Political Research Quarterly

The authors seek to explain the membership of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC). Focusing on human rights violations abroad, the Caucus offers few incentives for representatives to join this organization, yet it consistently has a large membership. Drawing on theoretical literature on Congress and interest groups, the authors argue that members' policy motivation and the subsidizing role of national and transnational human rights interest groups account for the decision to join. Documentary and interview evidence for House members in the 107th and 108th Congresses support these arguments. The results have substantive and theoretical implications for the study of the CHRC, the interactions between members of Congress and interest groups, and the study of congressional caucuses generally.

House rules allow the Speaker to choose any conferees he wishes, suggesting he might use conference delegations to advance partisan goals. In practice, the Speaker nearly always selects members of the bill's jurisdictional committee(s). The authors propose a theory of conferee selection that endogenizes both partisan goals and committee participation. They argue that the Speaker's incentives lead him to appoint committee members, but he anticipates cases in which they would produce an outcome unfavorable to the majority party. In these cases, the Speaker appoints other conferees in addition to those from the jurisdictional committee, thereby “packing” the delegation in favor of the majority party position. The authors derive and test hypotheses regarding when the Speaker packs conference delegations, and what delegations look like when packed. The tests support the theory.

Majority Party leaders are hypothesized, through their control of the legislative schedule in the House of Representatives, to use legislative success as a selective incentive to encourage majority party members to contribute to the collective goals of the party. Members can demonstrate party loyalty through floor voting and financial contributions to the party's re-election efforts. This article examines legislative success from the 103rd through 107th Congresses. The evidence shows that both demonstrations of party loyalty have a significant effect on legislative success.

In intraparty congressional leadership races, the characteristics of candidates and the nature of their campaigns increase the salience of particular legislator goals and, in doing so, influence legislators' support of particular leadership candidates. Using multinomial logit regression analysis, the authors test this “goal salience” theory to determine what factors predict individual legislators' commitments to candidates in the 2006 House Republican majority leader's race. Notably, among other factors, the level of campaign donations made to Republican House members had a positive and statistically significant relationship with the choice of specific candidates.

Executive agreements represent a powerful tool for pursuing commitments with other nations across the spectrum of foreign policy issues. In particular, the executive agreement gives presidents the flexibility to act independently of Congress. The authors' research demonstrates, quantitatively, how presidents use international executive agreements to advance their foreign policy priorities. The authors evaluate the foreign policy agendas of the Carter, Reagan, G. H. W. Bush, and first Clinton administrations and test whether the executive agreements signed during each administration serve to further the individual foreign policy goals of each president. The authors find that presidents are more likely to devote personal attention to an agreement that furthers a specific policy priority, and they identify greater agreement activity in areas that correspond to presidential initiatives.

In the struggle to control the federal bureaucracy, presidents have an overlooked but powerful tool: the recess appointment. By making recess appointments, presidents can fill vacancies without the advice and consent of the Senate. The authors delineate three conditions that define presidential unilateral powers and demonstrate how recess appointments fit within that paradigm. Presidents, the authors argue, should be more likely to make recess appointments to important policy-making positions, namely, major independent agencies. The authors compile a data set of every civilian nomination and recess appointment between 1987 and 2004. After controlling for other factors, the authors find strong support for their theory.

By and large, unless the president's public appeals for legislation are reported by the national media, only his immediate audiences will hear them. This article examines 541 presidential legislative appeals from the Reagan and first Bush administrations to determine how often such appeals are reported and which ones generate press coverage. It is discovered that the majority of appeals by the president are not reported. This finding helps explain why presidents struggle to build public support for their proposals, as the public cannot be persuaded by messages it never hears. Presidents themselves appear largely responsible for this limited coverage, as most of their appeals are quite short and not the central focus of their public remarks. However, appeals that meet the press's criteria for newsworthiness are reported more often, particularly those that are most significant to the president and that easily fit the narrative style of reporting favored by journalists.

This article examines the usage of popular address rhetoric within all the State of the Union Addresses to determine whether presidents have consistently used this rhetorical tool, or whether the introduction of going public is indeed a “modern” development that was little used in the rhetorical past of the presidency. By looking at instances in which the president identifies himself with the people, Congress, or as president, the author finds that many formerly “traditional” presidents exhibit “modern” tendencies, which suggests inconsistencies with the “traditional/modern” divide that is a commonly utilized paradigm in presidential study.

Extending transaction cost theories of agency design, the author develops a theory about why congressional coalitions vary the difficulty of influencing the policy decisions of bureaucratic agencies. He assesses the theory by examining the transaction costs that congressional coalitions imposed on actors seeking to influence agency decisions in landmark laws enacted by the U.S. Congress from 1947 to 1992. The findings stress the need to consider policy disagreement between congressional coalitions and both congressional committees and the president, as well as policy agreement between committees and the president, in understanding how difficult congressional coalitions make it to influence agencies' policy decisions.

This article examines the relationship between political veto points, credible commitments, and regulatory compliance costs. Its central purpose is to assess whether different types of political veto points credibly constrain regulatory change and thus lower compliance costs. The authors conceptualize veto points broadly, including legislative oversight, gubernatorial powers, and direct democracy. We analyze state-level environmental compliance costs from 1988 to 1994 as a function of the structure of state political institutions and state political and economic characteristics. The results suggest that a key veto point, the authority for legislators to review bureaucratic behavior, consistently reduces compliance costs.

What explains public confidence in the leadership of government institutions at the state level? The authors explore how political processes, the nature of representation, and economic and policy performance in the states translate into citizen confidence in state institutions. Using a multilevel modeling approach, the authors consider the sources of public confidence in the people who lead state legislatures, offices of the governor, and state courts. While the explanations for government confidence at the state level resemble, in part, those of the national government, the authors also observe notable differences, with each branch of state government drawing on distinct sources of public satisfaction.

Recent research on congressional elections suggests that voters are more likely to split their votes in ideologically extreme districts. The authors suggest that in this type of context, uncertainty about candidate position rather than clarity explains the occurrence of ticket splitting. Using data from a rolling cross-section campaign survey where two incumbents competed in a predominately conservative district, the authors find that a substantial proportion of voters are likely to have difficulty identifying which congressional candidate was more conservative. Moreover, media exposure contributed to ambiguity over candidate position, which increases the likelihood of ticket splitting.