Congressional Tightwads and Spendthrifts: Measuring Fiscal Behavior in the Changing House of Representatives

We evaluate fiscal behavior in the 103rd and 104th Houses using a newly defined dependent variable which separates roll-call votes by how much each bill costs or saves in federal government expenditures. This allows us to analyze how members view these as fundamentally different expressions of budgetary preferences. Party groups are shown to trade-off and substitute goals across spending and saving over time based upon majority status, leadership goal, and exogenous political pressure. The impact of region interacting with party is diminished, implying that Southern Democrats are not uniquely cross-pressured as a result of realignment. A significant proportion of the voting electorate believed that the "Contract with America" promised greater fiscal responsibility (Thurber 1996b). Republican House leaders successfully elevated congressional spending to the top of the campaign agenda during the 1994 midterm election and subsequently highlighted the fiscal ramifications of legislation during their control of the 104th House. We evaluate the fiscal implications of members' votes in the 103rd and 104th Houses, looking at differences by party, time, and region. The central question of this research note is: for both unified and divided party government, do Democrats and Republicans respond to spending and saving measures in different ways and if so, why? A widely held belief is that as a result of the transforming 1994 national election and a well-defined Republican agenda, individual members of the 104th Congress showed a fundamental shift in federal spending behavior, yet little has been done to analyze this notion. We examine several questions about the effects of party characteristics, change of party majority status, and party-region interaction effects on roll-call votes measured by the contribution to federal spending and saving measured separately. This two-component dependent-variable approach differs from others in that the net effect of spending and saving remains disaggregated thus allowing separate comparisons. DATA AND MEASURES This research note analyzes fiscal behavior for House members over three periods: 409 roll-call votes in the 103rd Congress from January 1, 1993, to September 31, 1994, 573 in the 104th Congress from January 5, 1995, to April 16, 1996 (until the fiscal year 1996 budget was finally passed, six and a half months late), and 751 in the 104th Congress from January 5, 1995, to December 1, 1996 (the complete session).1 This allows for the comparison of full House sessions with unified party government versus divided party government, it also isolates the crucial and interesting initial part of the 104th. The rational for these staggered, overlapping time periods is that juxtaposing the period of tight leadership control plus conflict with Clinton, and the Republican behavior over the entire 104th House provides the best contrast between the initial agenda ("Contract with America") and the reality of authorizing and appropriating over a complete session with subsequent electoral consequences. After months of confrontation between the Republican House and President Clinton and two lengthy government shutdowns, the signing of the FY1996 budget agreement on April 16, 1996, introduced a new political atmosphere in the budgetary process. After the agreement, Republican House members became more accommodating in the aggregate, and compromises approved by the Republican leadership allowed for funding clearly outside the conservative Republican agenda outlined in the "Contract with America" (Thurber 1997). In addition, for the purposes of this analysis, the observable effects would be even more dramatic if the 104th House were dichotomized at the April 16, 1996, cut-point. Our approach provides an opportunity to highlight potential contrasts between the periods of conflict and compromise in the 104th House, and to compare the complete divided party-government session with the complete unified party-government session of the 103rd. …