Tarnishing Opponents, Polarizing Congress: The House Minority Party and the Construction of the Roll‐Call Record

• Published date: 01 November 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12135
• Author: William T. Egar
• Date: 01 November 2016

WILLIAM T. EGAR

US Government Accountability Off‌ice

Tarnishing Opponents, Polarizing

Congress: The House Minority

Party and the Construction of the

Roll-Call Record

Existing research on congressional parties tends to focus almost exclusively on

the majority party. I argue that the inattention to the House minority party hampers our

understanding of the construction of the roll-call record and, consequently, our

understanding of the sources of polarization in congressional voting. Employing an

original data set of House members’ requests for recorded votes between 1995 and

2010, I demonstrate that votes demanded by the minority party are disproportionately

divisive and partisan and make Congress appear considerably more polarized based on

commonly used measures. Moreover, minority-requested votes make vulnerable

members of the majority appear more partisan and ideologically extreme.

Estimates of legislator ideology in the US Congress suggest that

the congressional parties are polarized today to a degree possibly not

seen before, at least since the late nineteenth century. Ideological polar-

ization in Congress does not seem to be an artifact of any single measure

of legislator preferences (Theriault 2008). Factors such as the ideological

sorting of liberal voters into the Democratic Party and conservatives into

the Republican Party (Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2011; Levendusky

2009; Rohde 1991), geographic sorting of voters into politically homog-

enous areas (Oppenheimer 2005; Theriault 2008), redistricting (Carson

et al. 2007; but see McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2009), primary elec-

tions (Brady, Han, and Pope 2007), growing income inequality

(McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006), and the ideological polarization of

voters themselves—or at a minimum, party activists (e.g., Abramowitz

2010; Fiorina et al. 2010)—have all been offered as explanations for why

this polarization has occurred.

Most of the above-listed explanations place their focus on changes

in the electorate. Fewer studies explore the within-chamber sources of

congressional polarization (for exceptions, see Harbridge 2015; Jessee

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 4, November 2016 935

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12135

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C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

and Theriault 2014; Lee 2009; Roberts and Smith 2003; Theriault

2013). The bulk of research on congressional polarization relies on esti-

mates of legislator ideology, estimates that are based on recorded votes.

Yet not all issues in Congress receive a vote, and those that do are deter-

mined (nonrandomly) by legislators themselves. Rather than being a

random sample of issues, then, members might request a roll-call vote in

order to engage in credit claiming (Mayhew 1974), to be certain of the

vote margin on a particularly contentious issue, or to place opponents on

the record in a politically diff‌icult situation (Roberts and Smith 2003;

Smith 1989), among other reasons.

In the following, I examine how the House minority party uses the

roll-call record to affect the image of its opponents as a matter of elec-

toral strategy. Specif‌ically, I argue that for a variety of reasons, typical

measures of congressional polarization and measures of partisan conf‌lict

will be inf‌lated as a consequence of minority-party electoral incentives.

Using an original data set of House members’ requests for recorded

votes, I provide evidence that the minority party strategically selects

divisive issues for recorded votes in order to negatively affect the image

of members of the majority party, which simultaneously has the effect of

making Congress as a whole appear more partisan and ideologically

polarized. Gaining a better understanding of the data-generating process

behind roll-call voting by examining requests for recorded votes can pro-

vide some insight with regard to f‌luctuations in congressional

polarization and party conf‌lict over time and can help our understanding

of the House minority party, which is often ignored in scholarly research

on congressional parties.

Existing Literature: Composition of the Roll-Call Record

Analysis of recorded voting is central to the study of the US

Congress. For instance, estimates of legislator ideal points such as

NOMINATE (Poole and Rosenthal 1997) are used for a wide range of

purposes in legislative studies and are based on recorded votes. Yet a

feature of congressional life that is often underappreciated is that not all

legislative items—and indeed, by some measures, relatively few

items—are disposed of by a recorded vote. Much of Congress’s work is

completed off the record. For instance, Clinton and Lapinski (2008) f‌ind

that only 11.9% of bills signed into law receive a recorded vote in the

House, with an even smaller percentage (7.9%) receiving a recorded

vote in the Senate; moreover, the bills that do receive recorded votes

tend to be measures of importance and are disproportionately in certain

issue areas and not others. Clinton and Lapinski suggest that a focus on

936 William T. Egar