Recurring bills and the legislative process in the US congress

Recurring bills may be interpreted in two very different ways. First, there is the 'legislative loser' perspective, which posits that legislators introduce bills repeatedly for symbolic reasons, not intending or expecting them to go very far. Alternatively, there is the 'softening up' perspective, which assumes that legislators introduce bills more than once for policy reasons. They first test the waters, making a second attempt more successful. In this research article, we test these assumptions by examining the legislative impact of recurring bill status at various stages in the US House and Senate: initial committee attention, committee passage, attachment to an omnibus package and enactment. The evidence is mixed for the first stage of the process, while the findings for subsequent stages support the softening up interpretation. We discuss the implications for representation and future research. Acknowledgments This research was supported by a Research Award from the Dirksen Congressional Center (funded by the Caterpillar Foundation) together with matching funds from the following entities at Arizona State University: The Office of the Vice Provost for Research, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and The Department of Political Science. We thank Patrick Kenney, Keith Gaddie, Paul Goren and Greg Marfleet for helpful comments. Philip Hardy provided excellent research assistance. Notes 1. N. Ornstein, T. Mann and M. Malbin, Vital Statistics on Congress, 1999–2000 (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 2000), pp.154–7. 2. The approximation of 40 per cent is based on the larger project, of which this paper is an initial step, where bill data are being collected for the period 1987–2004. 3. W. Oleszek, Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process (Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press, 4th ed., 1996), pp.92–3. 4. Ornstein et al., Vital Statistics on Congress, pp.154–60. 5. D. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), pp.1–8. 6. J. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies (New York: HarperCollins, 2nd ed., 1995), p.129. 7. G. McKissick, 'Policy Entrepreneurs and the Structuring of Choice: Issue Manipulation and Recurring Proposals in Congress', Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, Sept. 1995), p.2. 8. R. Fenno, Congressmen in Committees (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1973), pp.1–10. 9. L. Dodd, 'Congress and Quest for Power', in L.C. Dodd and B.I. Oppenheimer (eds.), Congress Reconsidered (Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1977), pp.269–307. 10. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, pp.127–9. 11. N. Polsby, 'Strengthening Congress in National Policy-Making', The Yale Review, 69 (4 June 1970) pp.481–97. 12. We do not include a 'passed the chamber' stage because the dependent variable for that stage is quite similar to the 'committee passage' stage. This similarity suggests that floor passage is more or less a formality, which may be due to the fact that the majority party has at its disposal a variety of parliamentary strategies to reduce uncertainty on the floor. 13. Omnibus packages typically contain something for everyone and pass with supermajorities. Hence, attachment to them is a form of policy output. 14. The larger project, of which this paper is part, includes data collection on a wider population of bills across a greater number of Congresses. The sample scheme utilised here makes a very large process (6,000–10,000 bills are introduced every two years in the House and Senate) more conducive to research and analysis. 15. These saliencies and jurisdictional arrangements were obtained by analysing data from the Policy Agendas Project, which is publicly available. We examined the dataset that contains all congressional hearings held in the post-Second World War period. Each hearing in the project dataset was assigned a specific topic code. This code makes it possible to determine the total number of hearings by issue area (which goes to saliency). In addition, the project leaders computed an index of jurisdictional spread for each issue area, which involves determining across how many different committees an issue is considered. 16. T. Lowi, 'American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies and Political Theory', World Politics, 16 (1964), pp.677–93. 17. M. Hojnacki and D. Kimball, 'Organized Interests and the Decision of Whom to Lobby in Congress', American Political Science Review, 92 (4 Dec. 1998), pp.775–90. 18. G. Krutz, Hitching a Ride: Omnibus Legislating in the U.S. Congress (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2001), Ch. 4. 19. Congressional Quarterly, Inc., Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1993, 1994. (Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1994, 1995). 20. Krutz utilised the Policy Agendas Project dataset of CQ Almanac stories, then returned to the actual Almanacs to create a dataset of bills per Congress to reflect better the lawmaking process in Congress, which is biennial (the Policy Agendas Project data sets are annual, resulting in bill duplicates within the period of a two-year Congress). 21. G.C. Edwards III, A. Barrett and J. Peake, 'The Legislative Impact of Divided Government', American Journal of Political Science, 41 (April 1997), pp.545–63; B. Sinclair, Unorthodox Lawmaking: New Legislative Processes in the U.S. Congress (Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1997). 22. One reviewer made the perceptive point that perhaps coding this recurring variable based on only one Congress rigged the analysis toward a finding for the softening up hypothesis. In other words, perhaps those bills that have been introduced two times before would better capture the legislative loser concept. We coded every bill to see if it was introduced in both the prior Congresses (193 fitted this bill in the House). The likelihood of legislative progression was the same (about 20 per cent) for the recurring bill operationalisation we use here as it was for the bills that recurred twice. Hence, our findings are not biased toward the softening-up hypothesis. We thank the reviewer for pointing out this potential weakness in our design, so that we could address it. 23. A reviewer cautioned that our recurring variable reflected change between the previous Congress and the current one (that is, was the bill introduced before), while our other independent variables are tied only to the current Congress. Would it not be more conceptually prudent to also code those variables in a temporal manner. We tried this and there were two problems. First, as we understand it, such a focus would require a sub-focus on only the recurring bills. Hence, do recurring bills stand a better chance when they are pushed harder than they were before? The key in terms of analysis is comparing the progression of the recurring bills compared to non-recurring bills. Is there a net gain? The other problem we found was one of multi-collinearity, owing to the plethora of new dummy variables that must be created to capture Congress to Congress change. We also appreciate this reviewer's comments, but we were unable to implement them in practice. 24. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection, pp.1–8. 25. Probit analysis is also useful with a dichotomous dependent variable. We use the logit approach because of the ease with which we can present the maximum substantive impact of the variables. We ran the results with probit and obtained the same basic findings. Additionally, we were concerned that the sponsor activity variables might be collinear. The highest correlation between any of the two independent variables is 0.19 (between co-sponsor percentage and the floor speech dummy variable). 26. W.H. Greene, Econometric Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2nd ed., 1993), pp.638–41

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