Preliminary Schedule

Friday, April 7

8:00am-9:00am -- Breakfast

9:00am-10:15am -- Panel 1

Discussants: Bruce Oppenheimer, Jeffery Jenkins

"Parties, Presidents and Committee Prestige: The Eclipse of the Senate in National Security, 1947-2004" (PDF)
Linda L. Fowler, Dartmouth University
R. Brian Law, University of California, Los Angeles

The paper examines the decline in the internal prestige and external visibility of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees in response to changes in the policy environment and polarization of the political parties from 1947-2004. Results from binomial regression provide empirical support for competing theories of party influence in Congress and indicate variation across committees in their response to institutional pressures. The declining fortunes of both Foreign Relations and Armed Services exemplify a contradiction between individual rationality and institutional effectiveness that often occurs in Congress, raising concerns about the capacity of the legislative branch to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities in balancing executive actions.

"Strategic Party Government: Party Influence in Congress, 1789-2000" (PDF)
Matthew Lebo, Stony Brook University
Adam J. McGlynn, Stony Brook University
Gregory Koger, University of Montana

Why does the influence of Congressional parties fluctuate over time? The prevailing answer, conditional party government, holds that party influence increases when legislators agree ideologically with fellow party members and disagree with members of the opposing party. Under these conditions, legislators delegate power to party leaders to achieve desired policy goals. We propose an alternative model, Strategic Party Government, which instead highlights the electoral motives of legislative parties and the strategic interaction between parties. We test this new theory using the entire range of House and Senate party behavior from 1789 to 2000 and find that the strategic behavior of parties dominates ideology as an explanation for variation in party influence. Moreover, we find strong links between party behavior in Congress and electoral outcomes. An increase in partisan influence on legislative voting has adverse electoral costs, while winning contested votes has electoral benefits.

"Party Conflict, Factionalism, and Extended Balloting in U.S. Senate Elections before the Adoption of the 17th Amendment" (PDF)
Wendy J. Schiller, Brown University
Charles Stewart III, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In this paper, we examine the role of partisan cohesion in balloting for United States Senator in state legislatures in the period 1870-1913. There is significant evidence from the data that we have collected that Senate elections reveal cleavages and factions within majority parties in state legislatures during this time period. Contrary to popular wisdom, the public canvass and party machine politics did not predetermine the winners of Senate contests. The unpredictability of the outcomes of Senate elections in state legislatures, coupled with the high turnover within state legislatures from session to session led to a lack of a viable mechanism of accountability for Senators once they were elected and seated in the Senate itself. Because there was no way of knowing who would be sitting in the state legislature when reelection came around, Senators had to form their own coalition among political elites and voters themselves and anticipate the issues that would drive state legislative elections; they had to consider the impact of their Senate roll call votes and other legislative behavior with respect to how it would create the potential for support at home. Consequently there is a connection between the degree of stability within the state political party and the extent to which Senators were inclined to support national party positions once they reached the Senate. More generally, the variation in policy preferences within the political parties in the Senate may be in part explained by volatility of parties at the state level.

10:15am-10:45am -- Refreshment Break

10:45am-11:45am -- PANEL 1 (Part II)

Noon-1:00pm -- Lunch

1:00pm-3:00pm -- PANEL 2

Discussants: Charles Stewart, Barbara Sinclair

"The Rise of Floor Leaders in the United States Senate, 1890-1915" (PDF)
Gerald Gamm, University of Rochester
Steven S. Smith, Washington University

With this paper, we offer the first scholarly account of the rise of floor leadership in the Senate. Previous accounts, based on scattered evidence, suggested that elected floor leaders did not emerge until the 1910s or 1920s. We demonstrate that Arthur Pue Gorman (D, Md.) created the position of floor leader in the early 1890s and that the Democratic caucus routinely elected and reelected floor leaders in subsequent decades. The timing of this change is consistent with our general theory that Senate parties engage in institutional innovation at times when party strength is closely balanced.

"The Senate Whip System: An Exploration" (PDF)
Erin M. Bradbury, College of William and Mary
Ryan A. Davidson, College of William and Mary
C. Lawrence Evans, College of William and Mary

This paper explores party coalition building in the U.S. Senate with archival data gathered from the personal papers of former Senate leaders, including records of over two dozen whip counts conducted by the Democratic majority during the 101st Congress (1989-90), a transition period in the role played by party leaders within the chamber. After comparing the internal operations of the Senate whip system with analogous activities in the House, we identify the kinds of measures likely to draw whip activity in the Senate, gauge the extent of leadership success at retaining or converting recalcitrant members, and evaluate the impact of leadership strategies on the fate of legislation.

"Party Discipline in the U.S. Senate? Assessing Party Loyalty and Its Consequences" (PDF)
Kathryn Pearson, University of Minnesota

Party leaders in the House of Representatives have several mechanisms of discipline at their disposal to reward their rank-and-file members for their loyalty expressed in voting and fundraising, e.g., legislative opportunities, committee positions, and campaign dollars. The mechanisms of party discipline in the Senate, however, are more limited and less obvious. This preliminary research analyzes Senate leaders' potential to exert party discipline. It begins by asking how Senate leaders evaluate party loyalty. It then analyzes Senate leaders' potential mechanisms of discipline: what resources and opportunities are allocated to senators by party leaders, how do they compare to those in the House, and under what conditions might leaders be willing to use them to reward loyalty and punish defection? At this preliminary stage, this paper raises more questions than it answers, but limited empirical data shed light on these questions. Ultimately, this research will reveal the incentives that "individualistic" senators have to toe the party line and the extent to which norms of individualism, combined with institutional features of the Senate, protect senators from leaders' attempts to exert party discipline.

3:00pm-3:30pm -- Refreshment Break

3:30pm-5:30pm -- PANEL 3

Discussants: Larry Evans, Kathryn Pearson

"Running on Empty: Coalition Building Constraints in the U.S. Senate, 1970s and 2000s" (Word) (PDF: Part 1, Part 2)
Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Vanderbilt University
Marc Hetherington, Vanderbilt University

This paper looks at the changing nature of coalition building in the Senate on energy issues contrasting the efforts to pass energy legislation in the 1970s with efforts from 2001-05. In the 1970s the struggle was one of the extremes against the middle and involved cross partisan coalition building. In recent years it has been far more partisan, starting at the majority party median and making side payments in an effort to cobble together sixty votes for cloture.

"Parties and the Politics of Pork in the U.S. Senate" (PDF)
Michael H. Crespin, APSA Congressional Fellow and The University of Georgia
Charles J. Finocchiaro, University of Buffalo, SUNY

In this paper we explore the distribution of pork-barrel projects in the U.S. Senate. Using a dataset that reports the source of the project--whether it was added in the House, Senate or in conference--we are able to test if the Senate delivers pork in a universal fashion or if the majority party maintains an advantage in the upper chamber. Our results indicate that while the number of pork projects are handed out without regard to party, the majority party receives a disproportionate share of the pork dollars.

"The Senate Electoral Cycle and Bicameral Appropriations Politics" (PDF)
Kenneth A. Shepsle, Harvard University
Robert P. Van Houweling, University of California at Berkeley
Samuel J. Abrams, Harvard University
Peter C. Hanson, University of California at Berkeley

This paper develops and tests an account of the influence of the Senate electoral cycle on the congressional appropriations process. Our theory suggests that the Senate appropriations process should allocate a disproportionate share of money to senators standing for election. At the same time, the House appropriations process should anticipate and counteract this tendency. We test this theory using appropriations data from 1995-2005. We supplement our data analysis with interviews of key House and Senate appropriations staff.

7:15pm -- Depart for Dinner

9:00am-10:15am -- PANEL 4 (Part I)

Discussants: Frances Lee, Chuck Finocchiaro

"Scoring the U.S. Senate: Scorecards, Parties and Roll Call Votes" (PDF)
Jason M. Roberts, University of Minnesota
Lauren Cohen Bell, Randolph-Macon College

Senators are confronted with myriad forces as they make roll-call voting decisions. They often must navigate conflicts between and among the desires of their constituents, their party, interest groups, and their own preferences. The ways in which individual senators navigate these conflicts have important consequences for each member's tenure and for his or her party's policy goals. In this paper we combine interest group scorecard and Senate roll-call data in order to gain empirical leverage on the question of how senators and parties balance their electoral and policy goals in the face of interest group pressure. In contrast with conventional wisdom on the Senate, we find that when casting votes, individual senators do not defect from their party's preferred position substantially more frequently than do their counterparts in the House of Representatives. However, we find that in many cases the ability of the majority party in the Senate to pursue its policy goals is constrained as a consequence of decisions by interest groups to score certain key votes.

"Negative Agenda Control in the Senate and House: Fingerprints of Majority Party Power" (PDF)
Sean Gailmard, Northwestern University
Jeffery Jenkins, Northwestern University

We present evidence suggesting that negative agenda control as exercised by the majority party in the US Senate is very similar, in empirical terms, to negative agenda control as exercised by the majority party in the US House. The evidence comes from comparisons of majority party roll rates across chambers for two types of legislative vehicles: final passage of chamber-generated bills (i.e., S bills in the Senate and HR bills in the House) and of conference committee reports. The response of majority party roll rates to covariates is very similar across chambers for each type of legislative vehicle. Given that explanations of House majority party power are often predicated on House-specific factors with no clear analogue in the Senate, the results reveal a puzzling similarity across chambers.

"Home Field Advantage: An Asymmetric-Costs Theory of Legislative Agenda Influence in the U.S. Senate" (Word) (PDF: Part 1, Part 2)
Chris Den Hartog, Northwestern University
Nathan W. Monroe, Michigan State University

Conventional wisdom holds that majority party influence in the United States Senate is difficult or impossible, largely because the Senate's open amendment process offers many opportunities for individual senators to put their own proposals onto the agenda. This thinking rests on the implicit assumption that such amendments receive sincere votes on the Senate floor, meaning that senators vote based on their policy preferences. If, however, the majority party routinely tables (i.e., kills) unwanted amendments via procedural votes on which majority party members vote based on party rather than on policy preferences, then majority party influence over the agenda is possible. We argue that motions to table are exactly this type of procedural vote, and serve as a mechanism by which the majority party manipulates the Senate agenda. This is one of what we believe to be a variety of ways in which the Senate minority party faces greater costs than the majority party in trying to get its proposals onto the agenda. In this vein, we lay out an asymmetric-costs framework for thinking about legislative agenda influence, which allows us to reconcile agenda manipulation by the majority party with the Senate's notoriously diffuse agenda setting procedures.

10:15am-10:45am -- Refreshment Break

10:45am-11:45am -- PANEL 4 (Part II)

Noon-1:00pm -- Lunch

1:00pm-3:00pm -- PANEL 5

Discussants: Jason Roberts, Erik Engstrom

"Agenda Content and Senate Party Polarization, 1981-2004" (PDF)
Frances Lee, University of Maryland

This paper examines whether changes in the content of the legislative agenda have contributed to higher levels of partisanship in the contemporary Senate. The analysis draws on an original dataset classifying Senate roll-call votes from 1981 to 2004 on the basis of substantive issue content and whether the vote deals with a presidential agenda item. The issues that were most divisive along party lines in the early years of the study consume a larger portion of the congressional agenda today. In addition, the congressional agenda has become more preoccupied with presidential initiatives. Multiple regression analysis confirms that systematic changes in the legislative agenda help account for increased partisanship. These findings suggest that strategic agenda control is an important internal cause of legislative partisanship.

"Electoral Accountability, Party Loyalty, and Roll-Call Voting in the U.S. Senate" (PDF)
Jamie L. Carson, University of Georgia

To what extent can voting behavior and loyalty to one's party be a liability for incumbent legislators? While prior research on electoral accountability has focused almost entirely on the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate provides a useful laboratory to examine the electoral effects of voting behavior given the relatively greater heterogeneity associated with statewide constituencies. Building upon and extending prior work examining the electoral consequences of roll call voting in the House, this paper examines the above question in the context of Senate elections from 1974 to 2004. The results suggest that although ideological extremity may hurt senators' chances of reelection, party loyalty is often rewarded by constituents when they go to the polls. In sum, the analysis addresses issues of democratic and electoral accountability in the context of roll call behavior in the U.S. Senate.

"Party and Constituency in the U.S. Senate, 1933-2004" (PDF)
John Aldrich, Duke University
Michael Brady, Duke University
Scott de Marchi, Duke University
Ian McDonald, Duke University
Brendan Nyhan, Duke University
David Rohde, Duke University
Michael Tofias, Duke University

This paper considers the relationship between state demographics and the party and DW-NOMINATE scores of Senators from the 73rd-108th Congress. We find that demographics are a significant but relatively weak predictor of party and DW-NOMINATE first dimension scores, while DW-NOMINATE second dimension scores are more closely related to demographics. We also find that these relationships have changed significantly over time. In particular, the link between demographics and second dimension scores was extremely high in the 1940s and 1950s, but by the 108th Congress the relationship between demographics and DW-NOMINATE was at a similarly low level for both dimensions.