From Rolls to Disappointments

• Date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912916674605
• Author: Andrew J. Clarke,Nathan W. Monroe,Jeffery A. Jenkins
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

2017, Vol. 70(1) 82 –97

© 2016 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912916674605

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Article

Introduction

In recent years, legislative scholars interested in studying

majority party power in Congress have increasingly

shifted their attention from the floor to the pre-floor stage.

Specifically, they have spent less time looking for evi-

dence of “arm twisting”—wherein party leaders would

pressure members to vote against their true preferences

on the floor—and more time considering the partisan

benefits associated with agenda setting. With the advent

of Cox and McCubbins’ (2002, 2005) “cartel agenda

model” (CAM), the central focus has been to study the

degree to which majority party leaders can exercise nega-

tive agenda control, or prevent legislative outcomes from

occurring that would harm a majority of their co-parti-

sans. From an empirical perspective, scholars have sought

to determine how effective majority leaders have been in

their “gatekeeping” efforts by assessing how often the

majority has been “rolled” on some category of votes

(usually final-passage votes)—or, more plainly, how

often a majority of the majority has opposed legislation

that has gone on to pass.

Thanks to the growing popularity of the CAM, the

“roll” has become a widely used metric in scholars’

search for significant party influence. This has been true

not only in terms of work on the House of Representatives,1

the legislative setting in which the CAM was explicitly

designed, but also the Senate,2 U.S. state legislatures,3

and legislatures in other countries.4 And whereas the

attention devoted to negative agenda control and rolls has

generated a windfall in terms of our collective knowledge

of majority party power in a legislative setting, it has also

led to a somewhat narrow view of agenda power and

majority party effectiveness more generally.

In this paper, we focus on a different aspect of agenda

power, by examining whether majority party leaders

exercise positive agenda control, or produce legislative

outcomes that a majority of their co-partisans support. In

so doing, we move beyond rolls, the standard metric of

majority party failure, and look instead at “disappoint-

ments,” a different metric of majority party failure. A dis-

appointment occurs when a majority of the majority

supports legislation that subsequently goes down to

defeat. A disappointment is thus a failure of positive

674605PRQXXX10.1177/1065912916674605Political Research QuarterlyClarke et al.

research-article2016

1University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA

2University of California, Merced, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jeffery A. Jenkins, Department of Politics, University of Virginia,

1540 Jefferson Park Avenue, P.O. Box 400787, Charlottesville,

VA 22904, USA.

Email: jajenkins@virginia.edu

From Rolls to Disappointments:

Examining the Other Source of

Majority Party Failure in Congress

Andrew J. Clarke1, Jeffery A. Jenkins1, and Nathan W. Monroe2

Abstract

Much of the literature on partisan agenda setting in Congress focuses on the majority’s ability to exercise negative

agenda control. As a result, the empirical emphasis has been on “rolls,” or how often the majority of the majority party

opposes legislation that nonetheless passes. Although interesting, rolls are only one source of majority party failure.

The other source, largely unexplored in the literature, is when the majority of the majority party supports legislation

that is subsequently defeated. These cases represent “disappointments,” and are a means to determine how effective

the majority party is at exercising positive agenda control. Making some basic modifications to a standard spatial model

of agenda setting, we articulate why and where we might expect the majority party to fail to exercise positive agenda

control effectively. We then derive hypotheses regarding (1) which members should vote “no” on roll calls that result

in a disappointment and (2) why disappointments vary on a Congress-by-Congress basis across time, and test them

using a dataset of final-passage votes on House bills in the post-Reconstruction era.

Keywords

majority party power, U.S. House, positive agenda control

Clarke et al. 83

agenda control, making it an analog to a roll, which is a

failure of negative agenda control.

Because disappointments are relatively unknown, we

focus first on introducing the concept, and do so by posi-

tioning disappointments within the broader class of

agenda-setting outcomes. Then, we develop a special case

of Krehbiel, Meirowitz, and Wiseman’s (2015; hereafter,

KMW) competitive theory of lawmaking as a means of

understanding the theoretical tenets of disappointments’

occurrence—that is, why and where might we expect the

majority party to fail to exercise positive agenda control

effectively and thus suffer disappointments. We then

derive two hypotheses regarding disappointments from

our theoretical extension of KMW’s work—which major-

ity party members should vote “no” on roll calls that result

in a disappointment, and why disappointments vary on a

Congress-by-Congress basis across time—and test them

using data on final-passage votes on House bills in the

post-Reconstruction era. Finally, we conclude with a sum-

mary of our argument and a discussion of future directions

for this line of research.

From Rolls to Disappointments

As suggested, legislative scholars have focused consider-

able attention on rolls when analyzing roll-call voting

outcomes to search for majority party effects. This is

understandable, given the influence that Cox and

McCubbins’ procedural cartel theory has had in the

agenda-setting literature. But the emphasis on negative

agenda control (which underlies procedural cartel the-

ory), and the failure of the majority to exercise it, signifi-

cantly limits our understanding of agenda power and the

full range of (potential) outcomes that result at the roll-

call stage.

Jenkins and Monroe (2016) seek to address this limita-

tion by developing a typology of agenda-setting outcomes,

which is derivative of two pieces of information: (1)

whether a relevant actor/group supports or opposes a

given proposal and (2) whether the proposal passes or

fails. This yields four distinct agenda-setting outcomes—

“success,” “disappointment,” “roll,” and “block”—which

are illustrated in Table 1. Outcomes associated with posi-

tive agenda control (successes and disappointments) are in

the top row, whereas outcomes associated with negative

agenda control (rolls and blocks) are in the bottom row.

The theoretical circumstance and usefulness of rolls—

where an agenda setter opposes a proposal that nonethe-

less passes—are well known. A roll indicates a failure to

effectively exercise negative agenda control. The other

three agenda-setting outcomes, by comparison, are much

less understood. For example, other than the analysis

found in Jenkins and Monroe (2016), successes have

received little attention (see only Jenkins and Nokken

2008a), whereas blocks have been ignored entirely.

Disappointments have been referenced—mostly in pass-

ing to note that they constitute a different type of “loss”

than rolls (Carson, Monroe, and Robinson 2011; Cox

2006; Cox and McCubbins 2011)—but have not been

examined in any kind of systematic way. Stated simply,

the literature’s over-focus on rolls has largely crowded

out the study of the other three agenda-setting outcomes

and associated measures. This leaves an especially large

gap with respect to positive agenda control outcomes.

If a proposal supported by the agenda setter gets to the

floor and passes—resulting in a success—this indicates the

effective exercise of positive agenda control. But, to get a

complete picture of positive agenda power, one must also

look at disappointments, those cases in which an agenda

setter supports a proposal that subsequently goes down to

defeat. Disappointments—which are in fact nearly as com-

mon as rolls in the modern era—often arise on major

issues. A scan of the online appendix, which lists all

majority party disappointments in the House on chamber-

originating (H.R.) bills from the 45th through the 113th

Congresses, reveals numerous controversial and important

policy areas: appropriations, debt limit increases, foreign

aid, budget reform, farm aid, and energy policy.5

Our focus in the remainder of this paper is to analyze

disappointments systematically, which will reveal more

about the “other” source of majority party failure in

Congress and thereby shed light on the majority’s ability

to exercise positive agenda control. Although disappoint-

ments may not occur often in the modern U.S. House,

where party leaders rarely move forward on a proposal

unless they know in advance that they have the votes, the

House majority may have had a different tolerance for

being disappointed in previous eras, something that can

only be assessed by an across-time analysis. Moreover,

the incidence of disappointments may vary based on fac-

tors such as ambition or perceived opportunity for suc-

cess on the part of the majority party.

To conduct our analysis of disappointments, we will fol-

low Cox and McCubbins (and others) and examine final-

passage votes in the U.S. House in the post-Reconstruction

era. Before turning to the data, however, we first provide

some theoretical foundations for disappointments—specifi-

cally, articulating why and where disappointments should

Table 1. Typology of Agenda-Setting Outcomes.

Proposal outcome

Pass Fail

Agenda setter

position

Support Success Disappointment

Oppose Roll Block

Source. Jenkins and Monroe (2016).