Cosponsorship Pooling on Presidents’ Legislative Programs

• In Event: The President and Congress: Conflict or Cooperation?

Abstract

Do the legislative priorities of the president influence cosponsorship activity in the House? Cosponsorship reflects the decision of a member to lend conspicuous support to a bill. Past research generally accounts for the decision of members to cosponsor legislation as the result of insular bargaining and socializing processes within the legislature. Scholars observe that members haggle over their individual preferences, coordinate freely across the aisle, and resort to shunning to punish those members who do not honor their pledges. Cosponsorship activity thus appears to be very decentralized in the House. Accordingly, existing studies frequently approach the subject through the lens of social networks.

Cosponsorship research has yet to identify presidents either enlisting or mobilizing cosponsors behind their and their party’s initiatives. We know presidents send Congress requests for new legislation and will at times go public to make their initiatives more politically palpable for legislators to support. If cosponsorship is consequential to a presidential initiative’s ultimate chances of success, one would expect to find presidents recruiting and mobilizing cosponsors behind their initiatives. In this paper we assess whether there is evidence of legislators pooling on presidential initiatives from 1981 to 2006. We also pay special attention to the potential polarization of cosponsorships of presidents’ initiatives along party lines.

In the past such research would have been limited to presidents’ “public agenda” – those initiatives that presidents promoted in public appeals and recorded in the Public Papers. Recently, with the public release of OMB’s legislative logs, a larger (N= 1,931), and perhaps exhaustive, set of presidential initiatives has become available. This allows us to test cosponsor pooling across a broad range of presidential legislation, including bills previously unrecognized as originating in the administration. If copartisans are found to gravitate to (and opponents, from) the president’s initiatives, it extends the range of presidents’ potential influence into this heretofore local arena of networking and entrepreneurship.

Authors

• Lee Dionne, University of California, San Diego

• Samuel Kernell, University of California, San Diego