Rules to Live By: Agenda Control and the Partisan Use of Special Rules in the House

Abstract

A great deal of research in the 1990s was devoted to exploring the consequences of the ceding of greater agenda control to the majority leadership in the House during the era of Democratic control. The intent of this article is to build on that earlier work to discuss the continuing consequences of strengthened parties for decision making from the 1990s onward. Specifically, we find that as the parties became increasingly homogenous over time, partisan conflict over special rules votes grew as well. After the 1970s reforms, with the Democratic majority more homogeneous and the leadership having more influence over committees, the content of legislation coming out of committees became steadily more satisfactory to the majority (and less so to the minority) over time. These expectations did not change with the advent of a Republican majority, and the subsequent results did not change either. The Gingrich and Hastert speakerships continued the trend of increasing levels of partisanship on rules votes and majority control of satisfactory committee outcomes. We also find that a switch back to Democratic control in 2006, did not lead to lower levels of partisanship. The data suggest that Democrats were just as successful, if not more so, in using rules to control the legislative agenda during the 110th Congress as the Republicans were in the 109th.

Notes

1. The work includes Aldrich 1995; Cox and McCubbins 1993; Rohde 1991, 1992a; and Sinclair 1995, 1997.

2. For a recent discussion of this view, see Cox and McCubbins 2005.

3. See Aldrich and Rohde 1997 for more details.

4. The Political Institutions and Public Choice Program was originally located at Michigan State University, and is currently at Duke University. The most recent version of the PIPC House roll call database can be found at http://www.poli.duke.edu/pipc/data.html.

5. Super-majority votes are votes with majorities of 90% or more. As our theoretical argument would expect, the incidence of super-majority votes on rules declined substantially over time, and in recent congresses have become nonexistent, (see Rohde and Aldrich 2010).

6. Quoted in VandeHei 2003.

7. We did not include the Eisenhower terms or the Kennedy/Johnson terms because this period was before the introduction of the recorded teller vote, which made it feasible for the first time to secure recorded votes on amendments in the Committee of the Whole. Prior to this, there could only be record votes on amendments if they were previously adopted in the Committee of the Whole.

8. Note that we divided the Clinton presidency at the point of change in party control of Congress, rather than between his two terms, because that seemed the more theoretically relevant point.

9. For the data examined here, since the Republicans, as the majority, had yet to enter a Congress without also controlling the White House, we have yet to test whether this pattern continues to hold.