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 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 : 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 : 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 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 thoughtful condition. This finding was replicated in study 2. In both studies, those in the loyalty condition were willing to move less on their priority issues and more on the issues of priority to the other party, which opens the possibility for logrolling. In study 3, which is currently ongoing, we are investigating the extent to which term limits and specialized legislative roles can be tools for managing gridlock under conditions of strong party loyalty. Implications of this research will be discussed.

Committee Chairs and Coalition Bargaining in the United States Congress Daniel Magleby (Assistant Professor, Binghampton University) & Gisela Sin (Associate Professor, University of Illinois)

In the US House of Representatives, by virtue of their position, committee chairs have the power to propose new alternatives to status quo (positive agenda control), but they also exercise a de facto veto over proposals that affect their issue area (negative agenda control). A fundamental issue is the selection of committee chairs. Who becomes committee chair? In contrast to the extant literature, which focuses on the role of seniority, we argue that the “selection” of new committee chairs largely reflects renegotiations among factions within the majority party. Leveraging the multiple cases in which legislators within a committee have the same seniority, we argue that “ties” in seniority present an opportunity for party leaders to strengthen their party in much the same way that leaders in parliamentary systems build and maintain coalitions. We show that even though seniority plays a role, party leaders use committee chairmanships as a tool to build and maintain coalitions of factions that makeup congressional parties.

Toward a Fuller Accounting of Lawkmaking: The Lawmaking Productivity Metric (LawProM) Jessica Preece (Associate Professor, Brigham Young University) and Mandi Eatough (PhD Student, University of Michigan)

Observers have long been interested in the distinction between Congressional “work horses” and “show horses." However, scholarly measurement of legislative productivity neglects many realities of modern lawmaking by focusing almost entirely on bill sponsorship and passage. To better measure lawmaking productivity, we compile widely available data on bill sponsorship/passage, cosponsorship, and amendments; we also use advanced text-as-data methods to identify and give credit for instances of behind-the-scenes lawmaking via bill text reuse. We weight and combine achievements from each of

these lawmaking methods to create the Lawmaking Productivity Metric (LawProM, "law prom") for Members of the 101-113th Congresses. Including methods of lawmaking beyond bill sponsorship in a legislative productivity metric reveals that scholars have systematically under-credited the work of women and Black Members of Congress.

How to Make Laws and Manipulate People: The Role of Heresthetic in Activating Legislative Inertia Alex P. Smith (PhD student, University of Florida)

This project seeks to understand how Congress goes from being gridlocked to passing legislation on a policy topic. Drawing from William Riker’s concept of heresthetic, it builds a theory for overcoming long-term stalemate using process tracing and four case studies on civil rights legislation. Three joint necessary but not sufficient conditions are identified: a legitimacy crisis, combined with multiple instances of strategic and dimension manipulation during negotiations. When legislators become convinced that continued inaction no longer serves their goals, strategic voting and dimension manipulation can be used to disrupt existing voting coalitions and the status quo. This project describes the motives underlying these negotiation tactics, how legislators have used them to build new coalitions, and the costs of prioritizing political feasibility over policy content.

Under the Shadow of Politics: Perspectives on the Nomination and Confirmation Process for the Federal Bench Logan Dancey (Associate Professor, Wesleyan University), Kjersten Nelson (Associate Professor, North Dakota State University), Eve Ringsmuth (Associate Professor, Oklahoma State University)

Over the last several decades, the process for confirming federal judicial nominees has become more contentious and protracted. We seek to investigate the consequences of this increased partisan conflict and gridlock by interviewing and surveying previous nominees, and individuals whose credentials make them likely nominees, to lower federal courts. We will evaluate whether this new norm of heightened contentiousness discourages qualified candidates from these positions and whether the process has lasting consequences for how judges approach their job or their impressions of the and the courts’ role in it. The project thus speaks to how an increasingly partisan confirmation process may affect the relationship between Congress and the courts and the pipeline to the federal bench.

PARTICIPANT BIOS BEGIN ON NEXT PAGE

Program Participants

David Barker, Professor and Director, CCPS,

Cori Alonso-Yoder, Visiting Professor of Law, American University Georgetown Law Biography Biography

Kevin Baron, Assistant Professor,

Sarah Anderson, Professor, Austin Peay State University University of California, Santa Barbara Biography Biography

Chris Bertram, Co-Founder, Program on Legislative Negotiation Biography Andrew Ballard, Assistant Professor, American University Biography

Sarah Binder, Senior Fellow: Governance Studies Brookings Institution Senator Barbara Boxer Biography Biography

Allida Black, Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Nadia Brown, Associate Professor, The Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Purdue University, Virginia August 2021: Director, Women’s and Gender Biography Studies Program Professor, Department of and Department of African American Studies Georgetown University Biography

Jean Parvin Bordewich, Program Officer, U.S. Democracy Program William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Biography

Amanda Brush, PhD Student University of California, Santa Barbara Biography

Zachary Burns, Assistant Professor, Gwen Calais-Haase, PhD student, University of San Francisco Harvard University Biography Biography

Jordan Butcher, Assistant Professor, Jason Casellas, Associate Professor, Arkansas State University University of Houston Biography Biography

Daniel Butler, Professor, University of California San Diego Christopher Clark, Associate Professor, Biography The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Biography

James Curry, Associate Professor, University of Utah Biography Ben Cook, Vice President at Lax Sebenius LLC

Researcher, Negotiation Strategy, Harvard

Business School

Biography

Amy Dacey Director, Sine Institute of Policy and Politics, American University Alison Craig, Assistant Professor, Biography University of Texas at Austin Biography

Logan Dancey, Associate Professor,

Michael Crespin, Director, Carl Albert Wesleyan University Congressional Research and Studies Center Biography Professor, University of Oklahoma Biography

Daniel Druckman, Professor Emeritus, Bill Dauster, Chief Counsel, George Mason University U.S. Senate Budget Committee Biography Biography

Lee Drutman, Senior Fellow, Political Reform Program, New America Bryce Dietrich, Assistant Professor, Biography University of Iowa Biography

Mandi Eatough, PhD student, The University of Michigan Elizabeth Dorssom, PhD student, Biography University of Missouri Biography

Ron Elving, Executive in Residence, Andra Gillespie American University Director, The James Weldon Johnson Institute Biography for the Study of Race and Difference Associate Professor, Emory University Biography

Jennifer Garcia, Assistant Professor, Oberlin College Biography Matthew Green, Professor, Catholic University of America Biography

Monica Giannone Harvard Kennedy School Negotiation Project Adjunct Lecturer, Babson College Trainer, AU Program on Legislative Negotiation Biography Peter Hanson, Associate Professor, Grinnell College Biography

Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Associate Professor, Whitney Hua, PhD Student, Northwestern University The University of Southern California Biography Biography

John Haskell, Director, Joshua Huder, Affiliate Senior Fellow, John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress Georgetown University Biography Biography

Kemba Hendrix, Director, House of Representatives Office of Diversity and Tom Kahn, Adjunct Professor, Inclusion American University Biography Biography

Kristin Kanthak, Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh Gregory Koger, Professor, Biography University of Miami Biography

Kevin R. Kosar, Resident Scholar, Naseem Khuri American Enterprise Institute Adjunct Assistant Professor, Tufts University Biography Trainer, AU Program on Legislative Negotiation Biography

David Lax Gavin Kilduff, Associate Professor, Managing Principal, Lax Sebenius LLC New York University Distinguished Fellow, Biography Harvard Negotiation Project, Harvard University Biography

Frances Lee, Professor, Kenneth Lowande, Assistant Professor, Princeton University University of Michigan Biography Biography

Amanda Leiter, Senior Associate Dean and Professor American University Washington College of Law Biography Anthony Madonna, Associate Professor, University of Georgia Biography

David Lublin, Professor, American University Biography Daniel Magleby, Assistant Professor, Binghampton University Biography

Anna Mahoney, Director of Research, Administrative Assistant Professor, Rachel Milner Gillers, Director Newcomb College Institute, Georgetown Baker Negotiation Network; Tulane University Adjunct Professor of Law, Georgetown Biography University Biography

Brian Mandell, Director and Senior Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School Negotiation Project Nathan Monroe, Associate Professor, Harvard University University of California Merced Biography Biography

Jane Mansbridge, Professor, Jason Mycoff, Associate Professor, Harvard University University of Delaware Biography Biography

Bettina Poirier, Director, Program on Legislative Negotiation, Senior Affiliate and Adjunct Professor, Kjersten Nelson, Associate Professor, American University Washington College of North Dakota State University Law Biography Biography

Jennifer Parlamis, Associate Professor, University of San Francisco Biography Lynda Powell, Professor, University of Rochester Biography

Bruce Patton, Co-Founder, Jessica Preece, Associate Professor, Harvard Negotiation Project Brigham Young University Biography Biography

Eve Ringsmuth, Associate Professor, Oklahoma State University John Rackey, PhD Student, Biography University of Oklahoma Biography

Jason Roberts, Professor, Jayesh Rathod, Associate Dean for Experiential University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Education and Professor, Biography American University Washington College of Law Biography

Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow, Governance Annelise Russell, Assistant Professor, Studies, University of Kentucky Brookings Institution Biography Biography

Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Associate Professor, Purdue University Biography Jamil Scott, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University Biography

Cathy Schenker Director of Online Learning and Professor Mehdi Shadmehr, Associate Professor, American University Washington College of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Law Biography Biography

Wendy Schiller, Professor, Brown University Biography

Gisela Sin, Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Biography

Jordan Tama, Associate Professor, David Skaggs, Chairman, American University Board of the Office of Congressional Ethics Biography Biography

Steven S. Smith, Professor, Washington University in St. Louis Biography Sean Theriault, Professor, The University of Texas at Austin Biography

Alex P. Smith, PhD student, University of Florida Biography Danielle Thomsen, Assistant Professor, University of California, Irvine Biography

James A. Thurber, Professor, Craig Volden, Professor, American University University of Virginia Biography Biography

Sophia Jordán Wallace, Associate Professor, University of Washington Biography Sarah Treul, Associate Professor,

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Biography

Jennifer Wessel, Assistant Professor, Jennifer Victor, Associate Professor, University of Maryland George Mason University Biography Biography

Michelle Whyman, Assistant Professor, Adam Zelizer, Assistant Professor, Florida State University University of Chicago Biography Biography

Antoine Yoshinaka, Associate Professor, University at Buffalo Biography