Party Factions, Legislative Procedures, and Amending Activity in the US House

• In Event: Factions and Coalitions in Legislative Politics

Abstract

Recent Republican House majorities have been characterized by the presence of vocal and seemingly obstructionist conservative factions such as the House Freedom Caucus, which we refer to as ‘New Conservatives.’ What is not clear is whether these New Conservatives succeed in pulling policy outcomes to the right. To assess the influence of party factions of this sort, we analyze an array of legislative behaviors to investigate two things: first, whether these members do, indeed, differ from their fellow partisans in observable ways and, two, whether their efforts succeed at making proposals more extreme. In this paper, we build on previous analyses of House amendments in which we found that New Conservatives had little effect on legislation via the amending process. We refine our analyses to account for special rules to discern whether (or how many) amendments are in order for a particular proposal, and whether New Conservatives are more likely to seek recorded votes on proposed amendments. Lastly, we seek to determine whether New Conservatives might have exerted disproportionate levels of negative agenda control by keeping items off of the House floor.

Authors

• Chris Den Hartog, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

• Timothy P. Nokken, Texas Tech University