Alan E Wiseman
Biographic Data
| ID | 1000833 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alan E Wiseman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alan E |
| FAMILY NAME | Wiseman |
| SIGNATURE | WISEMAN A E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2993-9188 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 550 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 31 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Legislative Effectiveness, Progressive Ambition, and Electoral Success
Are effective state lawmakers more likely than ineffective ones to be elected to Congress? We draw on a new dataset of state legislative effectiveness scores from 1993 to 2018 to examine the relationship between lawmaker effectiveness and the decision to run for, and ultimately be elected to, the U.S. House of Representatives. We find that more effective state lawmakers are more likely to enter Congress than ineffective lawmakers. This pattern is…
Issue Specialization and Effective Lawmaking in the U.S. Congress
On the Decline of Elite-Educated Republicans in Congress
We identify a rise in educational polarization among members of the US Congress mirroring the educational polarization in the American mass public. Over the past half-century, the percentage of Republican representatives who attended elite educational institutions declined from 40% to 15%, and the percentage of similarly educated Republican senators declined from 55% to 35%, while the ranks of elite-educated Democrats rose in both chambers. These…
Legislative Effectiveness in the American States
We develop State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES) for state legislators across 97 legislative chambers over recent decades, based on the number of bills that they sponsor, how far those bills move through the lawmaking process, and their substantive importance. We assess the scores through criterion and construct validation and reveal new insights into effective lawmaking across legislators. We then offer two illustrations of the immense o…
The Conditional Lawmaking Benefits of Party Faction Membership in Congress
Does joining a party faction in Congress enhance or undermine a member’s lawmaking effectiveness? Prior research suggests that factions can help members electorally in signaling their distinct ideological positions to potential political supporters. By contrast, we examine the nine largest ideological caucuses over the past quarter century to test three hypotheses about the conditional lawmaking benefits of faction membership: (1) that benefits f…
The Bipartisan Path to Effective Lawmaking
We confront the puzzle of why bipartisanship is alive and well in Congress, despite notable increases in party polarization and rising primary election threats. The answer is remarkably simple—bipartisanship unambiguously helps individual legislators who seek to advance their policy goals. We show that members of the House and Senate from the 93rd to 114th Congresses (1973–2016) who attract a larger portion of their bill cosponsors from the oppos…
Do constituents know (or care) about the lawmaking effectiveness of their representatives
Substantial evidence exists that members of the US Congress vary in their lawmaking effectiveness. Less known, however, is whether constituents are sufficiently informed and inclined to hold their representatives accountable, based on their effectiveness. We conduct two separate survey experiments, informing some constituents about lawmakers' effectiveness and comparing their responses to those with the baseline level of information. We find that…
The Primary Path for Turning Legislative Effectiveness into Electoral Success
Effective lawmakers are the workhorses of the US Congress, yet we know little about the electoral payoffs of their efforts. Are effective lawmakers better at warding off challengers in the next election? Do they win at a greater rate? To answer these questions, we draw on original data on congressional primary elections from 1980 to 2016, allowing us to focus on elections that lack partisan cues and where voters tend to be highly knowledgeable ab…
Chevron, State Farm, and the Impact of Judicial Doctrine on Bureaucratic Policymaking
We explain how two landmark Supreme Court cases, Motor Vehicles Manufacturers Association of the U.S. v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. (1983) and Chevron U.S.A., Inc., v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984), have constrained congressional and presidential control of the bureaucracy. We provide an overview of these cases, and we note how the dominant theories of bureaucratic policy making in the political science literature…
Legislative bargaining and partisan delegation
We use an extension of the Baron–Ferejohn model of legislative bargaining in which there are three legislators, two of whom have partisan ties, to analyze the division of a fixed political resource in a majoritarian legislature. A legislator’s preferences depend on the shares that he and any copartisan receive. We ask whether there are circumstances under which a partisan legislator is willing to delegate proposal-making authority to a party lead…
Partisan strength and legislative bargaining
We extend the canonical Baron–Ferejohn model of majoritarian legislative bargaining in order to analyze the effects of partisanship on bargaining outcomes. We consider three legislators, two of whom are party affiliated, with each partisan placing some value on the share of the dollar obtained by his copartisan in addition to his own share. We characterize the equilibrium of our model as a function of the strength of party affiliation and the deg…
Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Senate
Just like members of the House, US senators vary in how effective they are at lawmaking. We create Legislative Effectiveness Scores for each senator in each of the 93rd–113th Congresses (1973–2015). We use these scores to explore common claims about institutional differences in lawmaking between the House and the Senate. Our analysis offers strong support for the claim that the Senate is a more egalitarian and individualistic lawmaking body, in c…
Women’s Issues and Their Fates in the US Congress
Significant scholarship indicates that female legislators focus their attention on “women’s issues” to a greater extent than do male lawmakers. Drawing on over 40 years of bill sponsorship data from the US House of Representatives, we define women’s issues in terms of those sponsored at a greater rate by women in Congress. Our analysis reveals that most (but not all) of the classically considered women’s issues are indeed raised at an enhanced ra…
Spatial Models of Legislative Effectiveness
Spatial models of policymaking have evolved from the median voter theorem to the inclusion of institutional considerations such as committees, political parties, and various voting and amendment rules. Such models, however, implicitly assume that no policy is better than another at solving public policy problems and that all policy makers are equally effective at advancing proposals. We relax these assumptions, allowing some legislators to be mor…
A Theory of Competitive Partisan Lawmaking
Motivated by polar extremes of monopartisanship and nonpartisanship in existing literature on parties in legislatures, we introduce and analyze a more moderate theory ofcompetitivepartisan lawmaking. The distinguishing feature of competitive partisanship is that the minority party, although disadvantaged, has some guaranteed opportunities to influence lawmaking. Our analytic framework focuses on two dimensions of parties in legislatures:agenda-ba…
Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress
This book explores why some members of Congress are more effective than others at navigating the legislative process and what this means for how Congress is organized and what policies it produces. Craig Volden and Alan E. Wiseman develop a new metric of individual legislator effectiveness (the Legislative Effectiveness Score) that will be of interest to scholars, voters, and politicians alike. They use these scores to study party influence in Co…
Information and political institutions
When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men
Previous scholarship has demonstrated that female lawmakers differ from their male counterparts by engaging more fully in consensus‐building activities. We argue that this behavioral difference does not serve women equally well in all institutional settings. Contentious and partisan activities of male lawmakers may help them outperform women when in a polarized majority party. However, in the minority party, while men may choose to obstruct and d…
The Politics of Investigations and Regulatory Enforcement by Independent Agents and Cabinet Appointees
We develop a game-theoretic model that identifies conditions under which a political executive will be satisfied with the actions of an appointee who decides whether to investigate possible legal violations. Because investigations are a necessary precondition for enforcement, the investigator exerts significant influence over whether, and the extent to which, laws are enforced. In our model, an executive can exert power over the investigator's ac…
Delegation and Positive-Sum Bureaucracies
I develop a formal model to investigate why Congress would choose to delegate authority to an agency whose actions can be controlled, ex post, by a President with divergent policy preferences. Because the President and the Congress might find different policies to be salient to their constituencies, I demonstrate that executive review of agency rulemaking can benefit both branches of government, relative to legislative delegation without the poss…
Gerrymanders and Theories of Law Making
Redistricting politics in Illinois provide a novel opportunity for testing competing theories of law making. With this in mind, we demonstrate that the post-2000 Census redistricters in Illinois, dominated by Democrats, strategically reshuffled district demographic profiles in an attempt to convert relatively liberal Republican districts to conservative Democratic districts in the state Senate while decreasing and increasing the ideological diver…
The Legislative Median and Partisan Policy
We show that the median legislator in the US House is unambiguously closer to the majority party median than to the minority party median. An important implication of this finding is that the median legislator is predisposed to support the majority party's policy agenda. Thus, in the event that the majority party organization exerts no influence over the legislative process, and in the event that all policies then default to the legislative media…
The Politics of Wine
We investigate the contemporary impacts of the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution by focusing on recent changes in state laws governing interstate direct shipment of alcohol. The elimination of interstate trade barriers, consistent with the intent of the commerce clause, clearly facilitates efficient markets. More specifically, in 2003, the state of Virginia legalized direct wine shipping to consumers from out-of-state sellers, and by 2004,…
Bargaining in Legislatures over Particularistic and Collective Goods
We develop a bargaining model in which a legislature divides a budget among particularistic and collective goods. By incorporating both private and public goods in a unified model, we uncover nonmonotonic relationships between legislative preferences for collective spending and the amount of the budget actually allocated to collective goods. Put simply, policy proposers can exploit coalition partners' strong preferences for public goods to actual…
A Theory of Partisan Support and Entry Deterrence in Electoral Competition
I develop a model of electoral competition with partisan campaign support. Voters’ utilities are defined over candidate locations and the amounts of party campaign support that they receive. Parties’ utilities are defined over the location of the winning candidate and how much support they dole out for their candidates. Analytical results identify cases in which parties will successfully pull the electorally induced preferences of their members a…
When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men
Previous scholarship has demonstrated that female lawmakers differ from their male counterparts by engaging more fully in consensus‐building activities. We argue that this behavioral difference does not serve women equally well in all institutional settings. Contentious and partisan activities of male lawmakers may help them outperform women when in a polarized majority party. However, in the minority party, while men may choose to obstruct and d…
Women’s Issues and Their Fates in the US Congress
Significant scholarship indicates that female legislators focus their attention on “women’s issues” to a greater extent than do male lawmakers. Drawing on over 40 years of bill sponsorship data from the US House of Representatives, we define women’s issues in terms of those sponsored at a greater rate by women in Congress. Our analysis reveals that most (but not all) of the classically considered women’s issues are indeed raised at an enhanced ra…
Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Senate
Just like members of the House, US senators vary in how effective they are at lawmaking. We create Legislative Effectiveness Scores for each senator in each of the 93rd–113th Congresses (1973–2015). We use these scores to explore common claims about institutional differences in lawmaking between the House and the Senate. Our analysis offers strong support for the claim that the Senate is a more egalitarian and individualistic lawmaking body, in c…
Bargaining in Legislatures over Particularistic and Collective Goods
We develop a bargaining model in which a legislature divides a budget among particularistic and collective goods. By incorporating both private and public goods in a unified model, we uncover nonmonotonic relationships between legislative preferences for collective spending and the amount of the budget actually allocated to collective goods. Put simply, policy proposers can exploit coalition partners' strong preferences for public goods to actual…
Spatial Models of Legislative Effectiveness
Spatial models of policymaking have evolved from the median voter theorem to the inclusion of institutional considerations such as committees, political parties, and various voting and amendment rules. Such models, however, implicitly assume that no policy is better than another at solving public policy problems and that all policy makers are equally effective at advancing proposals. We relax these assumptions, allowing some legislators to be mor…
Delegation and Positive-Sum Bureaucracies
I develop a formal model to investigate why Congress would choose to delegate authority to an agency whose actions can be controlled, ex post, by a President with divergent policy preferences. Because the President and the Congress might find different policies to be salient to their constituencies, I demonstrate that executive review of agency rulemaking can benefit both branches of government, relative to legislative delegation without the poss…
Legislative Effectiveness in the American States
We develop State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES) for state legislators across 97 legislative chambers over recent decades, based on the number of bills that they sponsor, how far those bills move through the lawmaking process, and their substantive importance. We assess the scores through criterion and construct validation and reveal new insights into effective lawmaking across legislators. We then offer two illustrations of the immense o…
The Legislative Median and Partisan Policy
We show that the median legislator in the US House is unambiguously closer to the majority party median than to the minority party median. An important implication of this finding is that the median legislator is predisposed to support the majority party's policy agenda. Thus, in the event that the majority party organization exerts no influence over the legislative process, and in the event that all policies then default to the legislative media…
The Primary Path for Turning Legislative Effectiveness into Electoral Success
Effective lawmakers are the workhorses of the US Congress, yet we know little about the electoral payoffs of their efforts. Are effective lawmakers better at warding off challengers in the next election? Do they win at a greater rate? To answer these questions, we draw on original data on congressional primary elections from 1980 to 2016, allowing us to focus on elections that lack partisan cues and where voters tend to be highly knowledgeable ab…
The Politics of Investigations and Regulatory Enforcement by Independent Agents and Cabinet Appointees
We develop a game-theoretic model that identifies conditions under which a political executive will be satisfied with the actions of an appointee who decides whether to investigate possible legal violations. Because investigations are a necessary precondition for enforcement, the investigator exerts significant influence over whether, and the extent to which, laws are enforced. In our model, an executive can exert power over the investigator's ac…
The Bipartisan Path to Effective Lawmaking
We confront the puzzle of why bipartisanship is alive and well in Congress, despite notable increases in party polarization and rising primary election threats. The answer is remarkably simple—bipartisanship unambiguously helps individual legislators who seek to advance their policy goals. We show that members of the House and Senate from the 93rd to 114th Congresses (1973–2016) who attract a larger portion of their bill cosponsors from the oppos…
Do constituents know (or care) about the lawmaking effectiveness of their representatives
Substantial evidence exists that members of the US Congress vary in their lawmaking effectiveness. Less known, however, is whether constituents are sufficiently informed and inclined to hold their representatives accountable, based on their effectiveness. We conduct two separate survey experiments, informing some constituents about lawmakers' effectiveness and comparing their responses to those with the baseline level of information. We find that…
A Theory of Partisan Support and Entry Deterrence in Electoral Competition
I develop a model of electoral competition with partisan campaign support. Voters’ utilities are defined over candidate locations and the amounts of party campaign support that they receive. Parties’ utilities are defined over the location of the winning candidate and how much support they dole out for their candidates. Analytical results identify cases in which parties will successfully pull the electorally induced preferences of their members a…
A Theory of Competitive Partisan Lawmaking
Motivated by polar extremes of monopartisanship and nonpartisanship in existing literature on parties in legislatures, we introduce and analyze a more moderate theory ofcompetitivepartisan lawmaking. The distinguishing feature of competitive partisanship is that the minority party, although disadvantaged, has some guaranteed opportunities to influence lawmaking. Our analytic framework focuses on two dimensions of parties in legislatures:agenda-ba…
Tests of Vote-Buyer Theories of Coalition Formation in Legislatures
Formal theories of “vote-buying” aim to explain legislative coalition building, and lobbying. While anecdotal evidence suggests that something approximating vote-buying occurs, these theories have not been subjected to substantial empirical tests. Using roll-call data from all House bills subject to votes on final passage in the House of Representatives in the 103rd Congress, this study tests the coalition size implications of vote-buying theorie…
Gerrymanders and Theories of Law Making
Redistricting politics in Illinois provide a novel opportunity for testing competing theories of law making. With this in mind, we demonstrate that the post-2000 Census redistricters in Illinois, dominated by Democrats, strategically reshuffled district demographic profiles in an attempt to convert relatively liberal Republican districts to conservative Democratic districts in the state Senate while decreasing and increasing the ideological diver…
Joseph G. Cannon
Congression scholars regularly idenify Speaker Joseph G. Cannon as the personification of centralized authority and partisan strength in the United States Congress. Portraits of Cannon as a tyrant, however, are almost always based on anecdotal evidence and journalistic accounts. This paper assesses the conventional wisdom on Cannonism by systematically analyzing committee transfer patterns. Anecdotal evidence is consistent with recent theories of…
Chevron, State Farm, and the Impact of Judicial Doctrine on Bureaucratic Policymaking
We explain how two landmark Supreme Court cases, Motor Vehicles Manufacturers Association of the U.S. v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. (1983) and Chevron U.S.A., Inc., v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984), have constrained congressional and presidential control of the bureaucracy. We provide an overview of these cases, and we note how the dominant theories of bureaucratic policy making in the political science literature…
Joe Cannon and the Minority Party
The minority party is rarely featured in empirical research on parties in legislatures, and recent theories of parties in legislatures are rarely neutral and balanced in their treatment of the two parties. This paper makes a case for redressing this imbalance. We identify four characteristics of bipartisanship and evaluate their descriptive merits in a purposely hostile testing ground: during the rise and fall of Speaker Joseph G. Cannon, a.k.a.,…
Partisan Strategy and Support in State Legislative Elections
Using state-level data from Illinois General Assembly elections, I test the implications of a formal model of electoral competition where political parties present voters with platforms of ideological locations and levels of partisan support for their candidates. Consistent with the model, I find that candidate policy positions and parties’ campaign contributions are responsive to district partisan predisposition, even when controlling for the po…
Partisan strength and legislative bargaining
We extend the canonical Baron–Ferejohn model of majoritarian legislative bargaining in order to analyze the effects of partisanship on bargaining outcomes. We consider three legislators, two of whom are party affiliated, with each partisan placing some value on the share of the dollar obtained by his copartisan in addition to his own share. We characterize the equilibrium of our model as a function of the strength of party affiliation and the deg…
The Politics of Wine
We investigate the contemporary impacts of the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution by focusing on recent changes in state laws governing interstate direct shipment of alcohol. The elimination of interstate trade barriers, consistent with the intent of the commerce clause, clearly facilitates efficient markets. More specifically, in 2003, the state of Virginia legalized direct wine shipping to consumers from out-of-state sellers, and by 2004,…
The Conditional Lawmaking Benefits of Party Faction Membership in Congress
Does joining a party faction in Congress enhance or undermine a member’s lawmaking effectiveness? Prior research suggests that factions can help members electorally in signaling their distinct ideological positions to potential political supporters. By contrast, we examine the nine largest ideological caucuses over the past quarter century to test three hypotheses about the conditional lawmaking benefits of faction membership: (1) that benefits f…
Investigating the Dynamics of Political Compromise
Using data on party representation for the Rules, Appropriations, and Ways and Means Committees from the 47th–103rd Congresses, I test the implications of a recently developed theory by Dixit, Grossman, and Gul. Their theory predicts that, in any particular Congress, majority and minority party representation on committees should be a function of the maximum political strength enjoyed by the majority party during the entire period for which it ha…
Joseph G. Cannon
Congression scholars regularly idenify Speaker Joseph G. Cannon as the personification of centralized authority and partisan strength in the United States Congress. Portraits of Cannon as a tyrant, however, are almost always based on anecdotal evidence and journalistic accounts. This paper assesses the conventional wisdom on Cannonism by systematically analyzing committee transfer patterns. Anecdotal evidence is consistent with recent theories of…
Tests of Vote-Buyer Theories of Coalition Formation in Legislatures
Tests of Vote-Buyer Theories of Coalition Formation in Legislatures
Formal theories of “vote-buying” aim to explain legislative coalition building, and lobbying. While anecdotal evidence suggests that something approximating vote-buying occurs, these theories have not been subjected to substantial empirical tests. Using roll-call data from all House bills subject to votes on final passage in the House of Representatives in the 103rd Congress, this study tests the coalition size implications of vote-buying theorie…
Joe Cannon and the Minority Party
The minority party is rarely featured in empirical research on parties in legislatures, and recent theories of parties in legislatures are rarely neutral and balanced in their treatment of the two parties. This paper makes a case for redressing this imbalance. We identify four characteristics of bipartisanship and evaluate their descriptive merits in a purposely hostile testing ground: during the rise and fall of Speaker Joseph G. Cannon, a.k.a.,…
Investigating the Dynamics of Political Compromise
Using data on party representation for the Rules, Appropriations, and Ways and Means Committees from the 47th–103rd Congresses, I test the implications of a recently developed theory by Dixit, Grossman, and Gul. Their theory predicts that, in any particular Congress, majority and minority party representation on committees should be a function of the maximum political strength enjoyed by the majority party during the entire period for which it ha…
Partisan Strategy and Support in State Legislative Elections
Using state-level data from Illinois General Assembly elections, I test the implications of a formal model of electoral competition where political parties present voters with platforms of ideological locations and levels of partisan support for their candidates. Consistent with the model, I find that candidate policy positions and parties’ campaign contributions are responsive to district partisan predisposition, even when controlling for the po…
A Theory of Partisan Support and Entry Deterrence in Electoral Competition
I develop a model of electoral competition with partisan campaign support. Voters’ utilities are defined over candidate locations and the amounts of party campaign support that they receive. Parties’ utilities are defined over the location of the winning candidate and how much support they dole out for their candidates. Analytical results identify cases in which parties will successfully pull the electorally induced preferences of their members a…
The Politics of Wine
We investigate the contemporary impacts of the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution by focusing on recent changes in state laws governing interstate direct shipment of alcohol. The elimination of interstate trade barriers, consistent with the intent of the commerce clause, clearly facilitates efficient markets. More specifically, in 2003, the state of Virginia legalized direct wine shipping to consumers from out-of-state sellers, and by 2004,…
Bargaining in Legislatures over Particularistic and Collective Goods
We develop a bargaining model in which a legislature divides a budget among particularistic and collective goods. By incorporating both private and public goods in a unified model, we uncover nonmonotonic relationships between legislative preferences for collective spending and the amount of the budget actually allocated to collective goods. Put simply, policy proposers can exploit coalition partners' strong preferences for public goods to actual…
Gerrymanders and Theories of Law Making
Redistricting politics in Illinois provide a novel opportunity for testing competing theories of law making. With this in mind, we demonstrate that the post-2000 Census redistricters in Illinois, dominated by Democrats, strategically reshuffled district demographic profiles in an attempt to convert relatively liberal Republican districts to conservative Democratic districts in the state Senate while decreasing and increasing the ideological diver…
The Legislative Median and Partisan Policy
We show that the median legislator in the US House is unambiguously closer to the majority party median than to the minority party median. An important implication of this finding is that the median legislator is predisposed to support the majority party's policy agenda. Thus, in the event that the majority party organization exerts no influence over the legislative process, and in the event that all policies then default to the legislative media…
Delegation and Positive-Sum Bureaucracies
I develop a formal model to investigate why Congress would choose to delegate authority to an agency whose actions can be controlled, ex post, by a President with divergent policy preferences. Because the President and the Congress might find different policies to be salient to their constituencies, I demonstrate that executive review of agency rulemaking can benefit both branches of government, relative to legislative delegation without the poss…
The Politics of Investigations and Regulatory Enforcement by Independent Agents and Cabinet Appointees
We develop a game-theoretic model that identifies conditions under which a political executive will be satisfied with the actions of an appointee who decides whether to investigate possible legal violations. Because investigations are a necessary precondition for enforcement, the investigator exerts significant influence over whether, and the extent to which, laws are enforced. In our model, an executive can exert power over the investigator's ac…
Information and political institutions
When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men
Previous scholarship has demonstrated that female lawmakers differ from their male counterparts by engaging more fully in consensus‐building activities. We argue that this behavioral difference does not serve women equally well in all institutional settings. Contentious and partisan activities of male lawmakers may help them outperform women when in a polarized majority party. However, in the minority party, while men may choose to obstruct and d…
Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress
This book explores why some members of Congress are more effective than others at navigating the legislative process and what this means for how Congress is organized and what policies it produces. Craig Volden and Alan E. Wiseman develop a new metric of individual legislator effectiveness (the Legislative Effectiveness Score) that will be of interest to scholars, voters, and politicians alike. They use these scores to study party influence in Co…
A Theory of Competitive Partisan Lawmaking
Motivated by polar extremes of monopartisanship and nonpartisanship in existing literature on parties in legislatures, we introduce and analyze a more moderate theory ofcompetitivepartisan lawmaking. The distinguishing feature of competitive partisanship is that the minority party, although disadvantaged, has some guaranteed opportunities to influence lawmaking. Our analytic framework focuses on two dimensions of parties in legislatures:agenda-ba…
Spatial Models of Legislative Effectiveness
Spatial models of policymaking have evolved from the median voter theorem to the inclusion of institutional considerations such as committees, political parties, and various voting and amendment rules. Such models, however, implicitly assume that no policy is better than another at solving public policy problems and that all policy makers are equally effective at advancing proposals. We relax these assumptions, allowing some legislators to be mor…
Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Senate
Just like members of the House, US senators vary in how effective they are at lawmaking. We create Legislative Effectiveness Scores for each senator in each of the 93rd–113th Congresses (1973–2015). We use these scores to explore common claims about institutional differences in lawmaking between the House and the Senate. Our analysis offers strong support for the claim that the Senate is a more egalitarian and individualistic lawmaking body, in c…
Women’s Issues and Their Fates in the US Congress
Significant scholarship indicates that female legislators focus their attention on “women’s issues” to a greater extent than do male lawmakers. Drawing on over 40 years of bill sponsorship data from the US House of Representatives, we define women’s issues in terms of those sponsored at a greater rate by women in Congress. Our analysis reveals that most (but not all) of the classically considered women’s issues are indeed raised at an enhanced ra…
Partisan strength and legislative bargaining
We extend the canonical Baron–Ferejohn model of majoritarian legislative bargaining in order to analyze the effects of partisanship on bargaining outcomes. We consider three legislators, two of whom are party affiliated, with each partisan placing some value on the share of the dollar obtained by his copartisan in addition to his own share. We characterize the equilibrium of our model as a function of the strength of party affiliation and the deg…
Legislative bargaining and partisan delegation
We use an extension of the Baron–Ferejohn model of legislative bargaining in which there are three legislators, two of whom have partisan ties, to analyze the division of a fixed political resource in a majoritarian legislature. A legislator’s preferences depend on the shares that he and any copartisan receive. We ask whether there are circumstances under which a partisan legislator is willing to delegate proposal-making authority to a party lead…
The Primary Path for Turning Legislative Effectiveness into Electoral Success
Effective lawmakers are the workhorses of the US Congress, yet we know little about the electoral payoffs of their efforts. Are effective lawmakers better at warding off challengers in the next election? Do they win at a greater rate? To answer these questions, we draw on original data on congressional primary elections from 1980 to 2016, allowing us to focus on elections that lack partisan cues and where voters tend to be highly knowledgeable ab…
Chevron, State Farm, and the Impact of Judicial Doctrine on Bureaucratic Policymaking
We explain how two landmark Supreme Court cases, Motor Vehicles Manufacturers Association of the U.S. v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. (1983) and Chevron U.S.A., Inc., v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984), have constrained congressional and presidential control of the bureaucracy. We provide an overview of these cases, and we note how the dominant theories of bureaucratic policy making in the political science literature…
The Bipartisan Path to Effective Lawmaking
We confront the puzzle of why bipartisanship is alive and well in Congress, despite notable increases in party polarization and rising primary election threats. The answer is remarkably simple—bipartisanship unambiguously helps individual legislators who seek to advance their policy goals. We show that members of the House and Senate from the 93rd to 114th Congresses (1973–2016) who attract a larger portion of their bill cosponsors from the oppos…
Law (29 works) · Political science (29 works) · Law (27 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (25 works) · Legislature (24 works) · Politics (19 works) · Public Administration (18 works) · Economics (17 works) · Public Administration (16 works) · Law and economics (13 works)