Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: We show that term limitations on the tenure of U.S. House committee chairpersons is the chief source of committee seniority violations. House Republicans adopted a three-term limitation in 1995, making it effective in the 107th House in 2001. Since that time there have been numerous violations, whereas earlier Republican congresses had few. House Democrats, who did not adopt term limitations, had almost no violations. The addition of the 110th House of 2007-08 shows that reversion of Republicans to minority status and Democrats to power did not change the path of either party. We conclude that seniority violations are largely a structurally induced phenomenon attributable to opportunity created by the Republican term limitations.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Paper Proposal
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Theorizing identity in the critical realist tradition examines in what circumstances identity matters more or less in legislative decision making. The goal of this paper is to better understand how Black women legislators, somatic outsiders within the political institutions, challenge the existing structure of oppression as they deliberate on intersectional policy issues that disproportionally target sub-marginalized populations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The House of Representatives chooses its rules of operation by simple majority rule. Despite the presence of a Majority Party, the minority is always offered a role in lawmaking. Even on individual bills, the majority rarely votes as a bloc to shut out the minority. Understanding why majority parties do not exert their powers requires examining what the House actually does when considering a bill.

This paper examines key bills of the 104th Congress (1995-1996), looking in detail at the special rule, amendments, and other motions offered for each bill. This examination leads to several unexpected conclusions, particularly involving the ``motion to recommit'' (a right reserved to the minority party). It appears that the Majority may choose to tie its hands, committing to giving the Minority a voice, in an attempt to improve the efficiency and speed of bill consideration.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper, I extend a model
of deliberation developed in earlier studies (Carroll 2003, 2001) to
examine the quality of deliberation on environmental issues in the
House of Representatives. The quality of deliberation in legislative
debate can be measured as a function of three components: First, the
inclusiveness of discussion. (How many viewpoints are incorporated into
the argument?). Second, the public or private nature of
policy discussion. (Do members appeal to generally shared values and
interests or to narrow partisan and district concerns?). Third, the
rhetorical strategy used by members. (Do members adequately represent
the arguments of political opponents? Do policy statements include
polarized rhetoric or personal attacks on political opponents?). Using
content analysis, I examine member statements on major environmental
legislation in the period under consideration and assign scores for
each component. These scores are then summed to create a composite
measure of the quality of deliberation for each statement. Because
deliberation is time and resource intensive, it should be used only
when other strategies for winning support are unavailable or expensive.
The quality of deliberation is therefore expected to vary with the
relative cost of alternatives such as bargaining, side-payments, and
leadership pressure. To use a simple example, one might expect the
quality of deliberation to increase when an issue divides party members
and prevents the leadership from enforcing party unity. Other factors
that may increase the quality of deliberation include when the policy
is discussed (debates early in the term allow more time for the working
out of a deliberative strategy), access to leadership powers (formal
prerogatives decrease the need to use deliberation), point in the
electoral cycle (election year debates will forego inclusiveness for
appeals directed toward specific constituencies), and publicity (media
presence turns attention away from persuading other members to
posturing for the public). I will test this argument using OLS
regression on a sample of environmental bills selected from the House
Resources Committee during the 104th-108th Congresses. The dependent
variable will be the composite measure of deliberation. The key
explanatory variables are scheduling (a scaled variable gauging where
the bill falls during the session), media attention (mentions of the
bill in Congressional Weekly and major national newspapers), power
within committee (a scale variable that scores members according to
party membership and position within the committee structure) and
electoral pressure (measured by a dummy variable where 1= election
year, 0 = off year). Significant relationships among the variables will
suggest how and when legislators incorporate deliberation into larger
rhetorical and political strategies to win votes. By rigorously
examining legislative deliberation as it occurs on a daily basis in the
House of Representatives, this paper goes beyond previous research and
sets a foundation for future study. Isolating the environmental
conditions under which representatives use deliberation enables us to
move beyond theoretical debates and toward an understanding of
deliberation as a pragmatic approach for building legislative
coalitions. References:
2003. Deliberation in the House of Representatives: Evidence from Trade
and Environmental Policy Debates. Annual Meeting of the Southwestern
Political Science Association. April 15-18, San Antonio, TX 2001. The
Role of Ideology in Legislative Deliberation: Congressional Member
Organizations and Environmental Policy. Annual Meeting of the Southern
Political Science Association, November 8-11, Atlanta, GA.