The Cost of Majority‐Party Bias: Amending Activity under Structured Rules

• Date: 01 August 2016
• Published date: 01 August 2016
• Author: Jason M. Roberts,Anthony J. Madonna,Michael S. Lynch
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12133

MICHAEL S. LYNCH

ANTHONY J. MADONNA

University of Georgia

JASON M. ROBERTS

University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill

The Cost of Majority-Party Bias:

Amending Activity under

Structured Rules

All major legislation in the House necessitates a special rule from the Rules

Committee before it can be brought to the chamber floor. These rules often strictly limit

floor amendments to bills considered by the House. Scholars of political parties have

argued that the House majority party can bias policy output away from the floor median

through its usage of restrictive rules. In this article, we argue that in order to secure the

passage of restrictive rules, the majority often makes concessions to centrist legislators

through the amending process. We examine this theory using a newly collected data set

that includes all amendments considered by the Rules Committee during the construction

of structured rules in the 109th, 110th, and 111th Congresses (2005–2010). Our results

are mixed, but they do suggest that moderate members of the majority party often receive

concessions via amendments for their support of the majority party’s agenda-setting

regime.

Despite Congress having a reputation as an institution beset by par-

tisan gridlock, the modern day US House of Representatives is a quite

eff‌icient legislative machine. In contrast to the more deliberate Senate,

cohesive majorities can and do process legislation through the House

while using precious little plenary time. The primary procedural tool that

allows this kind of legislative eff‌iciency is the special rule. The House

Committee on Rules issues simple, yet f‌lexible, resolutions that allow

the chamber to choose bills to be considered and establish the terms and

length of debate on bills. These special rules can increase legislative eff‌i-

ciency by limiting the time allowed for debate and restricting the

number, as well as the content, of amendments allowed to be considered.

The permissiveness of rules can range from those that allow all germane

amendments (i.e., open rules) to those that allow a limited set of

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 3, August 2016 633

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12133

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C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

amendments (i.e., structured rules) to those that bar all amendments (i.e.,

closed rules).

Scholars of legislative politics have long recognized the sub-

stantial policy consequences of special rules. By issuing restrictive or

closed rules, the majority-party-controlled Rules Committee can

potentially shut the minority party out of the amending process

(Aldrich and Rohde 2000; Cox and McCubbins 2005). Moreover,

scholars have argued that majority-party centrists—members spatially

located on the minority-party side of the majority-party median in a

unidimensional policy space—can incur policy loss under this

arrangement as well (Cox and McCubbins 2005; Jenkins and Monroe

2012a, 2012b; Monroe and Robinson 2008; Young and Wilkins

2007). By extension, this can lead to substantial policy loss for their

supporters in the electorate, harming the interests of moderate and

potential median voters in the US electorate. Measuring or accounting

for this policy loss has proved diff‌icult, however, as data limitations

have forced scholars to treat special rules categorically, as either open

or restrictive, or to use f‌inal passage votes to test theories of policy

bias. This is problematic, as very few special rules are purely open or

purely closed. Specif‌ically, most rules adopted in the House are

“structured” rules, which allow for consideration of some, but not all,

amendments.

In this article, we build on the existing literature by collecting and

presenting a new data set that includes all amendments considered by

the Rules Committee during the construction of structured rules in the

109th, 110th, and 111th Congresses (2005–2010). Using these data, we

examine which proposed amendments are allowed to be voted on under

each structured rule. We then look at the success of these proposed

amendment. We draw three primary conclusions. First, our raw data

demonstrate that a substantial amount of legislative behavior occurs

under structured rules. Second, we f‌ind that the potential policy loss for

majority-party centrists is mitigated under these rules. Specif‌ically, even

when we control for other institutional factors, majority-party centrists

are generally more successful at getting their amendments considered

and adopted under structured rules. Finally, while we observe a bias

towards the majority party, minority-party members are granted consid-

eration of their amendments at a higher rate than we might expect.

Existing Work on Special Rules

Nearly all major bills considered in the US House come to the f‌loor

with a special rule, and in recent Congresses most of these rules have

634 Michael S. Lynch, Anthony J. Madonna, and Jason M. Roberts