Abstract
In this paper, we attempt to provide an economic explanation for the adoption of bill co-sponsorship by the US House of Representatives in 1967. We demonstrate empirically that key features of legislative production prior to 1967 (when House members’ support for a bill was indicated by introduction of duplicate bills) and post-1967 (when political support for a bill is indicated by co-sponsorship) are strikingly similar. Specifically, the raw number of supporters of a bill, whether indicated by duplicate bills or by co-sponsorship, is not nearly as critical to advancement of that bill through the House of Representatives as is the political power of the individual who introduces it and those who support it. The relative sizes of these effects are highly consistent over time. In effect, this finding means that the underlying factors of importance in the House’s legislative production function did not change significantly when bill co-sponsorship was adopted. This suggests that the change in operating procedure may have been driven by an intra-chamber struggle to control the legislative outcomes. We present empirical evidence that is highly consistent with this hypothesis—adoption of bill co-sponsorship in 1967 coincides exactly with the post-World War II peak in a concentration ratio of legislation passed in the US House of Representatives. Prior to the 90th Congress, there was a more-or-less steady increase in concentration of legislation passed by the five busiest committees that peaked at over 0.4 in the 90th Congress and then declined precipitously to under 0.15 by the 93rd Congress.
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Notes
Rep. William Colmer of Mississippi served on the House Rules Committee that unanimously approved limited co-sponsorship in 1967.
Because the Rules Committee agreed unanimously on this proposed change, no roll call vote of the full House membership was required or taken. In 1978 members of the US House of Representatives passed House Resolution 86, which removed the restriction on the number of bill co-sponsors.
Hence, the ith duplicate bill is not included in the calculations for mean characteristics of its counterparts in the same duplicate family. The Stata code used to generate all variables and subsequent estimates is available upon request.
OLS does not require distributional assumptions for the error component to derive coefficient estimates, whereas probit and logit require strong distributional assumptions about the disturbance to derive the estimates. Additionally, OLS will generate approximately the same average partial effects as probit and logit. Heteroskedasticity can be mitigated by using robust standard errors; however, we also control for clustering which is actually a much bigger problem of inference. We understand that for extreme values of the independent variables predicted probabilities can fall outside the unit interval. However, in our analysis we are not primarily concerned with the extreme tails of the distribution; that is, we are concerned more with how average behavior is changing across two different institutional settings. See Wooldridge (2010, pp. 563). We also estimate the same models using probit and logit. The average partial effects for logit and probit were not significantly different form the marginal effects reported for OLS. These results are available upon request.
Though 29 years in the House of Representatives is uncommon, this statement clarifies the extent to which seniority has an effect on bills being reported out of the committee.
These results are available upon request.
The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 had expanded the jurisdiction of standing committees and as a result increased the political influence of the committee chairs (Kravitz 1990).
This really was an intra-party fight between members of the Democratic Party, which enjoyed a roughly 2-1 majority in the House of Representatives during the 1960s. Of course, many of these individuals were Southern Democrats—conservative in philosophy rather than liberal.
The formation in 1965 of the Joint Committee on the Organization of the Congress eventually resulted in the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970.
The context of this statement must be taken into consideration to understand its implications. Joseph G. Cannon has long been looked at as a strong handed ruler during his tenure as Speaker of the House. However, Mr. Cannon was not a preference outlier when he assumed control of the house (Krehbiel and Wiseman 2001). Further, his response to criticism of ruling with czar-like power cited that the majority of the House stood behind his actions. Upon the “revolt”, Cannon vacated his seat as the House Chair, but was subsequently reinstated, showing that the majority still stood behind his leadership. These notions seem to suggest that this was more of a reformation of Cannon’s power, rather than a revolt against his control.
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We received helpful comments from our colleagues John Sophocleus, Michael Stern, Randy Beard, and from colleagues who attended a brownbag lunch seminar hosted by the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. We did not solicit co-sponsors. While duplicate versions of this paper might indicate support for the scientific contribution we present, they most assuredly would not be appreciated by the authors of this paper. We are solely responsible for any errors.
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Laband, D.N., Seals, R.A. & Wilbrandt, E.J. On the importance of inequality in politics: duplicate bills and bill co-sponsorship in the US House of Representatives. Econ Gov 16, 353–378 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-015-0170-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-015-0170-0