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Understanding Legislative Negotiation April 9, 2021 a Conference Understanding Legislative Negotiation April 9, 2021 A conference sponsored by American University’s Program on Legislative Negotiation (a joint program of the Washington College of Law and the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies), with support from the Hewlett Foundation’s US Democracy Program Program (All times EST) 8:30 Introduction (David Barker, Jane Mansbridge and Bettina Poirier) 8:55 ULN Sponsored Research (25-minutes per project; ~10-minute presentation & ~15-minutes discussion) - Matthew Green, “When Do Legislative Negotiations Succeed? A Case Study Approach” - Nadia Brown, Christopher Clark & Anna Mahoney, “Bridges: How Black Women Coordinate the Lawmaking Efforts of Identity-Based Caucuses” - James Curry & Jason Roberts, “Personal Relationships and Legislative Negotiation in the U.S. Congress” - Gwen Calais-Haase, “An Exploratory Study of the Hidden Lawmaking Process of the U.S. Congress” 10:35 MORNING BREAK 10:45 AU Program on Legislative Negotiation Sponsored Research (25-minutes per project; ~10-minute presentation & ~15-minutes discussion) - Alison Craig, “The Collaborative Congress: How Negotiation and Compromise Shape Day-to-Day Work in the U.S. House of Representatives” - Allida Black, “In the Shadow of 9/11: The Bipartisan Negotiations to Rebuild and Restore Lower Manhattan” - Adam Zelizer, Mehdi Shadmehr & Elizabeth Dorssom, “Higher Order Beliefs in a Legislature: An RCT to Test the Effects of Political Information on Bill Support Among State Legislators” 12:00 A Conversation with Barbara Boxer 12:30 LUNCH BREAK 1:00 “Meeting the Moment: Institutional Reform and Legislative Negotiation” - Kevin Kosar (Congress Overwhelmed/Return of Earmarks and Other Reforms) - Kemba Hendrix (Diversity, Inclusion, and Congressional Staffing) - Bill Dauster (The Role of Budget Reconciliation) 2:00 “Social Media and Legislative Negotiation” (David Lax and Ben Cook) 2:30 “Teaching Legislative Negotiation” (Bettina Poirier and Chris Bertram) 3:00 BREAK 3:10 New Scholarship (~8-10-minute presentations, followed by group discussion; ~20 minutes total, per project) - Daniel Druckman, Jennifer Parlamis & Zach Burns, “Loyalty and Logrolling: Shifting Dynamics in Legislative Negotiation” - Daniel Magleby & Gisela Sin, “Committee Chairs and Coalition Bargaining in the United States Congress” - Jessica Preece & Mandi Eatough, “Toward a Fuller Accounting of Lawmaking: The Lawmaking Productivity Metric (LawProM” - Alex P. Smith, “How to Make Laws and Manipulate People: The Role of Heresthetic in Activating Legislative Inertia” - Logan Dancey, Kjersten Nelson & Eve Ringsmuth, “Under the Shadow of Politics: Perspectives on the Nomination and Confirmation Process for the Federal Bench” 4:50 Wrap Up PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS BEGIN ON NEXT PAGE Presentation Abstracts Session I: AU Program on Legislative Negotiation Sponsored Research When Do Legislative Negotiations Succeed? A Case Study Approach Matthew Green (Professor, Catholic University of America) The ability to determine what factors contribute to successful legislative negotiations is hampered by the absence of data on how Congress has conducted such negotiations in practice. Using a newly-created dataset of over 40 cases of legislative negotiation in Congress over the past four decades, this project seeks to identify common features of the bargaining process that increase the likelihood that such negotiations result in the passage of legislation. Bridges: How Black Women Coordinate the Lawmaking Efforts of Identity-Based Caucuses Nadia Brown (Associate Professor, Purdue University), Christopher Clark (Associate Professor, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Anna Mahoney (Administrative Assistant Professor, Tulane University) Despite their small numbers in the House, Black women have made a place for themselves within the chamber as representatives of multiple communities, defenders of social justice, and often a voice of moral authority even when it means challenging their fellow partisans. This project centers on the 25 Black women serving in the House and as participating members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues in order to better understand how these members and these caucuses work together to facilitate legislative negotiation efforts. Personal Relationships and Legislative Negotiation in the U.S. Congress James Curry (Associate Professor, University of Utah) & Jason Roberts (Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Do inter-personal relationships among and between representatives and senators affect legislative collaborations in the contemporary Congress? Current scholarship on the many factors that affect the success of legislative negotiations tends to omit the personal and professional relationships among key members of Congress. However, both media and insider accounts always focus on these relationships. This project uses a mixed-methods approach to understand how relationships can help or hinder legislative collaboration, especially on bipartisan legislation. Interviews with high-level congressional staff reveal that actors on Capitol Hill believe that relationships matter for legislative collaboration (and success), and that foreign travel by groups of legislators aids the development of these relationships. Analyses of official House of Representatives data recording which members traveled together between 1993-2018 shows that members who travel together are more likely to introduce bipartisan legislation together. These results provide evidence that relationships, and relationship building, aid legislative collaborations in Congress. Repeated Bill Introductions in Congress and the Extent of Early-Stage Legislative Negotiations Gwen Calais-Haase (PhD student, Harvard University) Members of Congress have many tools with which they can satisfy their goals of being reelected. One such tool that is considerably understudied is the legislative strategy of frequently introducing seemingly identical bills in consecutive congresses. We identify all such cases in the 106th to 116th congresses, finding that this legislative strategy is actually quite common and applies to half of all legislative business. In addition to providing descriptive analysis for the phenomenon, we tackle a series of hypotheses in order to understand why this strategy is used, who uses it, and what its consequences are on the legislative language of serially introduced bills. We find no evidence that it is used as a way to engage in early-stage negotiations among members. Instead, we hypothesize that the strategy is used as a messaging tool to target interest group support. Session II: AU Program on Legislative Negotiation Sponsored Research The Collaborative Congress: How Negotiation and Compromise Shape Day-to-Day Work in the U.S. House of Representatives Alison Craig (Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Austin) Despite the reputation of Congress for gridlock and antagonism, its members frequently work with one another, finding common ground on legislation. These relationships often form in the earliest stages of the legislative process, before a bill is introduced. As a result, they are largely unobserved. This project, leverages an original data set of over 80,000 Dear Colleague letters sent by members of Congress to promote their legislation over a period of eight years to identify the bills and other policy initiatives that are the product of collaboration, and creates the first in-depth study of the nature of collaborative legislation in the House. In the Shadow of 9/11: The Bipartisan Negotiations to Rebuild and Restore Lower Manhattan Allida Black (Distinguished Visiting Scholar, The Miller Center for Public Affairs) The negotiations for federal assistance to New York City post 9/11 were without precedent. This project reconstructs these negotiations and offers a multi-media education module to explore the negotiations between the Congress and the White House to secure, preserve, and apply appropriated funds across multiple federal, state, and local agencies. Higher Order Beliefs in a Legislature: An RCT to Test the Effects of Political Information on Bill Support Among State Legislators Adam Zelizer (Assistant Professor, The University of Chicago), Mehdi Shadmehr (Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) & Elizabeth Dorssom (PhD student, University of Missouri) Legislators deciding whether and how strongly to support a bill need to consider their peers’ policy preferences, beliefs, and behaviors. Yet learning about peers is time-consuming, so legislators rely on the heuristics of x, y, and z, that is, higher order beliefs about their peers. This project examines the extent to which policymaking is hampered by imperfect higher order beliefs. Session III: New Scholarship Loyalty and Logrolling: Shifting Dynamics in Legislative Negotiation Daniel Druckman (Professor Emeritus, George Mason University), Jennifer Parlamis (Associate Professor, University of San Francisco), & Zachary Burns (Assistant Professor, University of San Francisco) The purpose of this research is to gain an understanding of legislative negotiation dynamics through the lens of group attachments (loyalty). In three separate Mechanical Turk studies, we manipulated party loyalty and explored movement on critical budget decision issues in the context of legislative negotiations. In study 1, it was confirmed that those in the loyalty condition were less flexible on budget decisions than those in the
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