The institutional foundations of majority party power [electronic resource]
Keywords: Political Science.

This dissertation assesses the relative significance of institutional and noninstitutional features of legislatures for policy outcomes. I utilize a comparative approach and new data on the procedural rules in the 99 U.S. state legislative chambers to identify the mechanisms that help create and limit majority party power, and to characterize their consequences for enacted policies. Studies of legislative organization argue that the majority party enjoys a policymaking advantage through its ability to set the agenda, but many have black boxed the process by which this occurs. As such, the effects that particular procedures have on majority party power and legislative outcomes are unknown. Moreover, others dispute whether majority party power is rooted in procedural rules at all, and suggest that noninstitutional features of legislatures, such as the size of the majority party or the heterogeneity of legislators' preferences, may be responsible. The challenge is to determine whether or not procedural rules have an effect on majority party power above and beyond the confounding influences of these noninstitutional factors. To assess the relative effects of institutional and noninstitutional factors requires variation in each of these variables, as well as variation in majority party power. I disentangle the effects of institutional and noninstitutional factors on the agenda-setting power of the majority party, and evaluate their consequences for policy outcomes. Rather than assume that gatekeeping institutions are present and are the cause of majority party power in a few legislatures, I canvass all 99 U.S. state legislative chambers, measure their agenda-setting institutions, and test whether they have the predicted consequences for the majority party's policy influence. This empirical strategy allows me to test the relationship between procedural rules and majority party agenda power in an environment where both actually vary. Moreover, I control for possible noninstitutional predictors of majority party power, and in so doing I am able to isolate the effect that specific procedural rules have on majority party agenda control. The dissertation consists of three papers. The first, "Legislative Organization and the Second Face of Power: Evidence from the U.S. State Legislatures" (coauthored with Sarah Anzia), proposes that variation in majority party power can be explained by variation in majority party agenda-setting rights. We develop hypotheses about the specific institutional features of legislatures that may enable the majority party to block bills from reaching the floor. We also conduct an original survey of state legislative clerks and secretaries to identify which procedures are present in each legislative body (and which are actually used in practice). Using data coded from these responses, we test whether majority party gatekeeping rights have the predicted consequences for majority roll rates (i.e., the percentage of passing bills on which a majority of the majority party voted in opposition). While our focus is on estimating the effects of these institutions, we recognize that certain noninstitutional features of legislatures can also explain variation in roll rates. Thus, in estimating the effects of gatekeeping procedures, we isolate the effects of majority party size, interparty preference heterogeneity, and intraparty preference heterogeneity. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that the presence of majority party gatekeeping rights at certain stages of the legislative process appear to increase majority party power even controlling for the noninstitutional correlates of roll rates. Specifically, in legislatures where majority-appointed committees can decline to hear bills or decline to report them to the floor, or where the majority leadership can block bills from appearing on the calendar, majority party roll rates are significantly lower than in legislatures were those procedures are absent. Most legislatures also limit the agenda-setting power of the majority party through procedures that allow the chamber majority to circumvent gatekeeping attempts. Whether or not these rarely invoked procedures are consequential is largely unknown. The second paper, "Parties, Median Legislators, and Agenda Setting: How Legislative Institutions Matter, " examines the significance of majoritarian procedures and majority party gatekeeping opportunities for legislative outcomes. Based on the responses from a second survey of clerks and secretaries, I measure majoritarian rules in the state chambers and test their effects on majority party power. I show that the presence of majoritarian procedures erodes majority party agenda power even in chambers with explicit majority party gatekeeping rights. Majority party gatekeeping opportunities, in fact, almost never matter for policy outcomes in chambers with majoritarian rules. Moreover, these effects can be traced to certain majoritarian institutions, including floor votes on committee assignments, committee discharge procedures, and motions to change the calendar order. Thus, even though they are rarely implemented, the mere presence of majoritarian rules is sufficient to condition legislators' behavior and influence policy outcomes. While we are arguably most concerned with what policies legislatures enact, most studies of legislative organization test the effect of procedural rules using measures based in roll calls (e.g., roll rates). But do procedural rules have important policy implications beyond the chamber in which they exist? In the third paper, "Majority Party Rights and Majority Party Power: The Link Between Procedural Rules and Policy Outcomes, " I theorize that partisan change should correspond to greater policy volatility in states where the legislative majority party has the ability to block bills. To test this prediction, I collect and examine data on legislative organization and enacted appropriations in the U.S. states from 1982-2010. I show that partisan change does indeed lead to more spending volatility in states where the legislative majority party can block bills at the committee or calendar stage of the legislative process, as compared to states in which the majority party cannot block bills at either juncture. There is, then, an explicit link between legislative agenda-setting procedures and the policies that the government ultimately enacts.