The Jeffords Switch and Legislator Rolls in the U.S. Senate

Chris Den Hartog

Department of Political Science

California Polytechnic State University

San Luis Obispo, CA 93407

and

Nathan W. Monroe

School of Social Science, Humanities, and Arts

University of California, Merced

Merced, CA 95211

Abstract

On May 24, 2001 United States Senator James Jeffords announced that he was switching from Republican to independent and would vote with Democrats on organizational matters (i.e. votes deciding party membership and majority party status), effectively taking majority party control of the Senate from the Republicans and giving it to the Democrats. This created an unusually well controlled quasi-experimental opportunity for learning about the role of parties in the Senate—it held most important variables constant while one variable, majority status, changed. We use roll call data to evaluate the probability of individual members of each party being rolled on Senate final passage votes, before and after the switch. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom on the Senate, majority status is an important factor in Senate decision-making. Our results show that Republicans were more likely to be rolled after the switch than they had been before, and that Democrats were less likely to be rolled than they had been before.

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 1-4, Washington, D.C. We thank John Aldrich, Cheryl Boudreau, Andrea Campbell, Dave Clark, Gary Cox, David Epstein, Bob Erikson, Karen Ferree, Clark Gibson, Will Heller, Simon Hix, Henry Kim, Thad Kousser, Gary Jacobson, Jonathan Katz, Jonathan Krasno, Jeff Lax, Michael McDonald, Mat McCubbins, Kathryn Pearson, Rose Razaghian, Dave Rohde, Brian Sala, Greg Wawro, and Nick Weller for helpful comments on previous versions and related projects. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support provided by NSF Grant # SES 9905224 (Principal investigators: Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins)

Congressional scholars sharply dispute the role of the majority party in shaping US Senate decisions. On one hand, the view that Senate parties exert little influence over the chamber runs throughout postwar congressional scholarship. The most influential studies, which focus on Senate procedures and practices such as holds, filibusters, and nearly unlimited amendment opportunities, portray the chamber as one in which power is distributed broadly across individual senators and the chamber as a whole as extremely difficult to manage (Matthews 1960;Ripley 1969; Sinclair 1989; Smith 1989). These studies are rich in detail and context, but tend to either ignore or explicitly downplay the importance of parties.[1]

As partisanship has risen since the 1980s, scholars increasingly have entered party identification into analyses of Senate behavior—but, rather than consensus, this has led to divergent views about their effects. Some studies argue that partisanship exacerbates the gridlock and dysfunction caused by individualism (Binder 1997, 1999, 2003; Binder and Smith 1997; Oppenheimer and Hetherington 2008; Smith 2005, 2007). From this perspective, partisan and individual goals act as competing interests, putting enormous pressure on Senate leadership to deliver partisan advantage in a chamber set up to empower individual interests (Sinclair 2001).

Other studies, however, point to Senate procedures and processes that work to the advantage of the majority party (Beth et al. 2009; Campbell 2001, 2004; Den Hartog and Monroe 2008, 2011; Evans and Oleszek 2001; Evans and Lipinski 2005; Koger 2010; Lee 2009; Schiller 1995, 2000,2001; Wawro and Schickler 2006). Some of these authors, as well as others, discern different types of pro-majority bias in Senate decisions (Bargen 2003; Campbell 2001, 2004; Campbell, Cox, and McCubbins 2002; Crespin and Finocchiaro 2008; Den Hartog and Monroe 2008; Gailmard and Jenkins 2007; Koger and Fowler 2006; Lee 2009).

We evaluate these competing views by examining how legislative outcomes varied when Democrats suddenly gained majority status in the middle of the 107th Senate, owing to Senator James Jeffords’s change in party affiliation. More specifically, we look at individual senators’ probability of being “rolled”—that is, voting against a bill that passes—on final passage votes in the periods immediately before and after “the Jeffords switch” (i.e., the change in majority status), and how these probabilities changed when Democrats gained and Republicans lost majority status. We conclude that majority status systematically affects Senate legislative outcomes. Our results show that Republicans were less successful after the switch than they had been before, and that Democrats were more successful after the switch than they had been before.[2] In some ways, however, the results also suggest limits on majority party power in the Senate, which we discuss later in the paper.

The Jeffords switch provides a unique quasi-experimental opportunity for examining the majority party’s role, because it allows us to isolate the “treatment” variable—majority status—while holding constant other variables that scholars identify as determinants of Senate decisions. It is the only instance in which majority status changed without any concurrent change in Senate membership—other changesin majority status resulted from elections that produced simultaneous changes in other factors likely to influence legislative outcomes, such as the ideological mix in the chamber, membership in the House of Representatives, and the expressed preferences of constituents.[3] Many elections also produced changes in control of the House, the White House, or issue salience. Across the period just before and just after the Jeffords switch, however, all of these things remained constant.

Yet, this paper’s intended contribution goes well beyond that short period. That controlled window allows us to understand the nature of majority status in the Senate and the way majority parties shape Senate outcomes in the modern Senate, not just the 107th Senate. The Jeffords switch is unique as an opportunity to test competing theories; but inasmuch as the Jeffords change does produce an effect, we expect that same basic effect to exist for any change in majority status. The only difference is that for other changes, we cannot as cleanly detect the causal relationship.

Others also have used the tidy research design produced by the Jeffords switch to study aspects of American politics. For instance, Nicholson (2005) uses the switch to study public support for divided government, Jayachandran (2006) uses it to study asset prices, and Roberts (2007) uses it to illustrate difficulties in drawing inferences about legislators’ preferences from roll call votes. The work closest to ours is Den Hartog and Monroe (2008), which also uses the switch to study partisan influence on Senate outcomes. But their dependent variable—stock returns for Democrat-supported and Republican-supported energy companies—assesses the impact of the switch by examining outcomes external to Congress.Their research design relies on the premise that investors’ reactions to the switch accurately reflected shifting party power withinCongress and the consequences such a shift would have on energy stocks. Put differently, to interpret their results as evidence of majority party bias in the Senate, one must believe that the market correctly anticipated the legislative consequences of the switch.

We use a research design that is similar but relies on no such premise. Our dependent variable, a senator’s probability of being rolled, is similar to those used by Carroll and Kim (2010),Carson, Monroe, and Robinson (2011), Cox and McCubbins (2005), Lawrence, Maltzman, and Smith (2005, 2006), and Smith (2007)—each of which uses some measure of individual legislators’ legislative successes or failures and compares the success (failure) of majority party legislators to the success (failure) of minority party legislators to draw inferences about party power. A common element of these other studies, however, is that they examine time series that stretch across multiple congresses, with one observation for each member in each congress, and changes in majority status resulting only from elections. The test in this paper has the novel twist that the period we study includes a change of majority status without a simultaneous change in other important variables.[4]

In the following sections we discuss the Jeffords switch, theories of majority power and the hypotheses we draw from them, our research design for testing those hypotheses, and empirical results of our tests. We end with a comparison of the Republican and Democratic majorities’ success, and concluding thoughts.

The Jeffords switch

Following the 2000 election, the Senate was divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans, leaving the Vice President as the tie-breaking vote and de facto determinant of which party enjoyed majority status. From January 3 through 20, Al Gore remained Vice President and Democrats were the majority party—although, knowing that they were about to lose majority status, they took little action. When Dick Cheney was sworn in as Vice President on January 20th,Republicans assumed majority status and, with it, unified control of the government. Realizing that they faced an extraordinary situation, Democratic leader Tom Daschle and Republican leader Trent Lott agreed at the outset to a so-called “power-sharing agreement” that, among other things, divided seats on all committees evenly between Republicans and Democrats, while making Republicans the chairs of each committee.

This continued for the next few months, during which the Bush administration defied many predictions by pushing a conservative agenda, to the consternation of some moderate Republican senators, including Jeffords (Martinez 2001). On May 24, he announced that he would switch from Republican to independent and would vote with Democrats on organizational matters. These organizational votes, in and of themselves, are not especially interesting in that they are virtually always straight party-line votes. They are, however, very important in that their outcomes determine which party will control committees and other aspects of Senate process that, in effect, give the majority party an institutional advantage. Thus, Jeffords’s intent to abandon the Republicans and vote with the Democrats on these organizational matters had the effect of giving Democrats a 51-49 advantage, thereby making them the majority party.[5]

The Senate recessed on May 26, after passing Bush’s tax bill;[6] when the session resumed in June, Democrats assumed majority status; Daschle became majority leader, Democrats became chairs of each committee, and (after a period of bargaining and procedural wrangling). Democrats assumed one-seat majorities on each committee. The new alignment was still in place a few months later when the terrorist attacks of September 11 put a temporary end to politics-as-usual.

Theories of Majority Party Effects on Legislation

Partisan theories of congressional legislation focus heavily on majority parties’ ability to affect outcomes by shaping the agenda—meaning, roughly speaking, affecting which measures do and do not get final floor votes. But Senate scholarship has long been rife with skepticism about the Senate majority’s ability to shape the chamber’s agenda. Before discussing theories or hypotheses, therefore, we discuss Senate procedures that plausibly could give the majority the ability to affect the set of measures subject to final votes.

Majority party procedural tools

Agenda setting can be thought of as occurring at three different stages of the Senate’s legislative process: the committee, scheduling, and floor stages.[7]What follows is a brief characterization of claims found in the literature on the Senate about ways that the majority party can affectoutcomes at each stage.

Committee chairs, who are all members of the majority party, exercise substantial power to block their committees from considering bills that the chair does not want considered, and to bring up their own version of a bill (the “chair’s mark”) for consideration if they prefer it to the version originally referred to the committee(Evans 1991). The power to block consideration of a proposal and the power to make the first proposal are often cited as important sources of agenda-setting power (Cox and McCubbins 2005; Finocchiaro and Rohde 2008; Romer and Rosenthal 1978).Chairs also have considerable sway over other committee members, especially from their own party, which they often use to ensure that their committees report measures that the chair wants reported (Evans 1991; Rawls 2009).[8]

The majority’s influence over scheduling (i.e., bringing a bill up for consideration on the floor) flows largely from the majority leader’s right to be recognized before any other senator, which givesthe majority leader an effectivemonopoly over the offering of either a motion to proceed or a unanimous consent request that proposesto bring the bill up in the form that he prefers (Tiefer 1989).This monopoly allows the majority leader to block scheduling of bills merely by doing nothing.

Of course, there is no guarantee of the chamber approving the majority leader’s scheduling proposals, which are often thwarted by filibusters, threats of filibusters, or objections to consent requests. But, any senator other than the majority leader facesthe same constraints, while also lacking the right of first recognition. Given that every senatorhas legislation that he or she wants enacted, the majority leader’s proposal monopoly can createbargaining leverage that sometimes induces opponents into acceding to scheduling of a bill that they oppose (Ainsworth and Flathman 1995), and perhaps also into refraining from filibustering or voting for cloture.

The Senate’s open amendment process has the potential to negate the majority party’s committee and scheduling advantages, but the majority is not without means of fighting back against unwanted amendments.Floor amendments are restrictedin some circumstances, such as when the majority leader fills the amendment tree (Beth et al. 2009; Campbell 2004; Oleszek 2004; Schiller 2000). And amendments must be germane once cloture is invoked, leading majority leaders oftento file for cloture as early as possible in order to limit amendments (Oleszek 2004; Sinclair 1997; Tiefer 1989).

When unwanted amendmentsareoffered, the majority can try to kill them by making and approving motions to table (which are non-debatable and require only a bare majority for approval), by ruling them out of order (Den Hartog and Monroe 2011), or by simply voting them down on an adoption vote.[9] None of these is a surefire means of killing amendments, but each clearly is effective in many cases.

As at the scheduling stage, the majority’s ability to move its bills forward is subject to the constraints of filibusters and objections to consent requests, which unquestionably can reduce the majority’s success in passing its policy priorities. But, as noted above, the minority party faces the same constraints and then some—and the majority leader’s proposal power sometimes creates leverage that allows the majority to overcome obstruction.

In sum, the picture of majority power that emerges is not one of a dominant majority party that steamrolls the minority. Rather, it is one in which the majority fights constantly to shape the agenda, sometimes without success, but succeeds in many other instances. Moreover, whatever the majority party’s limitations, the minority party faces the same limitations, plus additional obstacles, when trying to shape the agenda.

Partisan theories and individual roll rates

The concept of being “rolled”(an actor voting against passage of a measure on the vote in which the chamber passes the measure) is useful for evaluating which actors (e.g., parties, committees, individual legislators) wield “negative” agenda power, meaning the ability to block passage of measures. A roll indicates a lack, or failure, of blocking power on the part of the entity being rolled.[10] In the context of the Senate, the significance of rolls lies in their ability to shed light on whether the majority party successfully shapes Senate legislative decisions.

Partisan agenda setting theories generally assume that majority party leaders have negative agenda power, and predict that they will use it to block proposals that would lead to rolls of the party as a whole, or of most party members, leading to substantial overlap in partisan models’ predictions regarding roll patterns. In this section we sketch Den Hartog and Monroe’s (2011) “costly-consideration” model, which is specifically tailored to the Senate, to illustrate the predictions that these models make about the likelihood of individual legislators being rolled.

This model defines considerationas getting something to a final passage vote, and posits that getting a measure to a final passage vote is costly—in the sense that it requires scarce resources to move a bill forward through the legislative process. The model’s basic setup is as follows (and shown in Figure 1):Three actors—majority proposer (M), minority proposer (Mi), and floor median (F)—have linear, symmetric, singled-peaked preferences, with ideal policy points denoted by M, Mi, and F, respectively.[11] The sequence of play is, M moves first by either proposing a or not (~a). If M proposes a, then it pays a cost, denoted by c. Next, Mi can either propose b or not (~b) and pay a cost, denoted by k. Assume that ck.[12] Finally, depending on the actions of M and Mi, F will decide between adopting proposal a, b, or maintaining the status quo (SQ).