Beyond Pivotal Politics: Constituencies, Electoral Incentives, and Veto Override Attempts in the House

President George H. W. Bush famously employed a veto strategy in the 101st and 102nd Congress to project strength and defend "his party and his powers" (Mullins and Wildavsky 1992, 36). This strategy served President Bush rather well until he suffered a serious defeat at the end of his time in office. On September 17, 1992, the House of Representatives adopted the conference report on S. 12, the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, by a margin of 280-128 (CQ Almanac 1992). This supposedly "veto-proof' margin barely surpassed the two-thirds supermajority needed to override the president's veto. President Bush vetoed the bill on October 3, 1992. Bush's veto set up a highly public confrontation between Congress and the president in the midst of his reelection campaign. The White House "stressed loyalty to the president as the main reason why Republicans should switch" their votes on the cable bill and vote to sustain the president's veto (CQ Almanac 1992). In the end, the White House lost this argument as the House overrode the president's veto by a margin of 308-114. On perhaps the highest profile veto of Bush's presidency, zero members of the House switched their votes to support his position while 38 members either switched their votes to defect from the president's coalition or abstained on the final passage vote and then voted against the president during the veto override attempt. This crushing legislative defeat helped cripple Bush's already weak campaign for reelection. President Bush lost both the cable battle in October and the electoral war in November. Political science currently offers two primary explanations for member voting behavior on presidential agenda items. The two dominant arguments assert that members respond to the president based on (1) party (Bond and Fleisher 1980, 1984, and 1990; Edwards 1980, 1989), (2) ideology (Bond and Fleisher 1990; Krehbiel 1998; Poole and Rosenthal 1997). Some scholars combine party and ideology to argue that American politics takes place in a "four-party" system composed of liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans, and conservative Republicans (Burns 1963; Bond and Fleisher 1990; Fleisher and Bond 1996). Neither party nor ideology fully accounts for member behavior on the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992. First, Democrats held 270 seats in the 102nd Congress (61%), and therefore needed Republican assistance to override President Bush's veto. Second, ideological explanations do not accurately describe member behavior on S. 12 in 1992. Of the 38 members who changed their votes to defect from President Bush's coalition or abstained on the final passage vote and then voted for S. 12 during the veto override attempt, only four come from the veto pivot quintile. In fact, the members who changed their votes on S. 12 came from all over the ideological spectrum as captured by NOMINATE scores. In this article, I argue that to more accurately predict and explain member behavior on veto override attempts, political scientists must consider how constituencies and electoral incentives affect members' votes. The high stakes politics surrounding veto override attempts offer an ideal opportunity to study the president's influence in Congress. A bill's content is identical on both final passage and override votes, yet some members of Congress vote differently on these two roll-calls. Cameron (2000) examines veto power at the macro-level and finds that the veto's existence as an institutional rule can cause Congress to strategically modify legislation both in anticipation of a potential veto and after the president issues a veto. I build on these findings by looking at the micro-level and examining the behavior of the individual members of Congress, whose support the president needs to successfully veto legislation. Krehbiel (1998, 163) is one of few to study the veto's effect at the individual level. …