Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T22:21:57.063Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Partisan Basis of Procedural Choice: Allocating Parliamentary Rights in the House, 1789–1990

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Sarah A. Binder
Sarah A. Binder*
Affiliation:
The Brookings Institution
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Conventional accounts of the institutional development of Congress suggest that expansion of the size and workload of the House led members to distribute parliamentary rights narrowly: Majority party leaders accrued strong procedural powers while minority parties lost many of their parliamentary rights. I offer an alternative, partisan basis of procedural choice. Using an original data set of changes in House rules, I present a statistical model to assess the influence of partisan and nonpartisan factors on changes in minority procedural rights in the House between 1789 and 1990. I find that short-term partisan goals—constrained by inherited rules—shape both the creation and suppression of rights for partisan and political minorities. Collective institutional concerns and longer-term calculations about future parliamentary needs have little impact on changes in minority rights. The findings have important theoretical implications for explaining both the development of Congress and the nature of institutional change more generally.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 90 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 8 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Aldrich, John H. 1989. “Power and Order in Congress.” In Home Style and Washington Work, ed. Fiorina, Morris and Rohde, David. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Aldrich, John H. 1994. “Rational Choice Theory and the Study of American Politics.” In The Dynamics of American Politics, ed. Dodd, Lawrence C. and Jillson, Calvin. Boulder: Westview.Google Scholar
Aldrich, John H. 1995. Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Party Politics in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aldrich, John H., and Nelson, Forrest D.. 1984. Linear Probability, Logit, and Probit Models. Beverly Hills: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexander, DeAlva Stanwood. 1916. History and Procedure of the House of Representatives. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Bach, Stanley. 1990. “Suspension of the Rules, the Order of Business, and the Development of Congressional Procedure.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 15:49–63.Google Scholar
Bach, Stanley, and Smith, Steven S.. 1988. Managing Uncertainty in the House of Representatives. Washington: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Beth, Richard S. 1990. The Discharge Rule in the House of Representatives: Procedure, History, and Statistics. R. 90–84 GOV Library of Congress Congressional Research Service.Google Scholar
Binder, Sarah A. 1995a. “Partisanship and Procedural Choice: Institutional Change in the Early Congress, 1789–1823. Journal of Politics 57:1093–1117.Google Scholar
Binder, Sarah A. 1995b. Minority Rights and Majority Rule: The Partisan Basis of Procedural Choice in Congress, 1789–1994. Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
Brady, David. 1988. Congressional Elections and Congressional Policy Making. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brady, David, Cooper, Joseph, and Hurley, Patricia A.. 1979. “The Decline of Party in the U.S. House of Representatives.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 4:381–407.Google Scholar
Calvert, Randall. 1992. “The Rational Choice Theory of Social Institutions: Cooperation, Coordination, and Communications.” Presented at the conference of the Wallis Institute for Political Economy, University of Rochester.Google Scholar
Chiu, Chang-wei. 1928. The Speaker of the House of Representatives since 1896. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Champ. 1920. My Quarter Century of American Politics. New York: Harper & Brothers.Google Scholar
Clubb, Jerome M, Flanigan, William H., and Zingale, Nancy H.. 1990. Partisan Realignment. Boulder: Westview.Google Scholar
Cooper, Joseph. 1977. “Congress in Organizational Perspective.” In Congress Reconsidered, ed. Dodd, Lawrence C. and Oppenheimer, Bruce I.. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Cooper, Joseph, and Brady, David. 1981. “Institutional Context and Leadership Style.” American Political Science Review 75:411–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, Joseph, and Young, Cheryl D.. 1989. “Bill Introduction in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Institutional Change.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 14:67–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Roger, Kovenock, David, and O'Leary, Michael. 1966. Congress in Crisis: Politics and Congressional Reform. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.Google Scholar
Davidson, Roger, and Oleszek, Walter J.. 1977. Congress against Itself. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Dion, George Douglas. 1991. Removing the Obstructions: Minority Rights and the Politics of Procedural Change in the Nineteenth Century House of Representatives. Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Fink, Evelyn C. 1994. “Representation by Deliberation: Changes in the Rules of Debate in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1789–1838.” Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York.Google Scholar
Fink, Evelyn C., and Humes, Brian D.. 1992. “Electoral Forces and Institutional Change in the United States House of Representatives, 1860–1894. Presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago.Google Scholar
Follett, Mary. 1902. The Speaker of the House of Representatives. New York: Longmans, Green.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric. 1988. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Gamm, Gerald, and Shepsle, Kenneth. 1989. “Emergence of Legislative Institutions: Standing Committees in the House and Senate, 1810–1825.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 14:39–66.Google Scholar
Galloway, George. 1976. History of the House of Representatives. 2d ed. New York: Crowell.Google Scholar
Garfield, James A. 1981. The Diary of James A. Garfield. 4 vol. Ed. Brown, H. J. and Williams, H. D.. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.Google Scholar
Harlow, Ralph V. 1917. The History of Legislative Methods in the Period before 1825. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Hasbrouck, Paul. 1927. Party Government in the House of Representatives. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Hinds, Asher. 1907. Hinds' Precedents of the House of Representatives. 8 vol. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
Hurley, Patricia A. 1979. “Assessing the Potential for Significant Legislative Output in the House of Representatives.” Western Political Quarterly 32:45–58.Google Scholar
Hurley, Patricia A., Brady, David, and Cooper, Joseph. 1977. “Measuring Legislative Potential for Policy Change.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 2:385–97.Google Scholar
Katz, Jonathan N., and Sala, Brian R.. 1996. “Careerism, Committee Assignments, and the Electoral Connection”, American Political Science Review 90:21–33.Google Scholar
Kaufman, Herbert. 1985. Time, Chance, and Organizations. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House.Google Scholar
Kelly, Alfred H. 1959. “The Congressional Controversy over School Segregation, 1867–1875.” American Historical Review 65 (3):537–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knight, Jack. 1992. Institutions and Social Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levi, Margaret. 1990. “A Logic of Institutional Change.” In The Limits of Rationality, ed. Cook, Karen Schweers and Levi, Margaret. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mann, Thomas E., and Ornstein, Norman J.. 1993. Renewing Congress: A First Report. Washington: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Martis, Kenneth. 1989. Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1789–1989. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
McConachie, Lauros. 1898. Congressional Committees. New York: Crowell.Google Scholar
Polsby, Nelson W. 1968. “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives.” American Political Science Review 62:144–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riker, William. 1980. “Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions.” American Political Science Review 74:432–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, William A. 1930. Thomas B. Reed, Parliamentarian. New York: Dodd, Mead.Google Scholar
Schauer, Frederick. 1991. Playing by the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-based Decision Making in Law and in Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shepsle, Kenneth. 1979. “Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting.” American Journal of Political Science 23:27–60.Google Scholar
Shepsle, Kenneth. 1989. “Studying Institutions: Some Lessons from the Rational Choice Perspective.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 2:131–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shepsle, Kenneth, and Weingast, Barry. 1987. “The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power.” American Political Science Review 81:85–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinclair, Barbara. 1989. The Transformation of the U.S. Senate. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Steven S. 1989. Call to Order. Washington: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Stewart, Charles. 1989. Budget Reform Politics: The Design of the Appropriations Process in the House of Representatives, 1865–1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, Charles. 1992. “Responsiveness in the Upper Chamber: The Constitution and the Institutional Development of the Senate.” In The Constitution and American Political Development, ed. Nardulli, Peter F.. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1975. Historical Statistics of the U.S.: Colonial Times to 1970. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1987. Statistical Abstract. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1993. Statistical Abstract. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Congress. 1983. A History of the Committee on Rules. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Congress. 1993a. Congressional Directory, 103d Congress. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Congress. 1993b. Constitution, Jefferson's Manual, and Rules of the House of Representatives of the 103d Congress. 102d Cong., 2d sess. H. Doc. 102–405.Google Scholar
Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. 1965. “The Civil Rights Act of 1875.” Western Political Quarterly 18:763–75.Google Scholar