editor's introduction

Editor's IntroductionAuthor(s): Malcolm E. JewellSource: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Aug., 1982), pp. 317-319Published by: Comparative Legislative Research CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/439360 .

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Editor's Introduction

The first two articles in this issue examine changes that have occurred in U.S. congressional procedures, and the consequences of these changes. There has been considerable scholarly attention paid to the congressional budget process used since 1975 and considerable debate about its effectiveness. Lance LeLoup examines the changes that occurred in that process as a result of President Reagan's effort to achieve large cuts in the budget. The major vehicle for the President's effort was the reconciliation process, a little used feature of the 1974 budget act, which was resurrected and adapted to fit the

Reagan administration's needs. LeLoup draws several major conclusions from his examination of

the operation of the budget process during 1981. The voting alignment of united Republicans and some southern Democrats that prevailed in 1981 was not much different from earlier coalitions, but it succeeded because of Republican gains in the 1980 election. The problems faced in 1981 illustrated once again the limited congressional options when so much of the budget is untouchable. This fact, and the problems of making economic predictions, raise serious questions about the ability of both the President and Congress to make budgetary policy. The 1981 process demonstrated the potential power of the reconciliation process, while it weakened the committee system and blurred the distinction between authorizing and appropriating committees.

Bach's article on the germaneness rules adopted in recent years by the U.S. House of Representatives deals with a topic that has attracted much less attention than the reforms in the budgetary process and that appears at first glance to be highly technical. Very few legislative scholars have paid any attention to the procedures by which the Senate and House resolve differences on legislation, and specifically how they handle nongermane amendments adopted by the Senate that are out of order under House rules. The topic is important partly because it illustrates how the bicameral system works, and partly because it is a good example of the substantive significance that

Legislative Studies Quarterly, VII, 3, August, 1982 Copyright 1982 by the Comparative Legislative Research Center 0362-9805/82/0703-0317$00.15 317



Legislative Studies Quarterly

procedural changes may have. The most significant feature of the topic is that the House succeeded, after several false starts, in finding a way of accommo- dating its procedures to those of the Senate while maintaining the integrity of its own procedures. The members of the House made this compromise not only because they wanted to avoid a costly procedural conflict with the Senate but also because they apparently appreciated that nongermane amendments may sometimes serve a useful purpose, even for the House.

The next two articles provide comparative analyses of U.S. state legislatures, dealing with two of the most neglected aspects of that field: elections and legislative committees. Caldeira and Patterson use elections for both houses in Iowa and California to test the hypothesis that the level of voter participation in legislative elections is related to the intensity of campaign activities, as measured by the amount of money that the candidates spend. Most studies of voting turnout have concentrated on attributes of voters, rather than the political environment of elections, and there has been little or no attention to levels of turnout for state legislative elections.

This study is valuable for several reasons. It adds support to the theory that state legislative elections are becoming more independent of those held for statewide office. It illustrates the importance of campaign spending (as a surrogate for campaign activity) as an independent variable. Previous studies have shown that campaign spending by the challenger is an important predictor of election outcomes in congressional races. There is tremendous variety in the level of campaign activity in state legislative races, with some closely contested and many others only nominally contested. A more comprehensive analysis of legislative election competition could shed light on the advantages enjoyed by incumbents and the variables that affect competition.

The article by Hamm and Moncrief uses six legislative chambers to examine the impact of reforms in committee structure on the performance of state legislative committees. The reforms included changes in activity structuring (such as the number of committees and subcommittees), distribu- tion of authority, and support services (primarily staff). Performance is measured by several variables: the screening and modification of legislation and the action taken on the floor with regard to measures reported by committees. In each chamber three prechange sessions are compared with two postchange ones. Structural changes had the greatest effect on those aspects of performance that the committees could most readily control-the reporting and amending of legislation. There was less evidence of a change in actions taken on the floor. Obviously there may be a number of variables that affect the impact of changes in committee organization, including particularly changes in party or factional balance within the legislature or changes in leadership. This study illustrates the advantages of cross-state analysis as well as the frustra- tions of such analysis. A comprehensive study of the effect of committee

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Editor's Introduction

reforms in thirty or forty states would provide much more conclusive findings and would be enormously difficult to carry out.

The last three articles in this issue are primarily methodological and deal with aspects of congressional study. Campbell is concerned with a topic that has received little attention: congressional cosponsorship of legislation. Using data from the 95th Congress, he examines a number of variables that might be expected to have some relationship to the frequency of cosponsorship. He finds that cosponsorship is related to the member's ideology, his general level of legislative activity, reelection prospects (in the Senate), and seniority (in the House). The paper leaves unanswered a number of questions, including the relationship of cosponsorship to coalition strategy and its impact on the success of bills. Another unanswered question is whether the practice of cosponsoring a number of bills significantly helps members of Congress seeking to build their political base and win reelection.

Students of roll-call voting in Congress frequently find it useful to utilize the "conservative coalition" as one measure of voting. It refers to roll calls on which a majority of northern Democrats voted against a majority of southern Democrats and of Republicans. Hammond and Fraser demonstrate that the frequency with which this coalition occurs in a session depends on the standard used for excluding votes with minimal conflict; they also offer a rule for calculating exactly which roll calls to exclude from such analysis. This paper has a broader application, because the same rule can be applied whenever a study is being made of any type of coalition formation in a legislative body. The goal of such a rule, of course, is to provide consistency in comparative research on coalition formation.

The final article, by Linda Fowler, describes how interest groups select the issues to be included in the rating of congressmen. This topic is of interest to political scientists because such ratings are often used in analyzing the voting records, and more generally, the ideological position of congressmen. The major methodological contribution of this article is to suggest some of the risks that are involved in using such ratings because of the overemphasis on particular issues, specifically those that tend to polarize Congress.

-Malcolm E. Jewell

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editor's introduction

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