The effect of majority party agenda setting on roll calls
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The effect of majority party agenda setting on roll calls Joshua D. Clinton1 Received: 27 July 2019 / Accepted: 12 August 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract How well can roll calls detect the causal impact of majority party agenda setting in Congress? Estimating the counterfactual required to assess the effects of majority party agenda setting is complicated by time-varying differences in the political environment and the fact that measures commonly used to control for compositional changes may themselves depend on the extent of agenda control being exercised. Using techniques popularized by recent work focused on causal inference, I characterize whether agenda changes occuring during changes in majority party control in the US House of Representatives are consistent with predictions from models of majority party agenda control. Comparing how the same members in consecutive Congresses are affected by changes in party control and using fixed effects to account for time-varying differences between consecutive Congresses helps isolate the changes in the agenda attributable to agenda setting. The analyses highlight the challenge in consistently estimating the effects of agenda control and suggest that although recent transitions produce patterns consistent with the predictions of agenda setting theories, the average effect over the post-Reconstruction period is harder to interpret as being produced by agenda control. Keywords Agenda control · US Congress · Roll call voting JEL Classification D72 · H11 The study of legislators’ voting behavior occupies a prominent place in political science because legislators’ votes often are the means by which democratic politicians convert their preferences—and those of their constituents—into policy outcomes. As a result, the study of roll call voting has wide-ranging implications for assessing many critical issues for democratic politics (e.g., lawmaking, representation) and it often is central to investigations into the causes and consequences of elite-level politics (see, for example, the summary of Theriault et al. 2011). Prepared for the Conference on Causal Inference and American Political Development, University of Southern California, January 12–14, 2019. I thank conference participants—and especially Chris Tausanovitch, Jeff Jenkins, Nolan McCarty and Charles Stewart—for helpful feedback and reactions. * Joshua D. Clinton [email protected] 1
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
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Public Choice
Even if roll calls provide a partial portrait of congressional behavior (VanDoren 1990; Carrubba et al. 2011; Clinton and Lapinski 2011) whose meaning may be difficult to interpret (e.g., Kingdon 1989; Lee 2009, 2016a, b), roll calls provide a clear indication of what Congress chooses to make its members take public positions on. Because roll calls provide a comprehensive record of the public positions that members are asked to take identifiable positions on, studies interested in whether memb
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