Lawrence S Rothenberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 1126880 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lawrence S Rothenberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lawrence S |
| FAMILY NAME | Rothenberg |
| SIGNATURE | ROTHENBERG L S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Rochester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2788-5585 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 623 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Shaping Appropriations: Legislative Ability and Budgetary Success
In recent years, scholars have grown increasingly attentive to the uneven impacts that individual legislators exert on policy outcomes. These differences may reflect both lawmakers’ intrinsic abilities and the institutional levers at their disposal (e.g., chamber or party positions). Yet disentangling these forces empirically is challenging. We isolate the effects of legislative ability by focusing on members of the Appropriations Committee and i…
At What Price? Party Taxation and Member Advancement in the U.S. House
The tangled web of policy support: Foundations and environmental NGOs
Strategic avoidance and rulemaking procedures
Informal, ‘notice-and-comment’, rulemaking is the prototypical mechanism employed by US regulators. However, agencies frequently claim their actions exempt from the process, and courts typically agree. Agencies thus face an important strategic choice between informal rulemaking and avoidance. To study this choice, we analyze a model of rulemaking with exemption and empirically analyze agency avoidance. Our model implies that more biased agencies …
Agency control through the appointed hierarchy: Presidential Politicization of Unilateral Appointees
Schedule C and noncareer Senior Executive Service positions hold significant influence over policy outcomes, yet they have received limited scrutiny compared to advise and consent (PAS) appointments. Such appointments offer understudied avenues for presidential control over the bureaucracy. Through a comprehensive analysis of more detailed data than has been employed to date, we reveal that these appointments are responsive to broader political d…
The Importance of Position: Agency Discretionary Budgets and PAS Appointments
Agency budgets are recognized as strong conditioning influences on executive nominations and, by extension, bureaucratic politicization. Key is an appointed position with greater budgetary authority attached being more important. Yet, position importance has been measured broadly—for example, distinguishing among appointment tiers—without incorporating discretionary budgets as a more nuanced measure. We rectify this, assessing hypotheses about ho…
The Structure of Appointment Politics: Consistency or Change
Given its importance and level of conflict in recent decades, scholars have expended great effort analyzing appointment politics. However, despite descriptions that might lead to conclusions that the structure of how nominees are dealt with has changed over time, quantitative analyses have not investigated possible structural changes. We remedy this by conducting a changepoint analysis using data on executive nominations from 1885–2016. Two break…
The Amicus Game
Despite increased scholarly attention toward analyzing the influence of amicus briefs on case outcomes, we lack a microfounded model for understanding what we observe. Our analysis remedies this gap, modeling a world in which potential filers can advocate for a particular ruling and may provide information to influence a judge's decision. We show that the influence of an amicus brief depends on the interaction of the group's bias and contextual f…
Appointments and attrition: Time and Executive Disadvantage in the Appointments Process
While the importance of political appointments is a matter of consensus, theorists and empiricists generally focus on different considerations, such as ideology and confirmation duration, respectively. More recently, there have been efforts to integrate empirical and theoretical scholarship but, to date, no empirical analysis assesses theoretical expectations about the relationship between temporal concerns and nominee ideologies. We fill this ga…
Flexibility or Stability? Analyzing Proposals to Reform the Separation of Powers
The social welfare effects of legislatures in presidential systems, such as the U.S. Congress, are frequently lamented. In response, there are proposals to reform the separation of powers system by giving presidents control of the legislative agenda and weakening rules such as the filibuster. We provide a game‐theoretic analysis of the policy and social welfare consequences of a more executive‐centric system. Integrating standard assumptions abou…
The Who, When, and Where of Executive Nominations: Integrating Agency Independence and Appointee Ideology
In recent years, scholars have expended considerable efforts to understand the executive appointment process and the forces influencing the choices made by the president and the Senate. However, some factors integral to theoretical models have not been well integrated empirically, and other relevant factors have not been incorporated much at all. Here, we focus on one determinant corresponding to the former critique—nominee ideology—and another c…
The When and Why of Nominations: Determinants of Presidential Appointments
Scholars interested in bargaining over political appointments typically analyze the duration between the candidate’s nomination and eventual disposition, ignoring the prior period between vacancy and nomination. Using a dataset of vacancies reported to the Government Accountability Office, we instead examine the nomination stage. We uncover both commonalities and differences between the dynamics of nomination and those of confirmation. Ideologica…
Presidential unilateral action: Partisan influence and presidential power
Multidimensional Cheap Talk and Delegation
lignment with the legislator on the dimension of its expertise, and on the conflict of lobby interests. Full revelation is possible only when each lobby's preference on its expertise is completely aligned with the legislator's. Otherwise, greater preference alignment and lowered lobbyist conflict induce more transmission. We also show that results are sensitive to the legislator's expertise. In turn, we demonstrate how informational impacts provi…
Executive appointments: Duration, ideology, and hierarchy
While contemporary scholars generally view the Senate’s nominee approval role as impacting bureaucratic capacities and the president’s ability to realize campaign pledges, empiricists and theorists focus on different elements of bargaining. Since empiricists typically study confirmation delays, and theorists normally analyze equilibrium nomination preferences, theory and data rarely inform one another. We remedy this by specifying an executive ap…
The Elusive Search for Presidential Power
Unilateral presidential actions, such as executive orders, are widely cited as a key strategic tool for presidential power. However, is unilateral action evidence of unilateralism or might it represent executive acquiescence? We answer this by (1) specifying three competing models, each with a different presidential discretion assumption and generating alternative hypotheses; (2) extending the canonical item‐response model to best measure executi…
Does It Really Hurt to Be Out of Step
Scholars have seemingly established that constituents hold “out of step” legislators electorally accountable. Empirically, however, such claims have not been based on measures placing districts and perceptions of legislators’ preferences in the same space. We remedy this using the 2006 and 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, and Aldrich and McKelvey’s scaling procedure, finding that electoral success is roughly consistent with Downsi…
Rational incompetence
When something goes awry in a governmental agency, a frequent claim is that appointed political heads are incompetent. If true, what explains this in a separation of powers system where the executive nominates and the legislature approves? Our analysis provides a rationale and conditions for rational incompetence. Specifically, we present a model in which a President nominates and the Senate confirms or rejects an appointee. Besides choosing a no…
Influence without Bribes: A Noncontracting Model of Campaign Giving and Policymaking
Efforts to find empirical evidence that campaign money impacts policymaking choices have offered scant support for interest group influence. A possible explanation is that the hypothesis that those receiving campaign monies should adjust their policy choices to favor their donor requires the untenable assumption that interest groups and legislators can implement contracts. We develop a new, alternative, model in which legislators and interest gro…
Why Government Succeeds and Why It Fails
A Unified Theory of U.S. Lawmaking: Preferences, Institutions, and Party Discipline
We develop a unified theory of lawmaking that integrates preferences, institutional features, and imperfect party discipline. This model both parsimoniously subsumes numerous extant models and allows for examination of heretofore unexplored equilibria behavior. To demonstrate this, we pinpoint what effects the kinds of changes that reformers often focus on—strengthening parties and loosening the filibuster rule—might have on the equilibrium gridl…
The Search for Comparability: Response to Binder
Binder (n.d., Taking the measure of Congress: Reply to Chiou and Rothenberg. Political Analysis . Forthcoming) highlights areas of agreement and disagreement with our discussion of preference measurement and legislative gridlock. We now both agree that W-NOMINATE scores—employed in Binder (1999, The dynamics of legislative gridlock. American Political Science Review 9:519–33) to measure key independent variables, including bicameral differences—s…
Comparing Legislators and Legislatures: The Dynamics of Legislative Gridlock Reconsidered
Although political methodologists are well aware of measurement issues and the problems that can be created, such concerns are not always front and center when we are doing substantive research. Here, we show how choices in measuring legislative preferences have influenced our understanding of what determines legislative outputs. Specifically, we replicate and extend Binder's highly influential analysis (Binder, Sarah A. 1999. The dynamics of leg…
Foundations of Legislative Organization and Committee Influence
We revisit seemingly settled questions of legislative organization, specifying a more general, realistic, informational model than previously. While theorists, unlike empiricists, have commonly inferred that the floor lacks incentive to allow committee influence via gatekeeping, we find otherwise. By assuming that (1) legislators know more about the status quo than alternative proposals, and (2) committee authority is endogenously determined, we …
Still Shirking
While Lawrence's analysis highlights the importance of considering outliers, it neither disconfirms the original Rothenberg and Sanders analysis of shirking on the impeachment vote nor findings of shirking generally. Indeed, when a systematic analysis of outliers is conducted for Republican voting on the Clinton impeachment, shirking results again emerge. While outlier analysis is important, it must be done systematically and not in an ad hoc man…
Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress
Studies of representation focusing on legislative shirking tend to offer an interesting tension: when the opportunity presents itself, it seems that exiting members do not change their votinq behavior (ideological shirking) but do reduce their effort level by voting less (participatory shirking). Our analysis avoids the pitfalls of prior studies by defining a simple, quasi-experimental, research design contrasting those certain that they are seek…
When Pivotal Politics Meets Partisan Politics
Recent years have witnessed many efforts to understand legislative productivity and gridlock. However, despite theoretical and empirical contributions to how preferences and institutions shape political gridlock's level (e.g., Krehbiel 1996, 1998) and empirical evidence about how parties may affect political gridlock (e.g., Binder 1999; Coleman 1999), we lack a comprehensive perspective theoretically and empirically examining preferences, institu…
The Instability of Partisanship: An Analysis of the 1980 Presidential Election
Scholars have long assigned a key role to party identification as an explanation of voting behaviour. In doing so, they have assumed that individuals' partisan affiliations remain unchanged for long periods of time. But is partisanship sufficiently stable to justify this assumption? At the very least, to be considered a long-term force party identification cannot change during an election. Yet the intra-election stability of party affiliations ha…
Commitment and the Campaign Contribution Contract
Theory: Commitment problems make establishing long-term relationships between members of Congress and organized interests extremely difficult. Hypothesis: Political action committees whose contribution behavior is unfavorable to an election winner are not forced to pay for their mistakes in the subsequent election to get back into the representative's good graces. In other words, strong punishment strategies are not employed to enforce what we la…
Organizational Maintenance and the Retention Decision in Groups
Understanding why members leave or remain in groups has received little attention despite its fundamental importance for organizational maintenance. In this analysis, a theory of experiential search is proposed and applied to Common Cause. Group participation is conceptualized as a process by which imperfectly informed decision makers learn about the organizations they join. This framework makes quitting understandable and provides a link between…
The Elusive Search for Presidential Power
Unilateral presidential actions, such as executive orders, are widely cited as a key strategic tool for presidential power. However, is unilateral action evidence of unilateralism or might it represent executive acquiescence? We answer this by (1) specifying three competing models, each with a different presidential discretion assumption and generating alternative hypotheses; (2) extending the canonical item‐response model to best measure executi…
The Who, When, and Where of Executive Nominations: Integrating Agency Independence and Appointee Ideology
In recent years, scholars have expended considerable efforts to understand the executive appointment process and the forces influencing the choices made by the president and the Senate. However, some factors integral to theoretical models have not been well integrated empirically, and other relevant factors have not been incorporated much at all. Here, we focus on one determinant corresponding to the former critique—nominee ideology—and another c…
Executive appointments: Duration, ideology, and hierarchy
While contemporary scholars generally view the Senate’s nominee approval role as impacting bureaucratic capacities and the president’s ability to realize campaign pledges, empiricists and theorists focus on different elements of bargaining. Since empiricists typically study confirmation delays, and theorists normally analyze equilibrium nomination preferences, theory and data rarely inform one another. We remedy this by specifying an executive ap…
Life space and social networks as political contexts
Legislator Turnout and the Calculus of Voting: The Determinants of Abstention in the U.S. Congress
Does It Really Hurt to Be Out of Step
Scholars have seemingly established that constituents hold “out of step” legislators electorally accountable. Empirically, however, such claims have not been based on measures placing districts and perceptions of legislators’ preferences in the same space. We remedy this using the 2006 and 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, and Aldrich and McKelvey’s scaling procedure, finding that electoral success is roughly consistent with Downsi…
Influence without Bribes: A Noncontracting Model of Campaign Giving and Policymaking
Efforts to find empirical evidence that campaign money impacts policymaking choices have offered scant support for interest group influence. A possible explanation is that the hypothesis that those receiving campaign monies should adjust their policy choices to favor their donor requires the untenable assumption that interest groups and legislators can implement contracts. We develop a new, alternative, model in which legislators and interest gro…
Comparing Legislators and Legislatures: The Dynamics of Legislative Gridlock Reconsidered
Although political methodologists are well aware of measurement issues and the problems that can be created, such concerns are not always front and center when we are doing substantive research. Here, we show how choices in measuring legislative preferences have influenced our understanding of what determines legislative outputs. Specifically, we replicate and extend Binder's highly influential analysis (Binder, Sarah A. 1999. The dynamics of leg…
Lame-Duck Politics: Impending Departure and the Votes on Impeachment
One of the peculiarities of the December 1998 votes in the House of Representatives to impeach Bill Clinton was that they took place during a lame-duck session. Roughly 10 percent of the voting population were in their final term and therefore no longer faced any risk of electoral retribution by the citizenry. While most of the relevant empirical literature suggests that the absence of electoral discipline does not matter, in theory, these depart…
The When and Why of Nominations: Determinants of Presidential Appointments
Scholars interested in bargaining over political appointments typically analyze the duration between the candidate’s nomination and eventual disposition, ignoring the prior period between vacancy and nomination. Using a dataset of vacancies reported to the Government Accountability Office, we instead examine the nomination stage. We uncover both commonalities and differences between the dynamics of nomination and those of confirmation. Ideologica…
A Unified Theory of U.S. Lawmaking: Preferences, Institutions, and Party Discipline
We develop a unified theory of lawmaking that integrates preferences, institutional features, and imperfect party discipline. This model both parsimoniously subsumes numerous extant models and allows for examination of heretofore unexplored equilibria behavior. To demonstrate this, we pinpoint what effects the kinds of changes that reformers often focus on—strengthening parties and loosening the filibuster rule—might have on the equilibrium gridl…
Modeling Legislator Decision Making: A Historical Perspective
Although scholars have put enormous effort into developing models of legislative choice behavior, they may not have sufficiently considered the underlying choice process and its relationship to the institutional environment. Our analysis does so by jointly integrating more realistic models of legislator decision making with a historical perspective on institutional evolution. We apply a unified model, incorporating participation and vote choice i…
The Time to Give: PAC Motivations and Electoral Timing
There has been much discussion about how members of Congress desire money early in the campaign season. However, theoretical models of how contributions are allocated during the electoral cycle have been lacking. Our analysis attempts to remedy this gap by providing and testing a model which specifies how the process of bargaining between members of Congress and organized interests produces the pattern of donations observed over the course of the…
The Politics of Bureaucratic Competition: The Case of Natural Resource Policy
Todd Kunioka, Lawrence S. Rothenberg, The Politics of Bureaucratic Competition: The Case of Natural Resource Policy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 700-725
Rational incompetence
When something goes awry in a governmental agency, a frequent claim is that appointed political heads are incompetent. If true, what explains this in a separation of powers system where the executive nominates and the legislature approves? Our analysis provides a rationale and conditions for rational incompetence. Specifically, we present a model in which a President nominates and the Senate confirms or rejects an appointee. Besides choosing a no…
Still Shirking
While Lawrence's analysis highlights the importance of considering outliers, it neither disconfirms the original Rothenberg and Sanders analysis of shirking on the impeachment vote nor findings of shirking generally. Indeed, when a systematic analysis of outliers is conducted for Republican voting on the Clinton impeachment, shirking results again emerge. While outlier analysis is important, it must be done systematically and not in an ad hoc man…
Preferences, Parties, and Legislative Productivity
Chiou and Rothenberg (2003) utilized models of legislative productivity, synthesizing parties and preferences by deriving and measuring different equilibrium gridlock intervals, finding that such models outperformed alternatives depending on preferences alone. However, their temporal scope is limited to post-World War II. Generalizing theoretical models—notably recognizing the 1917 enactment of Rule 22 creating the Senate filibuster rule—and expa…
Reply to “Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Interest Groups in American Campaigns: The New Face of Electioneering
Journal Article Interest Groups in American Campaigns: The New Face of Electioneering Get access Interest Groups in American Campaigns: The New Face of Electioneering by Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. Washington, DC, Congressional Quarterly Press, 1999. 170 pp. Paper, $19.95. Lawrence S. Rothenberg Lawrence S. Rothenberg University of Rochester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly,…
Predicting Bureaucratic Control: Evidence from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments
The extent to which politicians control bureaucracies that are delegated authority over public policy involves fundamental positive and normative issues for the study of politics. Considerations related to such issues have stimulated a great deal of debate about whether the legislature exercises control over bureaucratic performance. However, establishing the measurable empirical conditions under which elected officials do and do not assure agenc…
Life space and social networks as political contexts
The Instability of Partisanship: An Analysis of the 1980 Presidential Election
Scholars have long assigned a key role to party identification as an explanation of voting behaviour. In doing so, they have assumed that individuals' partisan affiliations remain unchanged for long periods of time. But is partisanship sufficiently stable to justify this assumption? At the very least, to be considered a long-term force party identification cannot change during an election. Yet the intra-election stability of party affiliations ha…
Organizational Maintenance and the Retention Decision in Groups
Understanding why members leave or remain in groups has received little attention despite its fundamental importance for organizational maintenance. In this analysis, a theory of experiential search is proposed and applied to Common Cause. Group participation is conceptualized as a process by which imperfectly informed decision makers learn about the organizations they join. This framework makes quitting understandable and provides a link between…
Participation in Presidential Primaries
SINCE 1968 the number of presidential primaries has exploded. In 1984 Democratic voters participated in 26 primary elections; Republican electors were involved in 29. They selected 56.4 percent and 68.2 percent of the delegates to their party's respective nominating conventions. The proliferation of primary contests is one of the most significant changes in electoral politics in recent years. It has become increasingly important to understand wha…
Putting the puzzle together: Why people join public interest groups
Linking citizens to government: Interest group politics at Common Cause
Institutional features of congressional decisions: The fight to prohibit smoking on airlines
The Politics of Bureaucratic Competition: The Case of Natural Resource Policy
Todd Kunioka, Lawrence S. Rothenberg, The Politics of Bureaucratic Competition: The Case of Natural Resource Policy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 700-725
The Politics of Interests: Interest Groups Transformed. Mark P. Petracca
The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making
Commitment and the Campaign Contribution Contract
Theory: Commitment problems make establishing long-term relationships between members of Congress and organized interests extremely difficult. Hypothesis: Political action committees whose contribution behavior is unfavorable to an election winner are not forced to pay for their mistakes in the subsequent election to get back into the representative's good graces. In other words, strong punishment strategies are not employed to enforce what we la…
Interest Groups in American Campaigns: The New Face of Electioneering
Journal Article Interest Groups in American Campaigns: The New Face of Electioneering Get access Interest Groups in American Campaigns: The New Face of Electioneering by Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. Washington, DC, Congressional Quarterly Press, 1999. 170 pp. Paper, $19.95. Lawrence S. Rothenberg Lawrence S. Rothenberg University of Rochester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly,…
Predicting Bureaucratic Control: Evidence from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments
The extent to which politicians control bureaucracies that are delegated authority over public policy involves fundamental positive and normative issues for the study of politics. Considerations related to such issues have stimulated a great deal of debate about whether the legislature exercises control over bureaucratic performance. However, establishing the measurable empirical conditions under which elected officials do and do not assure agenc…
Lame-Duck Politics: Impending Departure and the Votes on Impeachment
Legislator Turnout and the Calculus of Voting: The Determinants of Abstention in the U.S. Congress
Lame-Duck Politics: Impending Departure and the Votes on Impeachment
One of the peculiarities of the December 1998 votes in the House of Representatives to impeach Bill Clinton was that they took place during a lame-duck session. Roughly 10 percent of the voting population were in their final term and therefore no longer faced any risk of electoral retribution by the citizenry. While most of the relevant empirical literature suggests that the absence of electoral discipline does not matter, in theory, these depart…
The Time to Give: PAC Motivations and Electoral Timing
There has been much discussion about how members of Congress desire money early in the campaign season. However, theoretical models of how contributions are allocated during the electoral cycle have been lacking. Our analysis attempts to remedy this gap by providing and testing a model which specifies how the process of bargaining between members of Congress and organized interests produces the pattern of donations observed over the course of the…
Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress
Studies of representation focusing on legislative shirking tend to offer an interesting tension: when the opportunity presents itself, it seems that exiting members do not change their votinq behavior (ideological shirking) but do reduce their effort level by voting less (participatory shirking). Our analysis avoids the pitfalls of prior studies by defining a simple, quasi-experimental, research design contrasting those certain that they are seek…
Modeling Legislator Decision Making: A Historical Perspective
Although scholars have put enormous effort into developing models of legislative choice behavior, they may not have sufficiently considered the underlying choice process and its relationship to the institutional environment. Our analysis does so by jointly integrating more realistic models of legislator decision making with a historical perspective on institutional evolution. We apply a unified model, incorporating participation and vote choice i…
When Pivotal Politics Meets Partisan Politics
Valuing Policy Alternatives: A Generalization
Those interested in political phenomena such as voting have found random utility models, originally developed for decisions such as transportation choice, especially attractive, as the underlying model can yield a statistical model with a few simple, realistic assumptions. Unfortunately, such models have proven difficult to apply to situations with more than two votes and three alternatives or an unknown cutpoint. Additionally, as we show, standa…
When Pivotal Politics Meets Partisan Politics
Recent years have witnessed many efforts to understand legislative productivity and gridlock. However, despite theoretical and empirical contributions to how preferences and institutions shape political gridlock's level (e.g., Krehbiel 1996, 1998) and empirical evidence about how parties may affect political gridlock (e.g., Binder 1999; Coleman 1999), we lack a comprehensive perspective theoretically and empirically examining preferences, institu…
Reply to “Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Much Ado About Very Little: Reply to Herron
While Herron (2004, Political Analysis 12:182–190) is correct that sensitivity to changes in underlying scale and how they affect estimates and inferences is generally important, our assumption in Rothenberg and Sanders (2000, American Journal of Political Science 44:310–319) that W-NOMINATE scales can be directly compared from one Congress to another to study legislative shirking is quite defensible because scale variability is not a substantial…
Labor and environment movement: The quest for common ground
Political science (43 works) · Politics (36 works) · Economics (35 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (35 works) · Law (34 works) · Law (32 works) · Law and economics (21 works) · Legislature (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (15 works)