Stephanie S Smith
Biographic Data
| ID | 92689 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephanie S Smith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephanie S |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH S S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Washington University in St. Louis |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9943-6717 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 654 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Just One of Those Things: Parties and Exclusive Committees in the U.S. House
When and why did House parties identify exclusive committees? The nexus of parties and standing committees defines the distribution of power in the U.S. House of Representatives, shapes legislators’ careers, and affects Congress's ability to address the nation's problems. Yet, political science provides inadequate and often misleading characterizations of the parties and the most important standing committees. We provide missing detail and offer …
The Changing Nature of Congressional Party Support in a Hyper-Partisan Era
Conventional wisdom suggests that many members of Congress face competing demands from their party and constituents, and therefore adjust their support for party positions as elections approach. Party leaders help members by avoiding the consideration of divisive votes when elections are near. Throughout much of the late 20th century, this dynamic produced a predictable election cycle effect in the U.S. House—a saw-toothed pattern in the frequenc…
Changes in Candidate Evaluations over the Campaign Season: A Comparison of House, Senate, and Presidential Races
Party Identification in the Age of Obama: Evidence on the Sources of Stability and Systematic Change in Party Identification from a Long-Term Panel Survey
Political scientists have long disagreed about the nature of individual-level change in party identification. While some scholars conclude that party identification is a stable identity—attributing changes in individual responses to measurement error—others show that aggregate party identification responds systematically to short-term forces such as presidential approval. In this article, we use a unique long-term panel measuring party identifica…
Pathways to trump: Republican voters in 2016
Revisiting Bedrock Values: The Stability and Predictive Power of the Society Works Best Index
In their 2011 piece, Smith et al. argue that there is a set of fundamental or bedrock values that predict ideology and that are strongly influenced by genetics. These values are considered universal, stable, and less susceptible to environmental changes. Smith et al. propose a scale to measure such values: the Society Works Best Index (SWBI). This is an important contribution, but the SWBI requires further evaluation. Using novel panel data, we e…
It’s Largely a Rigged System: Voter Confidence and the Winner Effect in 2016
The 2016 presidential election provided a unique opportunity to revisit two competing hypotheses for how voters establish their perceptions of electoral integrity. First, mass public opinion is believed to derive from elite messages. In the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump maintained that the election system was “rigged,” while election administration experts and officials received considerable media coverage in their efforts to…
Partisanship, Sophistication, and Public Attitudes about Majority Rule and Minority Rights in Congress
The balance between majority rule and minority rights is a central issue in the design and operation of democratic institutions and remains a contested issue in debates of policy‐making processes. Remarkably, public attitudes about this balance are not subjected to scholarly investigation. In this article, we report the findings of the first survey experiment in which the American public's attitudes about majority rule and minority rights in legi…
The Dimensionality of Congressional Voting Reconsidered
This article reports findings for a decomposition of the roll-call voting record of the U.S. Congress to determine the effect of the level of aggregation on the observed dimensionality of the policy space. In doing so, we identify some but certainly not all of the ways in which the aggregation of the voting record affects the observed dimensionality of the policy space. For the 1955 to 2008 period (84th-110th Congresses), we apply optimal classif…
Solutions to Political Polarization in America
Political polarization dominates discussions of contemporary American politics. Despite widespread agreement that the dysfunction in the political system can be attributed to political polarization, commentators cannot come to a consensus on what that means. The coarseness of our political discourse, the ideological distance between opposing partisans, and, most of all, an inability to pass much-needed and widely supported policies all stem from …
Ideological Labels in America
Cross-community youth work in North Belfast: Funding and youth leader personal networks
Valuing versus doing: Attitudes Toward and Behaviors Connected to Collaboration in Cross-Community Youth Work
Following decades of social, political and armed conflict, much of Northern Ireland continues to live, socialize and attend schools in separate areas. Within community development circles, collaboration has assumed positive salience as a response to promoting community relations and this is particularly the case among those that engage in cross-community work that serves to bring together the "two communities" (Catholic/Nationalist/Republican and…
Social network boundaries and tricky to access populations: A qualitative approach
Social network researchers are routinely faced with the boundary specification problem, namely, where to place limits on nodes that constitute a social network. The complexity of the issue varies; some networks are easily delineated, while others are not. For instance, if we were interested in exploring the relations among older people in an elder care home, then 'residence' would define actor membership. However, where a network exists with ambi…
Majority Party Power and Procedural Motions in the U.S . S enate
While the metaphor of H ouse parties as cartels is widely accepted, its application to the S enate is difficult as the majority party lacks the power to unilaterally manipulate rules and pass legislation. Nevertheless, several scholars have argued that the S enate majority party is able to employ nondebatable motions to table to exclude unwanted amendments with procedural rather than substantive votes. Does the motion to table yield negative agen…
Americans’ Attitudes About the Senate Filibuster
We examine public attitudes about one of the most visible procedural features of Congress, the Senate’s filibuster and cloture practice. We measure the stability of those attitudes during an important legislative episode, relate them to more abstract attitudes about majority rule and minority rights, and draw inferences about the importance of those attitudes for evaluations of the parties and vote intention for the 2010 elections. We find that f…
The American Congress
The American Congress provides the most current treatment of congressional politics available in an undergraduate text. Informed by the authors' Capitol Hill experience and scholarship, this book presents a crisp introduction to major features of Congress: parties and committee systems, leadership, voting and floor activity. This text contains discussions of the importance of presidents, courts and interest groups in congressional policy making. …
Using Pictures to Evoke Spiritual feelings in Breast Cancer Patients: Development of a New Paradigm for Neuroimaging Studies
Majority Party Bias in U.S. Congressional Conference Committees
This article examines the representativeness of conference committees in the U.S. Congress by measuring the difference in observed policy preferences between the conference delegations and the parent bodies. We predict and find significant differences between the House and Senate in terms of the partisan bias of conference delegations. House conference delegations are systematically biased in favor of the majority party and away from the chamber …
The Emotional Journey of Women Experiencing a Breast Abnormality
Using grounded theory, a multidisciplinary study team compared the narratives of 30 women who had recently experienced a breast cancer scare. Even though 10 women received a benign diagnosis, all women reported a difficult time prediagnosis, characterized by an array of emotions and contemplation of the meaning of life. Diagnosis separated the two groups with emotional relief dominant for the benign group and intensification of emotions for the c…
The American Congress Reader
The American Congress Reader provides a supplement to the popular and updated American Congress undergraduate textbook. By the same authors who drew upon Capitol Hill experience and nationally recognized scholarship to present a crisp introduction and analysis of Congress's inner mechanics, the Reader compiles the best relevant scholarship on party and committee systems, leadership, voting, and floor activity to broaden and illuminate the key fea…
Differentiating the neural response to intervention in children with developmental dyslexia
Party Influence in Congress
Party Influence in Congress challenges current arguments and evidence about the influence of political parties in the US Congress. Steven S. Smith argues that theory must reflect policy, electoral, and collective party goals. These goals call for flexible party organizations and leadership strategies. They demand that majority party leaders control the flow of legislation; package legislation and time action to build winning majorities and attrac…
Going Nuclear, Senate Style
Conflict within and beyond the United States Senate has refocused scholarly and public attention on "advice and consent," the constitutional provision that governs the Senate's role in confirming presidential appointments. Despite intense and salient partisan and ideological disputes about the rules of the game that govern the Senate confirmation process for judicial appointees, reformers have had little success in limiting the ability of a minor…
Lawmaking and Decree Making in the Russian Federation: Time, Space, and Rules in Russian National Policymaking
Russia's 1993 constitution created a hybrid presidential-parliamentary system in which the president has the power to initiate and veto legislation and to issue normative decrees. Using a comprehensive examination of laws and decrees promulgated in 1994-2004, three political scientists identify key influences on the use of lawmaking and decree-making powers by the president and parliament: constitutional constraints on the use of decree-making po…
Electoral Institutions and Party Cohesion in the Russian Duma
Russia's mixed single-member-district (SMD)-party list electoral system invites analysis of the effect of electoral rules on legislators' behavior in the context of an invariant set of legislative and constitutional rules. The paper estimates a model of the effects of electoral mandate and party affiliation on levels of factional cohesion in floor voting. No major within-faction differences between list and SMD members in levels of voting agreeme…
Who Wins? Party Effects in Legislative Voting
Political scientists have long attempted to measure and describe the modest and contingent effects of party on the behavior of members of Congress. Recent efforts have extended the debate to the more specific question of whether or not party influences are sufficiently strong to move policy outcomes away from the median position. In this article, we specify four theories of legislative behavior. One is a preference‐based, or partyless, theory of …
It’s Largely a Rigged System: Voter Confidence and the Winner Effect in 2016
The 2016 presidential election provided a unique opportunity to revisit two competing hypotheses for how voters establish their perceptions of electoral integrity. First, mass public opinion is believed to derive from elite messages. In the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump maintained that the election system was “rigged,” while election administration experts and officials received considerable media coverage in their efforts to…
Political Goals, Institutional Context, and the Choice of an Electoral System: The Russian Parliamentary Election Law
Theory: Alternative strategic models of party preferences for electoral institutions are identified. One model provides that legislators and parties define preferences for electoral systems over policy outcomes; an alternative provides that legislators and parties define preferences for electoral systems over electoral outcomes. Hypotheses: Based on the results of the 1993 Russian parliamentary elections, members of the Russian State Duma are exp…
The Development of Parliamentary Parties in Russia
Cross-national studies suggest that electoral law, the arrangement of political institutions, political cleavages in the electorate, and political stability influence the number of parliamentary parties and their policy-making role. These factors do not yield unambiguous expectations for the parties in Russia's new parliament. Nevertheless, the Duma, the lower and more powerful chamber of the new Russian Federal Assembly, has developed a strongly…
Ideological Labels in America
Positive Theories of Congressional Parties
In recent years, positive theories of congressional parties have been elaborated to encompass a variety of institutional features. The seasoning of the field is reflected in its contrasting theoretical accounts of the existence of parties and their effects, and the return to empirical evidence in a set of insightful studies of modem congressional decision making. This paper provides a critical review of this recent literature and suggests some un…
Going Nuclear, Senate Style
Conflict within and beyond the United States Senate has refocused scholarly and public attention on "advice and consent," the constitutional provision that governs the Senate's role in confirming presidential appointments. Despite intense and salient partisan and ideological disputes about the rules of the game that govern the Senate confirmation process for judicial appointees, reformers have had little success in limiting the ability of a minor…
Pathways to trump: Republican voters in 2016
Decrees, Laws, and Inter-Branch Relations in the Russian Federation
1998). Decrees, Laws, and Inter-Branch Relations in the Russian Federation. Post-Soviet Affairs: Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 287-322
Tracking the Filibuster, 1917 to 1996
Scholars and observers of the U.S. Senate have noted an appreciable rise in the use of the filibuster over the course of the 20th century. Although numerous explanations have been offered, alternative accounts have never been pitted against each other in a multivariate fashion. In this article, we survey and test these multiple accounts, using data on filibusters launched between 1917 and 1996. Our findings suggest that the incentive to filibuste…
Managing the Senate Floor: Complex Unanimous Consent Agreements since the 1950s
ronment, increasing and often competing demands on floor leaders produced innovations in the use and content of unanimous consent agreements. We demonstrate (1) that since the mid-1950s leaders have relied on unanimous consent agreement more frequently and that agreements (2) increasingly contained amendment-specific debate limits and increasingly specified certain times for votes on measures and amendments, (3) decreasingly restricted nongermane…
An Essay on Sequence, Position, Goals, and Committee Power
This essay considers the limits of the ex post veto as an explanation for committee power in Congress. A simple bicameral model is developed to indicate the severity of the conditions that must be met for a perfect ex post veto. Common conditions that undermine the ex post veto are explored, such as extreme committees, party turnover, and periodic legislation. Finally, the alternative explanation of member goals is described and Fenno's findings …
The Consistency and Ideological Structure of U.S. Senate Voting Alignments, 1957-1976
The pluralist-ideologist debate over the most appropriate interpretation of congressional voting patterns is analyzed in this paper. Two distinct concepts organize that debate, alignment consistency and ideological structure, both of which are operationalized and examined in the U.S. Senate during the 1957-1976 period. Senate voting patterns are found to exhibit a trend toward greater alignment consistency which is associated with a trend toward …
Majority Party Power and Procedural Motions in the U.S . S enate
While the metaphor of H ouse parties as cartels is widely accepted, its application to the S enate is difficult as the majority party lacks the power to unilaterally manipulate rules and pass legislation. Nevertheless, several scholars have argued that the S enate majority party is able to employ nondebatable motions to table to exclude unwanted amendments with procedural rather than substantive votes. Does the motion to table yield negative agen…
The Impact of Congressional Reform: House Democratic Committee Assignments
In 1974, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives adopted major reforms in their committee assignment process. Drawing upon interviews with participants and personal observation, we identify the major differences and similarities in the new and old assignment mechanisms and in their environments. The formal and informal procedural changes, in turn, lead to a set of expectations about the role and significance of the characteristics of reque…
Americans’ Attitudes About the Senate Filibuster
We examine public attitudes about one of the most visible procedural features of Congress, the Senate’s filibuster and cloture practice. We measure the stability of those attitudes during an important legislative episode, relate them to more abstract attitudes about majority rule and minority rights, and draw inferences about the importance of those attitudes for evaluations of the parties and vote intention for the 2010 elections. We find that f…
Theories of Legislative Institutions and the Organization of the Russian Duma
Theory: Recent positive theory based on United States congressional studies argues for policy preference-based models to explain the choice of legislative institutions; an alternative theoretical approach holds that reelection goals shape preferences over institutional arrangements. Still other theorists emphasize supply-side explanations of partisanship and party leadership in enabling legislators to overcome collective action problems in policy…
Partisanship, Sophistication, and Public Attitudes about Majority Rule and Minority Rights in Congress
The balance between majority rule and minority rights is a central issue in the design and operation of democratic institutions and remains a contested issue in debates of policy‐making processes. Remarkably, public attitudes about this balance are not subjected to scholarly investigation. In this article, we report the findings of the first survey experiment in which the American public's attitudes about majority rule and minority rights in legi…
Lawmaking and Decree Making in the Russian Federation: Time, Space, and Rules in Russian National Policymaking
Russia's 1993 constitution created a hybrid presidential-parliamentary system in which the president has the power to initiate and veto legislation and to issue normative decrees. Using a comprehensive examination of laws and decrees promulgated in 1994-2004, three political scientists identify key influences on the use of lawmaking and decree-making powers by the president and parliament: constitutional constraints on the use of decree-making po…
Party Identification in the Age of Obama: Evidence on the Sources of Stability and Systematic Change in Party Identification from a Long-Term Panel Survey
Political scientists have long disagreed about the nature of individual-level change in party identification. While some scholars conclude that party identification is a stable identity—attributing changes in individual responses to measurement error—others show that aggregate party identification responds systematically to short-term forces such as presidential approval. In this article, we use a unique long-term panel measuring party identifica…
Political Goals and Procedural Choice in the Senate
Recent scholarship on the U.S. Senate attributes the protection of extended debate to senators' principled commitment to quality deliberation and free speech. The persistence of rules protecting nearly unlimited debate is said to reflect senators' collective interests in maintaining an institution that protects free speech and minority rights. Such an explanation, we argue, understates the influence of political objectives in shaping senators' pr…
Congressional Leadership of Public Opinion
LAWRENCE R. JACOBS and STEVEN S. SMITH are, respectively, associate professor and professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. ERIC D. LAWRENCE is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. ROBERT Y. SHAPIRO is professor of political science at Columbia University. LAWRENCE R. JACOBS and STEVEN S. SMITH are, respectively, associate professor and professor of political science at the University of Minnesota
The early legislative process in the Russian federal assembly
The paper describes the establishment of legislative rules and procedures in the Russian Federal Assembly, the new bicameral parliament created under the 1993 Russian Constitution. The paper reviews the constitutional and electoral setting in which the new parliament formed, its organisational structure, and the elements of the legislative process. We discuss the consequences of the different bases of representation of members of the upper and lo…
Changing Motives for Committee Preferences of New Members of the U. S. House
The Consistency and Ideological Structure of U.S. Senate Voting Alignments, 1957-1976
The pluralist-ideologist debate over the most appropriate interpretation of congressional voting patterns is analyzed in this paper. Two distinct concepts organize that debate, alignment consistency and ideological structure, both of which are operationalized and examined in the U.S. Senate during the 1957-1976 period. Senate voting patterns are found to exhibit a trend toward greater alignment consistency which is associated with a trend toward …
Changing Motives for Committee Preferences of New Members of the U. S. House
Generational Change and the Allocation of Staff in the U. S. Congress
The Impact of Congressional Reform: House Democratic Committee Assignments
In 1974, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives adopted major reforms in their committee assignment process. Drawing upon interviews with participants and personal observation, we identify the major differences and similarities in the new and old assignment mechanisms and in their environments. The formal and informal procedural changes, in turn, lead to a set of expectations about the role and significance of the characteristics of reque…
Committee Size in the U. S. Congress
Westefield (1974) asserts that powerful congressional leaders expand the number of committee seats to create sources of leverage with rank-and-file members. We challenge his interpretation and provide a more rigorous test of his theory. A committee-specific examination of committee-size decisions corroborates Shepsle's (1978) findings. However, a speaker-by-speaker analysis confirms our expectation that Shepsle's findings obscure significant diff…
The Central Concepts in Fenno's Committee Studies
The Iran Arms Sale and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980
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An Essay on Sequence, Position, Goals, and Committee Power
This essay considers the limits of the ex post veto as an explanation for committee power in Congress. A simple bicameral model is developed to indicate the severity of the conditions that must be met for a perfect ex post veto. Common conditions that undermine the ex post veto are explored, such as extreme committees, party turnover, and periodic legislation. Finally, the alternative explanation of member goals is described and Fenno's findings …
The Making of a Senator: Dan Quayle, by Richard F. Fenno, Jr
Managing the Senate Floor: Complex Unanimous Consent Agreements since the 1950s
ronment, increasing and often competing demands on floor leaders produced innovations in the use and content of unanimous consent agreements. We demonstrate (1) that since the mid-1950s leaders have relied on unanimous consent agreement more frequently and that agreements (2) increasingly contained amendment-specific debate limits and increasingly specified certain times for votes on measures and amendments, (3) decreasingly restricted nongermane…
United States
Parental Influences on Inhalant Use by Children
Characteristics of the parents of Mexican American drug users were examined. Interviews with 78 mothers showed that a large percentage were not following the traditional path of marriage, childbirth, and caring for their children at home on a full-time basis. Adherence to traditional roles was related to the mother's age, education, alcohol use, depression, and her child 's depression, but was not related to heroin druguse, criminality, or home e…
Principals, Goals, Dimensionality, and Congressional Committees
The Development of Parliamentary Parties in Russia
Cross-national studies suggest that electoral law, the arrangement of political institutions, political cleavages in the electorate, and political stability influence the number of parliamentary parties and their policy-making role. These factors do not yield unambiguous expectations for the parties in Russia's new parliament. Nevertheless, the Duma, the lower and more powerful chamber of the new Russian Federal Assembly, has developed a strongly…
The early legislative process in the Russian federal assembly
The paper describes the establishment of legislative rules and procedures in the Russian Federal Assembly, the new bicameral parliament created under the 1993 Russian Constitution. The paper reviews the constitutional and electoral setting in which the new parliament formed, its organisational structure, and the elements of the legislative process. We discuss the consequences of the different bases of representation of members of the upper and lo…
Political Goals, Institutional Context, and the Choice of an Electoral System: The Russian Parliamentary Election Law
Theory: Alternative strategic models of party preferences for electoral institutions are identified. One model provides that legislators and parties define preferences for electoral systems over policy outcomes; an alternative provides that legislators and parties define preferences for electoral systems over electoral outcomes. Hypotheses: Based on the results of the 1993 Russian parliamentary elections, members of the Russian State Duma are exp…
Participation in Congress. Richard L. Hall
Decrees, Laws, and Inter-Branch Relations in the Russian Federation
1998). Decrees, Laws, and Inter-Branch Relations in the Russian Federation. Post-Soviet Affairs: Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 287-322
Electoral Institutions and Party Cohesion in the Russian Duma
Russia's mixed single-member-district (SMD)-party list electoral system invites analysis of the effect of electoral rules on legislators' behavior in the context of an invariant set of legislative and constitutional rules. The paper estimates a model of the effects of electoral mandate and party affiliation on levels of factional cohesion in floor voting. No major within-faction differences between list and SMD members in levels of voting agreeme…
Political Goals and Procedural Choice in the Senate
Recent scholarship on the U.S. Senate attributes the protection of extended debate to senators' principled commitment to quality deliberation and free speech. The persistence of rules protecting nearly unlimited debate is said to reflect senators' collective interests in maintaining an institution that protects free speech and minority rights. Such an explanation, we argue, understates the influence of political objectives in shaping senators' pr…
Theories of Legislative Institutions and the Organization of the Russian Duma
Theory: Recent positive theory based on United States congressional studies argues for policy preference-based models to explain the choice of legislative institutions; an alternative theoretical approach holds that reelection goals shape preferences over institutional arrangements. Still other theorists emphasize supply-side explanations of partisanship and party leadership in enabling legislators to overcome collective action problems in policy…
Congressional Leadership of Public Opinion
LAWRENCE R. JACOBS and STEVEN S. SMITH are, respectively, associate professor and professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. ERIC D. LAWRENCE is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. ROBERT Y. SHAPIRO is professor of political science at Columbia University. LAWRENCE R. JACOBS and STEVEN S. SMITH are, respectively, associate professor and professor of political science at the University of Minnesota
The Politics of Institutional Choice: The Formation of the Russian State Duma
Positive Theories of Congressional Parties
In recent years, positive theories of congressional parties have been elaborated to encompass a variety of institutional features. The seasoning of the field is reflected in its contrasting theoretical accounts of the existence of parties and their effects, and the return to empirical evidence in a set of insightful studies of modem congressional decision making. This paper provides a critical review of this recent literature and suggests some un…
The Politics of Institutional Choice: The Formation of the Russian State Duma
Political science (50 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (37 works) · Law (37 works) · Politics (32 works) · Law (26 works) · Public Administration (21 works) · Economics (19 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Public Administration (16 works) · Computer Science (14 works)