No abstract

We examine congressional cue‐taking theory to determine its extent, conditionality, and various forms in the US Senate. Using a novel data‐collection technique (timed C‐SPAN footage), we focus on temporal dynamics via event history analysis. Examining the effects of senator characteristics across 16 votes from the 108th Congress, we find that committee leadership and seniority generally predict cue‐giving, while other types of characteristics predict cue‐giving on certain types of votes. Our results underscore the importance of considering the order and timing of voting when studying congressional behavior.

The ability of the minority party to influence legislation in Congress is debated. Most bills are passed with large bipartisan majorities, yet the House, where most legislation is developed, is seen as a majority‐party‐dominated institution. I develop a theory of House minority‐party influence at the committee markup stage as a result of the Senate’s institutional rules. An original data set of congressional committee votes shows that minority‐party support in House committees predicts House and Senate passage. During unified party control of the chambers, an increase in Senate majority‐party seats results in lower minority‐party support for the legislation in the House committee, while during divided party control of Congress, the House majority passes more extreme bills as the chambers polarize. Even in the majority‐party‐dominated House, the minority’s preferences are incorporated into legislation, and the Senate’s institutional rules moderate bills to a significant degree.

Few political institutions are as central to theories of lawmaking as the executive veto. Despite its importance, institutional continuity at the national level has precluded identification of empirical effects of the veto on legislative behavior. We address this limitation and present evidence from the states demonstrating how the veto affects the formation of legislative coalitions and, indirectly, executive influence over policymaking. We find consistent evidence that the presence and strength of gubernatorial veto powers affect the lawmaking behavior of state legislatures. Our analysis shows how institutional provisions condition executives' ability to affect policy outcomes in separation-of-powers systems.Following Alexander Hamilton's insistence in Federalist 73 that the presidential veto would guard against the tendency of the legislature to "invade the rights of the executive," the veto is the key mechanism supporting policy bargaining between the president and Congress (Cameron 2000;McCarty 2000). Veto power helps presidents and governors extract policy concessions from their legislatures by providing a constraint on the enactment of legislation.The framers of the federal Constitution had a keen intuition for how their specific grant of veto power (with a two-thirds override requirement, per Article 1, Section 7 of the US Constitution) would empower the president. Likewise, architects of state constitutions first clashed over the mere existence of the veto, then came to different and varying provisions of veto power than that given to the president. These practitioners of institutional design had different preferences regarding the balance of power between the branches and used veto rules to solidify these preferences.

No abstract