Stalemate in the States: Agenda Control Rules and Policy Output in American Legislatures

• Author: Jesse M. Crosson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12210
• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Date: 01 February 2019

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 44, 1, February 2019

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12210

JESSE M. CROSSON

University of Michigan

Stalemate in the States: Agenda

Control Rules and Policy Output in

American Legislatures

This article examines how the power of majority-party leaders to set the

legislative voting calendar influences policy change in American state legislatures.

By generating an opportunity for party leaders to exercise gatekeeping or negative

agenda control, such rules introduce an additional partisan veto player into a sys-

tem of governance. This addition typically increases the size of the core or gridlock

interval, which drives policy change downward. Using both traditional data on bill

passage counts and new data on Affordable Care Act compliance, I find strong sup-

port for these claims. More specifically, when I calculate core sizes that are sensitive

to agenda rules, I find that agenda-control-adjusted core size is negatively corre-

lated with policy change, as expected. Moreover, even when I match states on their

overall preference dispersion or polarization, the ability of party leaders to exercise

negative agenda control is strongly negatively associated with policy change.

Over the past three decades, scholars of American political

institutions have invested much time and effort into exploring

the causes and consequences of legislative gridlock. Within the

study of gridlock, however, few topics have generated the level of

disagreement as the role that political parties do or do not play

in the policy-change process. For some, parties simply represent

ideological coalitions, themselves contributing little to policy-

change dynamics (Krehbiel 1993). For others, however, political

parties are central to policy change, as they exert a great deal

of control over the legislative agenda (Cox and McCubbins 1993,

2005). Yet in spite of the fact that competing theories of political

parties and policy change generate specific, testable empirical

implications, studies to date have often struggled to delineate

how much (if at all) political par ties matter for policy change.

At least part of this struggle derives from previous stud-

ies’ focus on policy-change dynamics in Congress alone. To be

© 2018 Washing ton University in St. Louis

4Jesse M. Crosson

clear, insofar as the goal of these studies is to test whether par-

tisan agenda control occurs in Congress, focusing solely on the

U.S. Congress makes sense. However, as a means of testing the

broader implications of partisan agenda control for aggregate

policy change, Congre ss has clear limitations as a s etting for such

examinations. A mong these li mitations is the fact that many pro-

ponents of party-centric theories of Congress argue that agenda

control developed as far back as the 1880s (Gailmard and Jen kins

2007)—preceding the period over which empirical analysis is

often conducted.

In this article, I provide one of the first broad empirical

documentations of the powerful implications partisan agenda

control has for aggregate policy change. To do so, I turn to the

institutional richness found in the American states and trace

the influence of the presence (and absence) of agenda-control

institutions through the policymaking process. In doing so, I

demonstrate that institutional features enabling negative or

gatekeeping agenda control significantly slow policy change,

even beyond what preference polarization alone might predict.

More specifically, I find that (1) by increasing the size of the

“core” or gridlock interval,2 the presence of partisan gatekeep-

ing drives gridlock upward and (2) even when conditioning on

distance b etween traditional institutional pivots, the pre sence of

partisan agenda-control institutions negatively predicts policy

change. Taken together, these findings build upon Anzia and

Jackman’s (2013) work on agenda control and roll rates and de-

velop support for the idea that negative agenda control intro-

duces a new, partisan veto player into a system of governance,

thereby decreasing policy change. These findings also improve

upon earlier work on agenda control in the states by Cox,

Kousser, and McCubbins (2010), by extending the analysis of

agenda control past roll rates and i ndividual policy shifts in t wo

states to aggreg ate-level polic y change across many state legisla-

tures, from 1995 to 2014.

Legislative Gridlock: Parties and Preferences

The importance of political parties to policy change and

legislative gridlock has long remained a key topic of debate

among legislative scholars. Beginning with Mayhew’s (1991) ex-

tended exchange with Binder (1999, 2003) and others (e.g., Howell

et al. 2000; Fiorina 1996) regarding the importance of divided