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

• Date: 01 February 2019
• Author: Jesse M. Crosson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12210
• Published 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 thre e decades, scholars of American pol itical

institutions have invested much ti me and effort into exploring

the causes and con sequences of leg islative gridlock. Withi n the

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

disagree ment as the role that political parties do or do not play

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

ideological coal itions, themselves contr ibuting little to policy-

change dynamic s (Krehbiel 1993). For others, however, political

parties are c entral 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 pol itical

parties and policy change generate sp ecific, t estable empiric al

implications, stud ies to date have often struggled to delineat e

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

At least part of this st ruggle derive s from previous stud-

ies’ focus on policy-ch ange dynamics i n Congress alone. To be

© 2018 Washing ton University in St. Louis

4 Jesse M. Crosson

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

tisan agenda control oc curs in Congres s, focusing solely on the

U.S. Congress makes sense. However, as a means of testi ng 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-c entric theorie s of Congress argue th at agenda

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

2007)—pre ceding the period over which empiric al analysis is

often conducted.

In this art icle, I provide one of the first broad empirical

documentations of the powerf ul implications par tisan agenda

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

institutional ric hness found in the Amer ican states and t race

the inf luence of the prese nce (and absence) of agenda-control

institutions through t he policymak ing process. In doing so, I

demonstrate that institutional features enabling neg ative or

gatekeeping agenda c ontrol significa ntly slow policy change,

even beyond what preference polari zation alone might predi ct.

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

“core” or gridlock inter val,2 the presenc e of partisan gateke ep-

ing drives gr idlock upward and (2) even when conditioning on

distance b etween traditional institutional pivots, the pre sence of

partisan age nda-control institutions negatively pre dicts policy

change. Taken together, these findings bu ild upon Anzia a nd

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 syste m of governance,

thereby decreasi ng policy change. Thes e findings a lso improve

upon earlier work on agenda control in the st ates 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 an d Preferences

The importance of political par ties to policy cha nge and

legislative grid lock has long remained a key topic of debate

among legislative scholars. Beg inning w ith Mayhew’s (1991) ex-

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

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