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Constructing Congressional Activity: Uncertainty and the Dynamics of Legislative Attention*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2015

Josh M. Ryan
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Abstract

Members and parties have electoral incentives to address issues on the congressional agenda to satisfy public demand. When determining which issues to address, majorities seek to minimize their uncertainty about the costs and electoral benefits of legislating by revisiting policy areas previously addressed. This theory is tested using error-correction models that demonstrate that policy activity within each chamber is in a long-term equilibrium and that the passage of legislation, even important bills, promotes future policymaking in the same policy area. This relationship is stronger when the majority has less information about the costs of lawmaking—specifically, when it faces a chamber controlled by the opposite party and when it is a new majority.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 299 - 321
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Josh M. Ryan, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Utah State University, 0725 Old Main Hill, Logan, UT 84322 (josh.ryan@usu.edu). A version of this paper was presented at the 2010 Midwest Political Science Association Conference and valuable feedback was provided by Anthony Madonna and James Rogers. Much of the data collection was funded by a grant from the Dirksen Congressional Center. The author thanks Jordan Ragusa, Jenny Wolak, E. Scott Adler, Bill Jaeger, Scott Minkoff, Robert McGrath, and Jon Rogowski for helpful comments on various drafts of the paper, and Drew Fairhurst and Melissa Hill for research assistance. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.66

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