The Rule of Faction in Congress

• In Event: Accounting for Success and Effectiveness in Legislatures

Abstract

Special interests, pressure groups, and legislative minorities are modern monikers for what the American Founders would have called factions. Within the United States Congress, the republican principle of majority rule, in and of itself, is the first solution to the problem of faction because it enables a representative majority to defeat a minority “by regular vote” (Federalist 10). Requiring at least a majority vote to pass a law was, in part, intended to block special interests from unilaterally working their will through federal legislation. However, by relying on omnibus legislation, the modern Congress has rendered the principle of majority rule an ineffective bulwark against the mischiefs of faction. Omnibus bills are a type of explicit logroll, which is an exchange (trade) of voting support on different measures by members of Congress. Using the provisions dataset, a hand-collected a resource, drawn from the volumes of the United States Code, that documents the policy content and legislative history of all 268,935 provisions of federal law from the founding to 2012, this paper presents results showing that, due to vote trading on logrolled provisions, omnibus laws are more likely to serve factional interests than are single topic laws. Although 90% of modern provisions are enacted within omnibus laws, the breadth of interests they serve have been steadily declining. In particular, modern omnibus laws are far more likely to contain provisions benefiting narrow geographical constituencies, particular industries, and relatively small circumscribed subsets of the American population, than are earlier omnibus bills or single topic bills. This paper concludes that omnibus laws are the ideal vehicle through which minority factions may ascend to rule in place of majorities in a seemingly majoritarian institution.

Author

• Michelle Whyman, Florida State University