Majority Party Agenda Setting: Picking Fights or Avoiding Them?

While a number of scholars have focused on the importance of partisan agenda control in the US House, few have examined its uneven consequences within the majority party. In this paper, we explore ‘counterfactual’ utility distributions within the majority party, by comparing policy outcomes under a party-less median voter model to policy outcomes under party-based positive and negative agenda control models. We show that the distribution of policy losses and benefits resulting from agenda control are quite similar for both the positive and negative varieties. In both cases, moderate majority-party members are made worse off by the exercise of partisan agenda control, while those to the extreme side of the majority-party median benefit disproportionately. We also consider the benefit of agenda control for the party as a whole, by looking at the way changes in majority-party homogeneity affect the summed utility across members. Interestingly, we find that when the distance between the floor and majority-party medians decreases, the overall value of positive and negative agenda control diminishes. However, we also find support for the ‘conditional party government’ notion that, as majority-party members’ preferences become more similar, they have an increased incentive to grant agenda-setting power to their leaders.

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From Rolls to Disappointments

Political Research Quarterly ◽

10.1177/1065912916674605 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 70 (1) ◽

pp. 82-97 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Andrew J. Clarke ◽

Jeffery A. Jenkins ◽

Nathan W. Monroe

Keyword(s):

Agenda Setting ◽

Spatial Model ◽

The Other ◽

Agenda Control ◽

Majority Party ◽

Reconstruction Era

Much of the literature on partisan agenda setting in Congress focuses on the majority’s ability to exercise negative agenda control. As a result, the empirical emphasis has been on “rolls,” or how often the majority of the majority party opposes legislation that nonetheless passes. Although interesting, rolls are only one source of majority party failure. The other source, largely unexplored in the literature, is when the majority of the majority party supports legislation that is subsequently defeated. These cases represent “disappointments,” and are a means to determine how effective the majority party is at exercising positive agenda control. Making some basic modifications to a standard spatial model of agenda setting, we articulate why and where we might expect the majority party to fail to exercise positive agenda control effectively. We then derive hypotheses regarding (1) which members should vote “no” on roll calls that result in a disappointment and (2) why disappointments vary on a Congress-by-Congress basis across time, and test them using a dataset of final-passage votes on House bills in the post-Reconstruction era.

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Agenda Setting in the U. S. House: A Majority-Party Monopoly?

Legislative Studies Quarterly ◽

10.2307/440199 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 26 (2) ◽

pp. 185 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Gary W. Cox

Keyword(s):

Agenda Setting ◽

Majority Party

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Parties, agendas, and roll rates

Journal of Theoretical Politics ◽

10.1177/0951629819892325 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 32 (2) ◽

pp. 348-359

Author(s):

Shawn Patterson ◽

Thomas Schwartz

Keyword(s):

House Of Representatives ◽

Agenda Setting ◽

Combinatorial Problem ◽

Agenda Control ◽

Majority Party ◽

The Us

For the US House of Representatives, Cox and McCubbins discover tiny majority-party roll rates and offer them as evidence of majority-party agenda control. However, the observed roll rates are approximately what would result from chance alone or from chance constrained in several natural ways. Besides that, we show that rolls themselves are not evidence of any lapse in partisan agenda control and may even occur as the intended consequence of agenda setting by the majority party. Innovations include a solution to the combinatorial problem of counting all possible rolls, the associated computations, hypothetical examples of strategically advantageous self-induced rolls, and a review of likely real examples of the same.

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