
but systematic analysis is necessary in order to control for competing
explanations.

In sum, while the dissertation raises these and other questions, the results
it provides serve to solidify our understanding of a few heretofore overlooked
aspects of congressional organization and behavior. More importantly, the
results offer implications for theories of how this important institution of American

government operates and conducts its charge as the “people’s House."

146

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