Abstract
In a time when legislative scholarship is full of jeremiads lamenting the US Congress’ institutional dysfunction, it is refreshing to read an analysis of legislative effectiveness. Treating Congress as a collection of individuals rather than a unitary actor, Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress by Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman explores the significant variation in members’ ability to advance their policy agendas through the House of Representatives.
To construct the new, more sophisticated measure of legislative effectiveness at the book’s core, Volden and Wiseman examine the legislative histories of more than 139,000 bills introduced in the House from 1973 to 2008 and trace their progress through the legislative process. The construction of the legislative effectiveness score (LES) necessarily involved many choices that could invite debate. However, Volden and Wiseman go to great lengths to show that their basic estimates accord with common expectations regarding the factors that should predict legislative success and to ensure that their measures are robust to a range of alternative specifications.
Armed with the LES scores, Volden and Wiseman first reexamine a long-standing debate about why members of the majority are advantaged in the legislative process. While they find some support for preference-based and conditional party government explanations, the evidence speaks most clearly to the power of negative agenda control exercised at the committee stage. Consistent with Woodrow Wilson’s aphorism that “Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work,” Volden and Wiseman show that it is here that the parties exert their greatest influence. Minority party bills that reach the floor have almost the same probability of becoming law as majority party bills; but few survive the gauntlet of the majority-controlled committee process.
An impressive feature of the analysis throughout the book is its careful attention to changing relationships over time. For example, Volden and Weisman show that from 1973 to 1993, much of the majority party advantage was driven by the great success and effectiveness of powerful committee and subcommittee chairs. However, following the 1994 Republican Revolution and the institutional changes it wrought, the benefits of majority status trickled down to the rank and file. This trend began to reverse in the final 2 years of the time series following the Democratic victory in the 2006 midterms. Here and elsewhere, temporal extension of the existing data analysis, alone, is a fruitful ground for future research. In this case, additional data would allow scholars to assess whether the advantages of being a committee or subcommittee chair continued to increase in the Democratic controlled 111th Congress (2009–2010) and whether it again eroded following the return of Republican control in the 112th Congress.
In one of the most interesting chapters of the book, Volden and Wiseman examine in detail the relative legislative effectiveness of three minority groups—women, African Americans, and Southern Democrats—and how their success changes across circumstances and over time. Building on research emphasizing the more consensual style of politics pursued by women legislators, Volden and Wiseman show that women are, on average, more effective than other legislators, but primarily when they are in the minority party. The finding is remarkably robust over time, as in every Congress since 1980, women in the minority have out-performed their male co-partisans.
African Americans, by contrast, have met with less legislative success, on average, than their fellow partisans. This was particularly true during the long period of Democratic control of the House from 1973 to 1993 but was not true under Republican rule from 1994 to 2006 or in the Democratic controlled 110th Congress. Here, again, temporal extension of the analysis is a fruitful ground for future research and would address significant normative questions. Did the gap between White and Black Democratic legislators reemerge in the 111th Congress or in the subsequent Republican controlled Houses? Or is the racial gap in legislative effectiveness a relic of the past?
The analysis then considers whether Southern Democrats were treated as pivotal—or pariahs—by their peers with influence over the fate of their legislative proposals. Sitting in the middle of the two parties, one might logically suspect that Southern Democrats enjoyed significant advantages in advancing their agendas, regardless of which party was in the majority. However, Volden and Wiseman show that Southern Democratic members routinely experienced lower levels of legislative success under both Democratic and Republican control. More liberal Democrats looked upon them with suspicion and quashed many of their legislative proposals. Southern Democrats fared no better under Republican control, when courting Southern moderates was largely viewed as superfluous.
Finally, Volden and Wiseman complement their extensive empirical analysis with a qualitative exploration of the strategies that enabled the most successful legislators to achieve their policy goals. In so doing, they offer a potential roadmap to future legislators seeking to maximize their influence in the House. A pressing question is whether gridlock in Washington would be eased if more legislators emulated the strategies of their successful peers. Unfortunately, the impact of such diffusion may be modest. For example, narrowly tailoring a legislative agenda to meet the needs of one’s district may lead to productivity but of a parochial sort. Other strategies, such as being open to compromise with nonnatural allies, have more promise. Yet, moderate members such as Hamilton Fish and John Breaux—two exemplars of this skill—are increasingly in short supply. Nonetheless, any progress toward greater legislative efficacy would be welcome in the contemporary climate. In this vein, future researchers should also take up the call to examine the extent to which voters incentivize legislative effectiveness, and whether any reforms could strengthen this mechanism of democratic accountability.
Volden and Wiseman have recast old debates in a new light and opened new and diverse trajectories for future research. The book will be of great interest to legislative scholars and students of American politics more generally.