Unpacking Agenda Control in Congress: Individual Roll Rates and the Republican Revolution

• DOI: 10.1177/1065912909343579
• Author: Nathan W. Monroe,Gregory Robinson,Jamie L. Carson
• Published date: 01 March 2011
• Date: 01 March 2011
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

64(1) 17 –30

© 2011 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912909343579

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Unpacking Agenda Control in

Congress: Individual Roll Rates

and the Republican Revolution

Jamie L. Carson1, Nathan W. Monroe2, and Gregory Robinson3

Abstract

The twelve years following the Republican revolution provide ideal ground to test existing theories of congressional

behavior and organization. The authors examine the incidence of individual roll rates in the U.S. House to “unpack”

the degree to which the 1994 election produced a change in agenda control and examine how it affected roll rates.

Then, to understand differences in agenda control, we compare majority and minority party roll rates before and

after the election. The results confirm majority party influence over the House agenda and show that the Republican

leadership exhibited remarkably similar behavior to the Democrats prior to 1995.

Keywords

Congress, roll rates, agenda control, partisan influence

After picking up fifty-two House seats in the 1994 elec-

tion, the Republican Party achieved majority control and,

for the first time in forty years, was in a strong position to

advance its policy objectives.1 This so-called Republican

revolution helps illustrate the importance of agenda con-

trol in Congress, and the transfer of power it brought

about provides an opportunity to address two specific

questions. First, party-based explanations of legislative

organization hold that members of the majority party del-

egate to party leaders based on the expectation that it will

yield policy benefits (Rohde 1991; Cox and McCubbins

1993). Thus, did the new Republican majority reap the

rewards of the change in majority status, by way of a change

in agenda control?

Second, much has been made of the influence wielded

by the Republicans during their time in control of the

House. Some observers have suggested that after gaining

the majority, the Republicans were even more aggressive

in pushing procedural advantages than their Democratic

predecessors (Fenno 1997; Mann and Ornstein 2006).

This leads us to systematically investigate the following

question: Did the Republicans usher in a new period of

agenda control greater than that seen among Democrats

when they held the majority in the House prior to 1995?

We build here on two pieces of previous research—

Lawrence, Maltzman, and Smith (2006) and Cox and

McCubbins (n.d.)—which are pioneering works on

indi vidual-level voting patterns. Moreover, Lawrence,

Maltzman, and Smith emphasize the 1994 change in

majority control as an important part of their analysis.

We differ from Lawrence, Maltzman, and Smith’s work

in two important ways. First, we utilize a different depen-

dent variable—we use “rolls” instead of “wins”—both in

deriving our theoretical predictions and testing compet-

ing theories. We see this as an important distinction,

especially if one is interested specifically in the effects of

negative agenda power, which we discuss in more detail

in the third section. Second, we expand our analysis

beyond final passage votes to also consider patterns of

voting on special rules and conference reports. Increas-

ingly, there has been a call to look beyond final passage

votes in assessing legislative behavior (Roberts and Smith

2003; Krehbiel and Woon, n.d.); we aim to take steps to

answer that call.

We focus on how individual members fare in the U.S.

House in an attempt to “unpack” the nature of agenda

control. One way to think of partisan agenda control is as

a dichotomous distribution of benefits (the majority party

wins and the minority party loses). Indeed, this is how

1University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

2University of California, Merced, Merced, CA, USA

3Binghamton University (State University of New York),

Binghamton, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Gregory Robinson, Department of Political Science, Binghamton

University (SUNY), PO Box 6000, Binghamton, NY 13902

E-mail: grobinso@binghamton.edu