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Bipartisanship and Bicameralism: a New Inside View of Congressional Committees

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Bipartisanship and Bicameralism: a New Inside View of Congressional Committees Bipartisanship and Bicameralism: A New Inside View of Congressional Committees Pamela Ban∗ Harvard University October 2017 Abstract Polarization in Congress has reached record highs in recent times, leading to concerns about gridlock and partisan outcomes. I show that even in a polarized environment, committees achieve consensus in the face of partisan conflict and can act as a cue for bipartisanship. Using a new text dataset of House committee hearings and committee reports from 2003-2014, I propose and construct bill-level measures of committee-stage disagreement between Republican and Democratic committee members. Results show that regardless of the level of committee-stage disagreement between the two parties, minority committee members still vote against their party on the floor, in their commit- tee's jurisdiction, to achieve high levels of bipartisanship among committee members. A difference-in-differences design suggests that this behavior comes from the sorting mechanism in the committee assignment process; these members were inclined to vote against their party at the same rate in the committee's jurisdiction even when they are not on committee. ∗Ph.D. Candidate, Political Economy and Government. [email protected]. 1 Introduction Congressional committees are central legislative units of Congress. Scholars have noted the congressional committee's strategic policy-making position, viewing committees as gatekeep- ers of their jurisdictions, policy experts, and agenda controllers in their policy area (Shepsle and Weingast, 1987; Smith and Deering, 1984; Fenno, 1973; Weingast and Marshall, 1988; Cox and McCubbins, 1993). Given the importance of congressional committees to Congress, understanding the dynamics of committees is crucial to understanding congressional politics. With the recent focus on high levels of party conflict in Congress, of particular interest is the effect of polarization on the legislative process and its impact on congressional output. As committees are gate-keepers to the floor, polarization in the committee stage has the potential to keep bills from reaching the floor or result in split committee votes on the bill's passage. The literature has theorized that members on a committee have incentives to cooperate with each other even in the face of internal disagreements and differing preferences. Richard Fenno coins this concept as \committee integration," describing it as \the degree to which a committee is able to minimize conflict among its roles and subgroups, by heading off or resolving the conflicts that arise" (Fenno, 1962). The literature has argued that the committee system can resolve conflicts by exchanging support through logrolling and vote trading { more generally, in a \gains from exchange institutional arrangement" (Weingast and Marshall, 1988; Shepsle and Weingast, 1987; Fiorina, 1987). Committees may also vote together to signal quality, or because they have important information that the wider chamber may not have (Gilligan and Krehbiel, 1989). However, while committee members do tend to seek out committees with jurisdictions that align with their interests, committee members can still have differing positions and heterogenous preferences within the committee. This is especially true along party lines. Does the incentive to cooperate lead committees to resolve high levels of partisan conflict on a bill during the committee stage, resulting in bipartisan support from committee members 1 on the floor? In today's highly polarized Congress, if we find that there is a high level of bipartisanship support among committee members during the floor stage, even though there was partisan conflict within committee during the earlier committee stage on the same bill, then the institution of the committee system may be a vehicle for bipartisanship. On the other hand, if we find that partisan conflict on a bill in the committee stage continues to exist in committee members' voting on the bill on the floor, then we have evidence that the majority party excludes the minority party (Cox and McCubbins, 1993) and that the committee system simply passes along existing party disagreements. Are committees successful at achieving consensus in the presence of partisan conflict? To answer this, a precise measure of disagreement between party members in the committee stage is needed. While scholars have long studied partisan politics on the congressional floor, pre-floor activity in Congress has received scant attention.1 This is largely due to the data limitations surrounding congressional committee activity in the committee stage. Empirical work on Congress has mainly been restricted to activities and outcomes on the floor (relying on measures built upon roll call votes or congressional floor speech) or at the beginning of the legislative process (relying on measures built upon bill sponsorship data). Systematically measuring party disagreement in the committee stage { taking place in between these two points in time { is difficult because committee activities do not result in clean numerical data that reveal positions on bills under consideration. To tackle this, I propose a new approach that uses new text data to measure disagreement on bills inside committees. I construct two text-based measures of bill-level disagreement among committee members in the committee stage using the speech of committee members in committee hearings and the amount of formal disagreement presented by minority committee members in committee reports. To do this, I collect and use a new text dataset comprised 1The congressional literature has measured and documented the divide between parties on the floor, focusing on the growing homogeneity in policy positions within each party and the growing distance between the two parties. This growth in polarization has been measured in numerous ways, including using the percentage of party votes (Bond and Fleisher, 2000; Stonecash, Brewer and Mariani, 2003), interest group ratings (Stonecash, Brewer and Mariani, 2003), member NOMINATE scores (Poole and Rosenthal, 1997; Jacobson, 2000), and party unity scores (Bond and Fleisher, 2000; Stonecash, Brewer and Mariani, 2003). 2 of committee reports and committee hearing transcripts for the 108th-113th Congresses, linked to individual bills. I do this for five committees that have jurisdiction over important areas of domestic policy: Education and Labor, Financial Services, Energy and Commerce, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Veterans' Affairs. I find that the amount of committee-stage disagreement over a bill does not have a statistically significant effect on that committee's bipartisanship on the bill's passage vote on the floor. However, there are substantial levels of bipartisanship on the floor for these five committees even in the face of committee-stage disagreement on bills. In order for these levels of bipartisanship among committee members to exist on the floor, there must be some members of the minority party voting with the majority party, or vice versa. While this is not surprising for bipartisan bills (when both parties vote in the same direction), party- line bills are an interesting case. Is there something inherent in committee service { and the benefits or incentives that come along with it { that leads certain committee members to vote against their own party? Or is it because the members on these committees were already inclined to vote against their party on legislation in their committee's jurisdiction, perhaps due to district preferences, even when they are not on committee? Previous research has suggested three possible reasons for why committee members (mi- nority or majority party) may vote differently on issues in that committee's jurisdiction compared to non-committee members. Scholars have shown that committee members receive more interest group donations and lobbying efforts from interest groups in the committee's jurisdiction than non-committee members (Romer and Snyder, 1994; Grimmer and Powell, 2016; Hojnacki and Kimball, 1998, 1999; Kollman, 1997; Hall and Wayman, 1990). Nor- matively, policymakers or observers of Congress may be concerned that this extra attention from interest groups affects committee members' voting behavior. Furthermore, two tra- ditional theories of committees suggest that committee members may vote differently from non-committee members of their party. First, if we think that committee service comes with more power over what goes into legislation, committee members may be in a better 3 position to extract specific benefits for themselves and their districts, versus when they are not on committee (Weingast and Marshall, 1988; Shepsle and Weingast, 1987) This distribu- tive benefits story also relates to the \preference outlier" theory of committees.2 Second, the informational theory of committees, e.g. Gilligan and Krehbiel (1989), suggests that committee members have more information on the bill and its relevant policies compared to non-committee members { in other words, committee members may know more about the true benefits and implications of the bill than non-committee members, and so may vote differently than (co-partisan) non-committee members because of this information. The second part of this paper tests whether committee service impacts members' fre- quencies of voting against their party and exploits the panel structure of my data using a within-member design. I find that on average, minority committee members tend to vote more frequently against their party than their party's non-committee members on party-line
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