Yale University The Role of the Roll: Party Brand and Ticking Clock Issues in Hastert Rule Violations Alex Brod Adviser: John Henderson April 2019 Senior essay submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Political Science Abstract Why do majority rolls occur? Cox and McCubbins (2005) claim that majority leaders in the United States House of Representatives protect their party’s reputation by keeping bills opposed by the majority of their party off the legislative agenda. I argue that Cox and McCubbins take an overly restrictive view of what constitutes a party’s reputation. Selectively violating the “Hastert rule” by allowing certain party-splitting issues on the legislative agenda can create a favorable party brand and improve the prospects for retaining majority status. Drawing from the literature on party brands, political psychology, Congress, and policy making, I develop a theory to predict the circumstances that make violations of the Hastert rule more probable. I find that the majority party is more likely to be rolled on salient bills that address what I term “ticking clock” issues, as these issues will elicit the most attention and concern from voters. I then test this theory by examining the six instances in which Speaker John Boehner violated the Hastert rule. The theory accounts for five of the six rolls. Introduction On February 28, 2013, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, but only 87 Republican congressmen voted in favor of the bill’s passage (CQ Almanac 2013b). The vote represented a rare majority “roll,” or “Hastert rule” violation, in which the Speaker scheduled a vote for a bill that was opposed by the majority of the majority party. Discussing his violation of the Hastert rule, Speaker John Boehner told reporters, “it’s not a practice that I would expect to continue long term” (Strong and Newhauser 2013). Yet, later that year, Boehner again violated the Hastert rule, this time on a bill 1 to reopen the federal government during a shutdown (CQ Almanac 2013a). In total, Boehner would allow six majority rolls during his tenure as Speaker. Boehner’s speakership exemplifies the typical use of the Hastert rule: Majority party leaders tend to obey the rule, but on occasion, they permit bills onto the legislative agenda that the majority of their conference opposes, allowing them to pass with most of the “yea” votes coming from the opposing party. Cox and McCubbins’ (2005) procedural cartel theory provides a compelling explanation as to why majority rolls are so rare. According to the theory, majority party leaders keep party-splitting issues off the agenda in order to protect the party’s brand name, thereby increasing the party’s chances of retaining its majority status (Cox and McCubbins 2005). Less clear, however, is why majority leaders allow the limited number of rolls that do occur. In this paper, I attempt to answer this question by developing a theory to predict the circumstances that make majority rolls more likely. The first section of this paper explores procedural cartel theory and related scholarly work. The literature review illustrates how scholars have not adequately explained why Hastert rule violations occur. In the next section, I begin to develop a theory to account for this phenomenon by examining the concept of the party brand. The associative network model of party brands expands Cox and McCubbins’ restrictive view of what constitutes a party’s reputation, opening the door for the possibility that majority rolls can sometimes improve a party’s reputation. I then outline my main theoretical expectation: Salient “ticking clock” issues make majority rolls more probable. Failing to address these time-sensitive issues would draw voter attention and damage the majority party brand—an outcome that party leaders hope to avoid. In the subsequent section, I test the theory’s predictions on John Boehner’s six Hastert 2 rule violations, finding that the theory can explain five of these rolls quite well. I conclude with a discussion of further implications of the theory and suggest directions for future related research. Procedural Cartel Theory In their seminal work Setting the Agenda, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins (2005) observe that agenda setting power in the United States House of Representatives is “cartelized” by the majority party. Since the majority party controls all committee chairs, a super- proportional share of the seats on the Rules Committee, and the speakership, the party leaders who occupy these offices determine which bills will be considered for votes on the floor of the House (Cox and McCubbins 2005). The majority party delegates to leaders these “special agenda-setting powers” in order to solve a collective action problem: managing the party label (Cox and McCubbins 2005, 22). Cox and McCubbins (2005, 22) note that “managing the party label is the primary collective action problem that members of a party must solve.” The party label, reputation, or brand in turn depends on the party’s “record of legislative accomplishment” (Cox and McCubbins 2005, 21). Since the policies and legislative actions associated with a party and its leaders can significantly affect the overall party brand, it is the task of party leaders to use their agenda setting powers to help compile the most favorable record of legislative accomplishment (Cox and McCubbins 2005). The more favorable the legislative record associated with the party, the more favorable the party’s reputation will be. Individual party members have an interest in bolstering their party’s label because the party brand influences their chances of reelection and the party’s chances of being in the majority during the next Congress (Cox and McCubbins 2005, 7). In this sense, the party’s reputation is a public good from which substantially all members will “benefit or suffer” 3 together, irrespective of each member’s individual contribution to the state of the label (Cox and McCubbins 1993 and 2005). Cox and McCubbins (1993) explore this notion in greater detail in Legislative Leviathan. They find extensive evidence that the reelection fates of incumbents of the same party are tied together, which accords with the idea that the party label should be a collective concern for party members (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 104–109). Moreover, members seem to recognize the existence of this “common element” in the electoral chances of co-partisan incumbents, as evidenced by the negative correlation between the rates of Republican and Democratic congressional retirements (Jacobson and Kernell 1981, 54). If members of Congress are presumed to value their own reelection, internal advancement in the House, their policy priorities, and majority status for their party (which is effectively a prerequisite for internal advancement and quite helpful for passing their favored policies), promoting a positive party label should be a priority for them and their leaders (Cox and McCubbins 2005). How do party leaders use their delegated agenda-setting powers to establish a favorable legislative record and party brand? Cox and McCubbins (2005, 27) argue that party leaders are expected never to “push bills that would pass despite the opposition of a majority of their party,” which represents the key insight of the book. The passage of such a bill—an event that Cox and McCubbins call a “roll”—would shift status quo policies in a direction that the majority of the party finds undesirable, thus harming the party’s legislative record and reputation. Indeed, Cox and McCubbins’ (2005, 5) theory “stresses the avoidance of party-splitting issues, hence the preservation of some existing policies, as the key to the political survival of majority parties.” In practice, majority party leaders do not often permit these party-splitting bills to be placed on the House’s legislative agenda: The majority was rolled on just 1.7 percent of all the final-passage votes on joint resolutions in the House from the 83rd to 105th Congresses, an average of 2.1 rolls 4 per Congress (Cox and McCubbins 2005, 93). Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House, summarized this trend in 2003 when he said, the “job of the Speaker is not to expedite legislation that runs counter to the wishes of the majority of the majority” (Golshan 2018). This remark led to the coining of the “Hastert rule” (Golshan 2018). Cox and McCubbins’ theory of negative agenda control has had a considerable impact on scholarship related to Congress and partisan influence therein, and the metric of “rolls” has been extensively applied. Several scholars have further investigated procedural cartel theory in the context of the House. Carson, Monroe, and Robinson (2011) analyze party rolls before and after the 1994 midterm elections, concluding that the agenda control behavior of the Republicans upon assuming majority control was quite similar to that of the pre-1995 Democratic majority. Jenkins and Nokken (2008) find virtually no difference between the negative agenda control exercised during lame duck and regular sessions of Congress following the passage of the 20th amendment. Stiglitz and Weingast (2010) argue that negative agenda control in the House has strengthened since the committee reforms of the mid-1970s. Other scholars have examined rolls and procedural cartel theory in the U.S. Senate. Using roll rate data, Gailmard and Jenkins (2007) conclude that the majority party in the Senate exercises significant negative agenda control that is comparable to that exercised by the majority party in the House. Further scholarship has focused on negative agenda control and roll rates in various state legislatures. Anzia and Jackman (2013) examine all 99 state legislatures1 to demonstrate that majority roll rates are lower in legislatures in which majority leaders can block bills from consideration or majority-appointed committees can decline to report bills to the floor.