Rewarding Dysfunction: Interest Groups and Intended Legislative Failure

• Published date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12173
• Date: 01 November 2017
• Author: Jeremy Gelman

JEREMY GELMAN

University of Nevada, Reno

Rewarding Dysfunction: Interest

Groups and Intended

Legislative Failure

Why do majority parties choose to add extreme dead on arrival bills to their

legislative agendas rather than enactable legislation? Majorities in Congress

choose this strategy in order to accrue political support from their allied interest

groups who reliably reward this legislative behavior. By examining all bills that

receive floor consideration from 2003 through 2012, as well as interest group

scorecards and campaign commercials, I find support for my theory. Dead-on-

arrival bills generate electoral benefits for majority-party lawmakers, are more

politically valuable than other bills, and are more often used to credit rather than

punish legislators.

Partisan warfare and messaging politics are commonplace in

the contemporary Congress. Political observers agree that these leg-

islative strategies, in which lawmakers seek to score political points

by avoiding compromise, are used by members to pursue their elec-

toral goals (e.g., Theriault 2013). However, there is no consistent

theory or empirical evidence concerning who makes these uncom-

promising legislative strategies politically prof‌itable.

Extant theories suggest two potential audiences for messaging poli-

tics. First, the blame game model contends that legislators use partisan

warfare to tarnish the reputation of the opposition party in the eyes of

moderate or undecided voters (Groseclose and McCarty 2001) . A second

possibility is that messaging politics are used to rally policy makers’ parti-

san voters by “playing to their base.” However , it is not obvious that

moderate or partisan voters directly respond to these proposals. Ma ny

messaging bills are on obscure topics (e.g., dynamic scoring at the

Congressional Budget Off‌ice), and voters are an inattentive audience to

much of this day-to-day partisan f‌ighting (Cameron 2012; Mayhew 1974 )

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 42, 4, November 2017 661

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12173

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C2017 Washington University in St. Louis

In contrast, I argue that allied interest groups serve as a reliable,

proximate audience for the messaging proposals advanced in Con-

gress. Organized interests reward this legislative behavior for two

reasons. First, messaging proposals are an important way organized

interests separate friends from foes on salient policy issues. In turn,

groups can direct more electoral resources to members who will help

achieve the groups’ policy goals. Second, this legislation pushes

allied lawmakers to coalesce around the groups’ preferred legislative

alternatives. Even though the proposal will not become law,

organized interests reward legislators for adopting its preferred pol-

icy as the party’s position.

To test my argument that groups are a consistent audience for mes-

saging politics, I examine the 270 dead on arrival (DOA) bills that

majority parties brought to the f‌loor in Congress from 2003 through

2012.

1

DOA legislation is a unique type of messaging tactic as it is (1)

initiated by the majority party; (2) requires collective action, not just the

initiative of a single member; and (3) occurs throughout the legislative

process. Moreover, intended failures arise on a variety of issues ranging

from highly salient topics, such as repealing the Affordable Care Act, to

obscure policies, such as regulating farm dust. Since the majority party

allocates scarce agenda space to these bills, DOA proposals must

provide a consistent political return to majority legislators.

Using campaign television advertisements and legislative score-

cards sponsored by organized interests, I f‌ind support for my argument.

Groups frequently use dead on arrival bills as justif‌ication for supporting

majority-party candidates. Intended legislative failures are more often

used by allied groups to support the majority party than by opposition

groups to punish lawmakers. This indicates that these bills generate

more credit than blame. Furthermore, I show that the political rewards

created by intended failures outstrip the benef‌its that legislators gain

from advancing enactable legislation.

My results help explain why messaging politics is politicallyprof‌it-

able and the important role interest-group priorities play in structuring

partisan conf‌lict in Congress. Additionally, these f‌indings explain why

obscure issues become the subject of partisan bickering. As long as orga-

nized interests are willing to reward lawmakers for engaging in

messaging politics rather than legislating, members will pursue polariz-

ing tactics that lead to legislative stalemate instead of compromise. Of

course, dead on arrival bills, and messaging politics more generally, can

generate voter interest. As I show below, organized interests serve as the

proximate audience for these partisan battles and use DOA legislation as

a way to mobilize citizens.

662 Jeremy Gelman

Defining Dead-on-Arrival Bills

Before proceeding any further, I def‌ine what constitutes a dead-on-

arrival bill. Anecdotal accounts of intended failures provide guidance in

developing a clear def‌inition. For instance, in 2011, pundits came to the

consensus that the House Republicans’ bill to repeal the Affordable Care

Act was doomed because they knew that veto players in the legislative

process would not agree to the proposal. For example, before the f‌irst

vote to repeal the ACA, Steinhauer (2011) reported that “Senate Demo-

crats would almost certainly block a repeal bill from coming to a vote.

Even if both the House and Senate were to approve a repeal, President

Obama would veto such a bill.”

Of course, what made the ACA repeal efforts DOA was that the

bill, no matter the manner in which House Republicans passed it, would

not become law. No amount of procedural maneuvering or deal making

would have helped Republicans enact their proposal. The bill would not

have been successful if it were attached to another piece of legislation or

if Republicans tried to include it during negotiations on another topic.

Consequently, an important feature of a bill being dead-on-arrival is not

only that the proposal will fail at some point in the lawmaking process

but that it does not become law later in the same Congress. Taken

together, these features provide the basis for def‌ining an intended failure.

A bill can be classif‌ied as dead on arrival if:

(1) The bill has no chance of becoming law under the current govern-

ing coalition,

(2) A DOA bill will not be enacted when coupled with other proposals,

and

(3) Policy makers and political observers alike know that the legisla-

tion is doomed to fail.

If all three conditions are met, I classify a bill as dead on arrival.

Importantly, a proposal is characterized as an intended failure based on the

policy preferences of legislative veto players during the term that bill is

brought up. As control of Congress and the presidency change hands, a bill

that was once DOA can become enactable, and legislation that once could

become law can become DOA. Put differently, a bill’s prospects for enact-

ment, or lack thereof, is endogenous to the current governing coalition.

In addition to def‌ining what a dead-on-arrival bill is, it is crucial to

be clear about what does not constitute a DOA proposal. There is an

important distinction between an intended failure and an initial offer dur-

ing a negotiation. DOA legislation does not serve as the opening salvo

663Interest Groups and Intended Legislative Failure