Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T16:40:18.420Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Competing Gridlock Models and Status Quo Policies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Jonathan Woon  and
Ian Palmer Cook
Jonathan Woon*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15260
Ian Palmer Cook
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15260
*
e-mail: woon@pitt.edu (corresponding author)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Spatial theories of lawmaking predict that legislative productivity is increasing in the number of status quo policies that lie outside the gridlock interval, but because locations of status quo policies are difficult to measure, previous empirical tests of gridlock theories rely on an auxiliary assumption that the distribution of status quo points is fixed and uniform. This assumption is at odds with the theories being tested, as it ignores the history dependence of lawmaking. We provide an alternative method for testing competing theories by estimating structural models that explicitly account for temporal dependence in a theoretically consistent way. Our analysis suggests that legislative productivity depends both on parties and supermajority pivots, and we find patterns of productivity consistent with a weaker, contingent form of party influence than found in previous work. Parties appear to exert agenda power only on highly salient legislation rather than strongly influencing outcomes through voting pressure and party unity.

Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , Summer 2015 , pp. 385 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Authors' note: A previous version was presented at the Positive Political Theory Mini-Conference at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, LA. Replication material can be found at the Political Analysis Dataverse (Woon and Cook 2015). Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis web site.

References

Aldrich, John H. 1995. Why parties? The origin and transformation of political parties in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Binder, Sarah. 2003. Stalemate: Causes and consequences of legislative gridlock. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Brady, David, and Volden, Craig. 2006. Revolving gridlock: Politics and policy from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Carroll, Royce, Lewis, Jeff, Lo, James, McCarty, Nolan, Poole, Keith, and Rosenthal, Howard. 2010. Common Space DWNOMINATE Scores with Bootstrapped Standard Errors. (Joint House and Senate Scaling). www.voteview.com.Google Scholar
Carrubba, Clifford J., Yuen, Amy, and Zorn, Christopher. 2007. In defense of comparative statics: Specifying empirical tests of models of strategic interaction. Political Analysis 15(4):465.Google Scholar
Chiou, Fang-Yi, and Rothenberg, Lawrence S. 2003. When pivotal politics meets partisan politics. American Journal of Political Science 47(3): 503–22.Google Scholar
Chiou, Fang-Yi, and Rothenberg, Lawrence S. 2006. Preferences, parties, and legislative productivity. American Politics Research 34(6): 705–31.Google Scholar
Chiou, Fang-Yi, and Rothenberg, Lawrence S. 2009. A unified theory of U.S. lawmaking: Preferences, institutions, and party discipline. Journal of Politics 71(4): 1257–72.Google Scholar
Clinton, Joshua D. 2007. Lawmaking and roll calls. Journal of Politics 69(2): 457–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Covington, Cary R., and Bargen, Andrew A. 2004. Comparing floor-dominated and party-dominated explanations of policy change in the House of Representatives. Journal of Politics 66(4): 1069–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, Gary W., and McCubbins, Mathew D. 2005. Setting the agenda: Responsible party government in the House of Representatives. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Krehbiel, Keith. 1998. Pivotal politics: A theory of U.S. lawmaking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Krehbiel, Keith. 2006a. Macropolitics and micromodels: Cartels and pivots reconsidered. In The macropolitics of Congress, eds. Scott Adler, E. and Lapinski, John S., 21–49. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Krehbiel, Keith. 2006b. Pivots. In The Oxford handbook of political economy, eds. Weingast, Barry R. and Wittman, A., 222–240. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Krehbiel, Keith, Meirowitz, Adam, and Woon, Jonathan. 2005. Testing theories of lawmaking. In Social choice and strategic decisions, eds. Austen-Smith, David and Banks, S., 249–68. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Lawrence, Eric D., Maltzman, Forrest, and Smith, Steven S. 2006. Who wins? Party effects in legislative voting. Legislative Studies Quarterly 31(1): 33–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayhew, David R. 1991. Divided we govern: Party control, lawmaking, and investigations, 1946–1990. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Morton, Rebecca B. 1999. Methods and models: A guide to the empirical analysis of formal models in political science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 1997. Congress: A political-economic history of roll call voting. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Richman, Jesse. 2011. Parties, pivots, and policy: The status quo test. American Political Science Review 105(1): 151–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Signorino, Curtis S. 1999. Strategic interaction and the statistical analysis of international conflict. American Political Science Review 93(2): 279–97.Google Scholar
Signorino, Curtis S. 2003. Structure and uncertainty in discrete choice models. Political Analysis 11(4):316.Google Scholar
Stiglitz, Edward H., and Weingast, Barry R. 2010. Agenda control in Congress: Evidence from cutpoint estimates and ideal point uncertainty. Legislative Studies Quarterly 35(2): 157–85.Google Scholar
Witten, I. H., and Bell, T. C. 1991. The zero-frequency problem: Estimating the probabilities of novel events in adaptive text compression. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 37(4): 1085–1094.Google Scholar
Woon, Jonathan, and Palmer Cook, Ian 2015. Replication data for: Competing gridlock models and status quo policies. http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/28696 Dataverse [Distributor] V1 [Version].Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Woon and Cook supplementary material

Appendix

Download Woon and Cook supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 215.5 KB