STUDY TESTS AN OVERREPRESENTATION HYPOTHESIS DERIVED FROM A SUBGOVERNMENT THEORY OF POLICY MAKING IN AN EFFORT TO EXPLAIN THE ADOPTION AND MAINTENANCE OF THE OIL DEPLETION ALLOWANCE OVER TIME. NULL FINDINGS LEAD TO ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS AND SUGGEST LIMITATIONS ON THE SUBGOVERNMENT THEORY OF POLICY MAKING.
AbstractThis article updates estimates of which presidents won more or fewer votes than should be expected through President Biden's first two years in office. Multiple regression models estimating the effects of contextual variables (party, public approval, and party polarization plus interactions) establish a common baseline. Errors reveal which presidents won more or less than should be expected. Party polarization conditions relationships between party control and presidential success, but effects differ across chambers. As polarization increases in the House, majority presidents win more votes and minority presidents win fewer. The effects are less obvious in the Senate. Majority presidents win more than do minority presidents regardless of polarization. But polarization has led to a de facto 60‐vote Senate, as the minority party uses the supermajority required to invoke cloture to block confirmation of presidential appointments. Conclusions discuss limitations of roll‐call vote measures of presidential success.
AbstractThis article updates previous research that seeks to identify which presidents won more or fewer roll‐call votes than should be expected through Trump's first two years in office. Multiple regression models estimating the effects of key contextual variables known to influence roll‐call voting in Congress (party control, public approval, and party polarization plus interactions) establish a common baseline of predicted success. The errors reveal which presidents won more or less than should be expected given the political context. Consistent with earlier studies using different model specifications analyzing earlier periods and presidents, this updated analysis is unable to reject the null hypothesis that the errors are random, and we observe no more unusual outliers than would be expected to occur by chance. Trump's high success rates in the 115th Congress are about what should be expected with cohesive Republican majorities in both chambers.
Presidency scholars have interpreted Congressional Quarterly's (CQ) studies of how often members of Congress support the president's position on roll‐call votes and how often he prevails as valid and reliable measures of presidential support and success. This interpretation assumes that the president's position‐taking behavior is honest and consistent and that he contributed to and understands the policies he purports to support. Trump's behavior belies these assumptions. His erratic behavior highlights the fundamental importance of reliably observing this aspect of presidential behavior. This article assesses the validity and reliability of CQ's Presidential Support studies and compares CQ's list of presidential position votes in 2017 to the list identified by FiveThirtyEight. The analysis finds a number of inconsistencies in how CQ identified presidential positions over time and that only about 50 percent of votes identified in the two studies are on both lists. These results raise questions about whether presidential support scores and success rates in recent years are comparable to those in previous decades.
The author argues that Congress: The Electoral Connection by David Mayhew (New Haven, CT: Yale U Press, 1974) has proven to be a significant contribution to scholarly understanding of US Congressional politics, primarily due to Mayhew's theoretical work. Utilizing economic analysis to study Congress, Mayhew demonstrated that this approach can be thorough without being too technical. Flaws in Mayhew's work include his assumption that Congressional members are always motivated by their desire for reelection & his superficial treatment of policy making. 4 References. A. Funderburg
