Legislative Gridlock and Policymaking Through the Appropriations Process
| Published date | 01 November 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X231173403 |
| Author | Josh M. Ryan,Scott L. Minkoff |
| Date | 01 November 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
American Politics Research
2023, Vol. 51(6) 805–822
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X231173403
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Legislative Gridlock and Policymaking
Through the Appropriations Process
Josh M. Ryan
1
and Scott L. Minkoff
2
Abstract
Divergent preferences within and across American lawmaking institutions make it difficult to enact legislation. Yet, individual
legislators and parties have incentives to effect policy change, even during periods of gridlock. We claim appropriations offer an
alternative means of policymaking when legislation is likely to be unsuccessful using authorization s because appropriations bills
have an extreme reversion point. Using an original dataset of appropriations laws, we measure the quantity of policy enacted
given distributions of House, Senate, and executive preferences. The findings show that a larger gridlock interval and greater
distance between the House and Senate medians promote the use of appropriations bills as substantive policymaking vehicles.
This effect is especially pronounced when new chamber majorities come to power. We conclude that divergent preferences
among lawmaking institutions affect legislative productivity, but winning coalitions can still make substantive policy changes using
unorthodox lawmaking processes.
Keywords
American institutions, appropriations process, divided government, legislative productivity
In addition to the “textbook”legislative process where new
policy is promulgated through authorizations legislation, Con-
gress uses the appropriations process to make important policy
changes. Appropriations bills frequently include new substan-
tive legislative provisions, stipulations on funding, restrictions
on the discretion of bureaucratic agencies and administrators,
and changes to particular programs and policy provisions. For
example, in 1998 Congress passed an omnibus appropriations
bill which contained 27 different substantive legislative provi-
sions, dealing with issues ranging from children’s online privacy
to fisheries, according to the Congressional Research Service
(CRS). The 2018 Consolidated Appropriations Bill also con-
tained numerous substantive legislative provisions, including
exemptions from labor laws for Major League Baseball’sminor
league players, an increase in the number of H-2B visas, new
laws concerning privacy and government access to cloud
computing data, and increased access to mental health care for
certain types of discharged veterans.
1
We develop a theory of
policymaking through the appropriations process and show that
it is more than a means of exercising budgetary discretion; it is
alsoanimportantlegislativetoolusedtobypassgridlockinthe
authorizations process. This claim challenges the conventional
wisdom that increasing ideological or preference differences
across lawmaking institutions always promote legislative
gridlock.
The American separated system requires agreement from
the House median, Senate filibuster pivot, and one of the
president or the two congress-members necessary to override
aveto(Krehbiel, 1998). When the status quo policy lies
between the filibuster pivot and the president or veto override
pivot (whichever is closer to the filibuster pivot), the status
quo cannot be changed because any new policy would leave
at least one pivotal actor worse off than they would be under
the status quo. As the ideological distance between these
pivots expands, a larger number of policies are “gridlocked”.
While previous research on legislative productivity has not
distinguished between appropriations and authorizations
legislation, the reversion point for appropriations bills is not
the existing status quo but an extreme outcome where funding
becomes zero and the program or policy ceases to exist
(Doyle 1992). As a result, appropriations bills differ from
authorizations in that they are “must pass”legislation.
Our contributions are first, demonstrating that appropri-
ations bills are more than budgetary tools and instead often
carry extensive substantive policy changes. And second, we
1
Political Science, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA
2
Political Science and International Relations, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz,
NY, USA
Corresponding Author:
Josh Ryan, Political Science, Utah State University, 0725 Old Main Hill,
Logan, UT 84322-1400, USA.
Email: josh.ryan@usu.edu
develop a theory that appropriations are used to make policy
changes when the authorizations gridlock interval is large,
and when interchamber differences are large. In doing so, we
recast the legislative productivity debate; even when Con-
gress suffers from gridlock due to ideological differences
between institutions, legislative procedures offer alternative
methods of creating new policy. Though authorizing legis-
lation is the “work horse”of congressional policy change
(Adler & Wilkerson, 2012), appropriations offer flexibility
when the authorizations process is blocked. Additionally, the
theory and results offer an explanation of recent brinkman-
ship over appropriations legislation (e.g., the government
shutdown during the Obama administration over funding of
the Affordable Health Care Act).
2
Finally, our results provide
evidence in support of the pivotal politics model of legislative
productivity which, despite its theoretical appeal, has only
limited empirical support (Gray & Jenkins, 2017).
To properly consider the role of appropriations in poli-
cymaking, we create a new dataset of all laws from the 80th
through 116th Congresses and classify their type (appro-
priation or authorization). We measure overall policymaking
using a word count of each law’s text and find that appro-
priations laws become longer as the size of the gridlock
interval increases. There is no similar effect for authorizations
laws. We find similar results for appropriations as the
ideological distance between the Senate median and House
median increase, and also show that these effects are most
pronounced when a new majority takes control of a chamber,
as they are impatient to change policy and have a larger set of
status quo policies they want to alter.
Appropriations and Budgetary Politics
The power of the appropriations process originates from the
constitutional requirement that no federal expenditures occur
without explicit congressional approval.
3
Only after a pro-
gram has been authorized may Congress appropriate money
(Streeter, 1999, 28); this two-step process has been in place
since at least the mid-19th Century (Kiewiet & McCubbins,
1991;Schick, 2000).
4
In the modern Congress, funding for
all discretionary federal programs, policies, and agencies,
along with the legislative language which details con-ditions
for the spending, are grouped into a small number of annual
appropriations bills (currently 12 under regular budgeting
procedures)
5
or large omnibus (also called consolidated)
funding bills frequently passed using unorthodox lawmaking
procedures (Hanson, 2014;Krutz, 2000;Sinclair, 1997;
Cannan, 2022). The authorization and appropriations pro-
cesses have long been seen as separate and distinct; “[a]
uthorizations establish, continue, or modify programs or
policies; appropriations fund authorized programs or policies
[42])”(Oleszek, 2007).
6
Importantly, our theoretical and
empirical claims exclude other types of appropriations, in-
cluding continuing appropriations, which are usually enacted
to temporarily fund government programs during
negotiations over regular appropriations, and emergency or
supplemental appropriations which are passed to address a
particular, temporary issue or crisis.
Reconsidering the Role of Appropriations
Regular appropriations can be a powerful policy implementation
mechanism rather than just a budgetary tool, though there have
been few systematic empirical tests of this claim. For example,
Aldrich and Rohde (2000) claim that House Republicans used
the Appropriations Committee to enact major policy changes
after attaining the majority for the first time in 40 years in the
104th Congress: “Thedecisionwasmadenotonlytousethe
committee to slash spending on programs the GOP majority did
not support, but also to enact substantive legislative changes that
could, under regular procedures, only be considered by standing
legislative committees [9].”Their argument is supported by data
which show increasing partisanship on roll call votes in the
Committee, an increase in partisan rules, and more partisan
voting behavior on appropriations bills. Appropriations bills are
taking longer to pass in the modern Congress, driven by both
ideological differences between Congress and the president, and
differences between each chamber’s majority party and the
committees (Woon & Anderson, 2012). The party leadership is
also exerting a heavierhand over the process, sometimes over the
objections of committee members (Buhl,Frisch&Kelly2013).
Qualitative evidence from interviews and case studies sug-
gests that the appropriations process has become an important
tool of majority coalitions seeking to make policy changes in the
short-term (Ginieczki 2010), and that the authorization-
appropriation sequence has become muddled. Drastically re-
ducing funding has important policy implications, as Wildavsky
(1988,18)notes,“A decision not to fund an activity, or fund it
under certain circumstances...looks much like a policy deci-
sion.”Additionally, despite the fact that congressional rules
prohibit language that makes substantive policy changes in
appropriations bills (especially in the House), in practice
Congress has a number of ways of circumventing or outright
ignoring these rules (Champoux & Sullivan, 2006).
7
According
to the CRS, the House and Senate usually separate appro-
priations from substantive legislation but, “At other times,
however, the legislative provisions included in annual
appropriations acts have been much more substantial and
have represented a deliberate suspension of the usual pro-
cedural boundaries (Keith, 2008,3)”.
The Causes of Legislative Gridlock
Existing research on the effects of gridlock on legislative
productivity does not differentiate between authorizations
and appropriations bills. Most theoretical claims are derived
from standard spatial models of separated powers lawmaking,
which assume a one-dimensional policy space where po-
litical actors prefer the policy closest to their own ideal point
(Black, 1948). Under open amending and majoritarian voting
806 American Politics Research 51(6)
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