John S. Lapinski is associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the deputy director of elections at NBC News. He is the coeditor of The Macropolitics of Congress (Princeton).

THE SUBSTANCE OF REPRESENTATION

CONGRESS, AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT, AND LAWMAKING

By John S. Lapinski

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13781-0

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………..viiChapter I Policy Issue Substance and the Revitalization of Legislative
Studies…………………………………………………………..1Chapter II Bringing Policy Issue Substance Back In…………………….19Chapter III Political Polarization and Issues: A New Perspective………..54Chapter IV The Case Studies: Policy Issue Substance and the Political
Behavior of Members of Congress (with David Bateman)…………………..69Chapter V Legislative Accomplishment and Policy Issue Substance…………104Chapter VI Explaining Lawmaking in the United States, 1877–1994…………133Chapter VII At the Crossroads: Policy Issue Substance, Congress, and
American Political Development………………………………………150Bibliography………………………………………………………161Index…………………………………………………………….171

CHAPTER 1

Policy Issue Substance and the Revitalization ofLegislative Studies

When legislative studies exploded in the 1960s and 1970s, manyscholars took seriously the idea that policy issue substance was theoreticallyand empirically a very important consideration. During this earlier moment,scholars such as Theodore Lowi (1964, 1970, 1972), Aage Clausen (1967,1973), David Mayhew (1966), and a young aspiring PhD candidate (andfuture Congress member and vice president), Richard Cheney (Clausen andCheney 1970) were curious about how the types and content of issues underdiscussion shape political behavior and how lawmaking subsequently producesparticular policy outputs. At the outset of this fertile period for legislativestudies—which would produce tremendous advances in systematic studies ofCongress—work privileging policy issue content seemed poised for prominence,perhaps even predominance, within the subfield. The situation wouldquickly change, however, for reasons explored in this book. By the mid-1980sthe substance-centered line of research was nearly nonexistent, and by the2000s it seemed to have donned a cloak of invisibility.

The complete disappearance of issue substance from the study of policymakingand Congress by Congress scholars leads to two natural questions.First, what was the reason for this disappearance? And second, does it matter?In other words, has the removal of policy issue substance from our study ofCongress hindered progress in our understanding of how the lawmaking andpolicymaking processes work in the United States?

In attempting to answer the second question—which is the central focusof this book—I demonstrate repeatedly, through both theoretical and empiricalexercises, that the removal of policy issue substance from our study ofCongress has mattered very much and indeed has been extremely costly.

The cost of omitting policy substance takes two primary forms. The firstis mischaracterization of the policymaking process. Specifically, I show thatwe often make incorrect inferences about lawmaking when we neglect policysubstance. Sometimes these mistakes in assessing theories of lawmakingand/or policymaking lead us to lump laws together by issue area in our analysesrather than considering them separately. For example, an empirical regularitythat we believe to be true (and that therefore might serve as a cornerstonefor future theory building) may be contingent on aggregating all policy typestogether; that “regularity” changes or even disappears once we disaggregatepolicies by issue type. A concrete example can be found in the literature oncongressional polarization, which is built around two empirical findings thatare now treated as facts: that polarization has been increasing since the 1970s,and that polarization has followed a U-shaped form across the last 130 years ofAmerican history (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006). These two empiricalfindings have driven theoretical and empirical research on polarization, but asI show later in this book, they do not hold across policy issue areas. In reality,the polarization story is a much more complex one after policy issue substanceis introduced into the equation.

There are consequences for getting it only partially right, or even wrong.In the case of the polarization literature, introducing a more accurate pictureof how polarization behaves across policy issue areas could reshape thetheoretical literature on the topic. I show here that domestic politics isalmost always highly polarized, but that the pattern changes in the realmof international relations and sovereignty policy. These divergent findingscall for a rethinking of polarization. This point is not, of course, confinedto the study of elite polarization. Regardless of whether our efforts areaimed at testing theories or empirically attempting to understand patterns inpolicymaking, not taking policy issue substance into consideration repeatedlyleads us into making incorrect inferences and statements about lawmaking.Simply put, omitting policy substance makes us get it wrong, and getting itwrong is extremely costly for many reasons, given what is at stake. Fifteenyears ago, Charles Jones (1995, 1) made this point about the costs of gettinglawmaking wrong in his presidential address to the American Political ScienceAssociation:

Lawmaking is the core decision-making process of a democratic state. It isthe means for defining, promoting, and regulating community life and, accordingly,is spectacularly interesting and highly relevant to our purposes as politicalscientists.

Thus, a critical endeavor for political scientists is to arrive at clear and accurateunderstandings, characterizations, and explanations of the lawmaking process.The lessons of Jones’s address are no less relevant today than when he deliveredit. I argue throughout this book that we will never get lawmaking right withoutseriously bringing policy issue substance into our study of it.

The second cost of omitting policy issue substance as a topic of study isless obvious and also more difficult to prove. I argue that this omission hassequestered congressional studies from other subfields—particularly Americanpolitical development (APD) and to a lesser extent policy studies—primarilybecause both are interested directly in what Congress scholars for the mostpart no longer study: issue-specific policy outputs. I also suggest that thissequestering of the Congress subfield is an important reason why it has lostits place as the most theoretically and empirically interesting area of politicalscience. This is not to say that the Congress subfield is not still producinginteresting research. Instead, I argue that policy issue substance is the key forthe subfield to make another significant advancement in our understanding ofhow Congress behaves as well as how lawmaking works. Policy issue substanceis the key to new progress.

Although there are certainly many reasons why the Congress subfield isnot directly engaged with the APD subfield and policy studies, and vice versa,the omission of policy issue substance is probably the most important reason(see Katznelson and Lapinski 2006a). The direct cost of not having Congressscholars engaged with APD and policy studies is, of course, impossible to fullydetermine. How do we determine what we would know about policymakingif there was synergy between these subfields? Fortunately, this question isone that can be partially set aside: it is axiomatic that having three diverseand talented groups of scholars attempting to better understand policymakingwould lead to a much better overall understanding. This question must not,however, be fully avoided. The next section considers not only the contributionof APD and policy studies to congressional studies, but also the potentialrevitalization of these two subfields by restoring to them the study of policyissue substance in lawmaking.

Before discussing the path by which we might bring policy substanceback into the study of Congress and lawmaking—with the goal of providingbetter inferences and predictions about lawmaking while building synergybetween Congress, APD, and policy scholars—I take a closer look at why policysubstance is no longer a part of congressional studies, what has been lost as aresult, and why we need to bring it back.

Why We Need to Restore Policy Issue Substance toCongressional Studies

There is, of course, no single explanation for why policy substance is no longeran important consideration in our study of Congress. One explanation pointsto the rising prominence of deductive theory within congressional studies:behavior work on policy substance dwindled as scholars began to think ofit as limited to descriptive objectives (Katznelson and Lapinski 2006a). In arelated development, the powerful work of Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal(1985; 1991; 1997) has demonstrated empirically that roll call voting in theU.S. Congress appears to be largely unidimensional. An even more importantfinding of Poole and Rosenthal’s for the disappearance of policy substancefrom the study of Congress is that members’ preferences measured through rollcall voting do not vary much issue by issue. Although Poole and Rosenthal’swork on this specific topic is limited, the mountain of empirical findingsthey have produced on the low dimensionality of the political issue space hasencouraged most Congress scholars to conflate low dimensionality with theidea that policy issue substance is inconsequential. Why is it so unfortunatethat their forceful results have provided a mistaken empirical foundation to theargument that studying policy issue substance is not necessary to understandthe behavior of members of Congress or policymaking in the United States?Because low dimensionality does not imply that members’ preferences acrossissue areas are more or less the same. I insist throughout the book that thesetwo issues, low dimensionality and policy issue substance, should be separated.

It is somewhat paradoxical to argue that the omission of policy substancefrom our congressional studies has been costly when that omission coincideswith a remarkably fertile period in the history of such studies. From roughlythe mid-1980s until a pinnacle in the early 2000s, congressional studiesproduced important and rigorous findings that have fundamentally changedour understanding of Congress. The bulk of this period’s work focused onwhy institutions, rules, and procedures are formed and how they influencecollective choice. The theory building in congressional studies during thisperiod was supplemented by careful empirical evaluations, and the majority ofthe hypotheses derived or constructed made empirical predictions that relatedto political behavior, not to policy outputs.

The study of Congress through roll call votes has a long and rich history inpolitical science. There is certainly nothing wrong with studying the politicalbehavior of members of Congress, and there is no question that roll call votingrecords provide an excellent way to do so. However, with so many scholarsengaged in this institutionally based work on Congress, the direct study ofpolicy outputs has been left to others. Moreover, the study of political behaviorwith no counterbalancing focus on outputs may have been unhealthy for boththe study of lawmaking and the subfield of Congress studies.

This began to change after the publication of David Mayhew’s DividedWe Govern (1991). Mayhew demonstrated the importance of moving beyondan orientation toward rules, institutions, and procedures in studying thebehavior of members of Congress and focusing instead on explaining whatgovernment does. His seminal work brought the study of policy outputsback into congressional studies, spurring the creation of a small cottageindustry that assesses the legislative performance of Congress. This work hascollectively increased our understanding of the determinants of lawmaking(see Adler and Lapinski 2006; Binder 1999, 2003; Coleman 1999; McCarty,Poole, and Rosenthal 2006), although it has remained silent on the questionof whether policy substance is an important causal factor in lawmaking.

Even though we know more today about the determinants of lawmakingthan ever before, much remains unknown. This limited understanding hasbeen attributed by some to the near-invisibility of policy issue substance inour research (Katznelson and Lapinski 2006b; Lapinski 2008; Rohde 1991).Evidence that the omission of policy substance is hindering rather than helpingour understanding of lawmaking can be found in some fine recent empiricalassessments of theoretical models of lawmaking in the United States.

The two most prominent models of this type are the “pivotal politics”model of lawmaking (Brady and Volden 1998; Krehbiel 1998) and the “partycartel” model (Cox and McCubbins 2005). The pivotal politics model oflawmaking predicts that policy change occurs when status-quo policies areextreme relative to the preferences of members of Congress. More specifically,a gridlock interval can be constructed by examining key “pivots” in theseparation-of-powers system. These pivots are defined by the filibuster in theSenate (the cloture pivot) and the presidential veto. Policy change occursprecisely when the status quo of an existing policy is extreme relative to thegridlock interval. Like the pivotal politics model, the party cartel model oflawmaking also constructs a gridlock interval, but it differs in that the gridlockinterval depends on the preferences of the median members of the majorityparty and the chamber median. In both models, policy change is determinedby the location of status-quo policies relative to the preferences of criticalmembers of Congress.

As mentioned, empirical assessments of these formal models of lawmakinghave been less than stellar. For example, in a well-executed test of the pivotalpolitics, party cartel, and median voter models of lawmaking, Keith Krehbiel,Adam Meirowitz, and Jonathan Woon 2005 summarize their overall findingsas “painfully inconclusive.” They propose two possible explanations for theirlackluster empirical results: either the theoretical models were wrong or theempirical tests were flawed. A lack of attention to policy substance may play alarge role in either explanation.

The first possible explanation for why theoretical models of lawmakingdo not receive strong empirical affirmation may be rooted in policy content.This would be the case if the mechanisms underlying policymaking vary bypolicy issue substance (Lapinski 2008; Rohde 1991). The idea here is thatdifferent processes explain lawmaking across policy issue domains. The tasktherefore is to identify how mechanisms vary according to policy substance.To understand how these mechanisms work, we need to get a firm grasp onthe empirical regularities of lawmaking across policy issues and time periods.This understanding, in turn, will allow us to determine the strengths andweaknesses of our theoretical models.

The second explanation proposed by Krehbiel and his colleagues (2005) forthe poor fit between theory and data, the issue of measurement, is also linkedto policy substance. Scholars believe that inconclusive empirical results stemfrom improperly measuring the induced preferences of members of Congressthat are needed to assess existing models. In other words, problematic empiricalresults are not a result of poor models, but of the poor measures used totest the models. This is the explanation favored by Krehbiel and his colleaguesfor the lackluster results of their study. They believe that the empirical resultsfor their pivotal politics model of lawmaking would improve if the inducedpreferences of members of Congress were measured by policy issue area. Theirbelief, in short, is that induced policy preferences vary by policy issue domain.Not accounting for variation by policy substance leads to measurement errorand therefore attenuated (weak) results.

This book contends that policy issue substance is at the center of the poorresults found by Krehbiel and his colleagues. Assessing their idea in moredetail, we can examine how the assumptions underlying these two models oflawmaking might interact with policy issue substance. Empirical evaluations ofthe pivotal politics and party cartel models make specific implicit assumptionsto produce testable predictions for legislative accomplishment across time.Many of the nonformal theories of lawmaking discussed earlier also makethese assumptions, which have to do with the desire and opportunity to passlegislation.

The first assumption is that all legislative regimes are equally interestedin legislating. At least one scholar has made the case that not all legislativeregimes are alike. John Coleman (1999) argues that Democrats are more likelythan Republicans to enact new legislation when they control government. Thistype of assumption is not fully explored in most preference-based models oflawmaking. Instead, most scholars assume that lawmakers would like to enactor move policies closer to their ideal points regardless of their ideologicalpositioning.
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