The Strategic Timing behind Position-taking in the US Congress: A Study of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act

Huang, Taofang; Theriault, Sean M.

doi:10.1080/13572334.2012.646709

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The research on when legislators take policy positions is far more limited. Most of what we know about the timing of position-taking comes from only a handful of studies, most of which evaluate timing on very notable pieces of legislation in Congress: position-taking announcements in the US House on support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (Boehmke 2006;Box-Steffensmeier, Arnold, and Christopher 1997), the impeachment of President Clinton in the House (Caldeira and Zorn 2004), House veto overrides (Glazer et al 1995), and immigration policy in Congress (Huang and Theriault 2012). Extending this logic to state legislatures is not straightforward, and we must piece together expectations from multiple sources.…”

Section: When Legislators Cosponsormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What we know about the timing of position-taking comes from Congress, and those studies are exceedingly narrow. Most often, this research examines an individual high-profile piece of legislation in one chamber of Congress at a single moment in time (Boehmke 2006;Box-Steffensmeier, Arnold, and Christopher 1997;Caldeira and Zorn 2004;Glazer et al 1995;Huang and Theriault 2012). While important contributions, these analyses may not be generalizable beyond the unique characteristics of the individual bills.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Timing Their Positions: Cosponsorship in the State Legislature

Schilling

Matthews

Kreitzer

2023

State Politics Policy Q.

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Legislators must decide when, if ever, to cosponsor legislation. Scholars have shown legislators strategically time their positions on salient issues of national importance, but we know little about the timing of position-taking for routine bills or what this activity looks like in state legislatures. We argue that legislators’ cosponsorship decision-making depends on the type of legislation and the partisan dynamics among the current cosponsors. Members treat everyday legislation as generalized position-taking motivated by reelection, yet for key legislation, legislators are policy-oriented. With a new dataset of over 73,000 bills introduced in both chambers of the Texas state legislature in the 75th to 86th regular sessions (1997–2020), we use pooled Cox proportional hazard models to evaluate the dynamics of when legislators legislate, comparing all bills introduced with a subset of key bills. The results show that legislators time their cosponsorship activity in response to electoral vulnerability, partisanship, and the dynamics of the chamber in which they serve.

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Section: When Legislators Cosponsormentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Timing Their Positions: Cosponsorship in the State Legislature

Schilling

Matthews

Kreitzer

2023

State Politics Policy Q.

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“…Whereas congressional scholars regularly examine the cross-section of member opinion on many diff erent roll-call votes, investigations into the timing of their announcements are sparser; but see Krehbiel's (1991) important work on signaling models, and Boehmke (2006), Box-Steff ensmeier, Arnold, and Zorn (1997), and Huang and Theriault (2012) for articles that seriously examine the question of timing.…”

Section: The Timing Of Position Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Huang and Theriault (2012), who examine pronouncements on immigration reform, we draw on the methods of survival/event history analysis to model the timing of senator changes This changing nature of opinion on same-sex marriage in the Senate suggests that a public pronouncement on the issue tells only part of the story. As former senators, Barack Obama and Joe Biden both highlight that the key question is not the position that they take on the issue, but the evolution of their position over time.…”

Section: Modeling Changes In Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Huang and Theriault (2012), who examine pronouncements on immigration reform, we draw on the methods of survival/event history analysis to model the timing of senator changes in support for same-sex marriage. In our analysis, we estimate a Cox regression model with discrete, time-varying covariates that treats the time senators spend in office without supporting same-sex marriage as the object of interest.…”

Section: The Rise Of Support For Same-sex Marriage Among Us Senatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Diffusion of Support for Same-Sex Marriage in the US Senate

Theriault

Thomas

2014

APSC

Self Cite

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Advocates for same-sex marriage have had much to celebrate. The last few years have shown that state after state and senator after senator have declared their support for full marriage equality. Such momentum suggests that their goals will be realized sooner rather than later. In this article, we analyze when senators announce their support for same-sex marriage. Contrary to the popularly held belief that their decisions will quickly snowball into filibuster-proof numbers, we find that most of the easy successes have already been achieved. The difficulty of securing the last few votes may take much longer.

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Reassessing legislative relationships

Schilling¹

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Since Woodrow Wilson's (1885) analysis of Congress, researchers assumed that members of Congress look to one another for information, cues, and advice on unfamiliar policy areas. The amount of time and effort that each legislator and their staffers would have to put in to make all of these voting decisions would be insurmountable. Fellow legislators are a resource to turn to for guidance or assistance. Legislators are able to influence their colleagues above and beyond each of their individual preferences. The members of Congress that are most influential will not necessarily be the same for every bill. The significant legislators may be one's co-partisans and the party leadership or they may be a group of legislators with whom they share a common interest. Spatial analysis allows researchers to look more explicitly at the relationships between legislators and their colleagues. I use spatial probit and a spatial duration model to study these issues by examining the factors that influence voting decisions and the timing of position announcements. I look at a variety of different policy areas, including foreign policy, education, and agriculture, over an extensive time period (1933-2014) to test which relationships are most influential on their decisions. I study the interdependence between three different relationships, same party, state delegation, and ideological similarity, and hypothesize that these ties will lead legislators to behave more similarly. The use of the spatial analysis provides an opportunity to test these relationships and see if even after controlling for other influences there is dependence between legislators. In my research, I find that legislators are interdependent regardless of their individual characteristics. When I analyze voting behavior, legislators' behave similarly from one another across all three relationships above and beyond what we would expect given their personal preferences. These positive findings do not hold when I study v the timing of position announcements where legislators behave dissimilarly from one another when interdependence exists. The study, overall, suggests that legislative ties are especially important in explaining voting behavior and that it is critical to account for these relationships. vi

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The Strategic Timing behind Position-taking in the US Congress: A Study of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act

Cited by 4 publications

References 17 publications

Timing Their Positions: Cosponsorship in the State Legislature

Timing Their Positions: Cosponsorship in the State Legislature

The Diffusion of Support for Same-Sex Marriage in the US Senate

Reassessing legislative relationships

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