the contract with america and conditional party government in state legislatures.pdf

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The Contract with America and Conditional Party Government in State LegislaturesAuthor(s): Richard A. ClucasSource: Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Jun., 2009), pp. 317-328Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the University of Utah

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Political Research Quarterly

/^l|fn*% Number

The Contract with America and |3jg3y^ 10.1177/10659129(18320667

Conditional Party Government in \<W9*EE:ttp://onHifie.sagepub.com

State LegislaturesRichard A. ClucasMark O. Hatfield School ofGovernment, Portland State University, Oregon

This study tests two theories of legislative leadership by comparing the power ofmajority-party leaders in states

where theRepublican Party adopted a state-level version of "The Contract withAmerica" in 1994,with that f leaders

in stateswhere no contractwas adopted. Using a nationwide surveyof legislators to rankpower, the studyfinds that

the lower house leaders in contract stateswere stronger in 1995, as were those from states inwhich thepublic was

ideologically polarized along partisan lines. The results provide support for conditional party government theorywhile expanding our knowledge of state legislative politics.

Keywords: legislative leadership; state legislatures;Contract withAmerica; statepolitics; conditionalparty government;

pivotal politics

Howimportantf a roledo partyleadersplay in

legislative politics? This question is at the center

of debate among different positive theories of con

gressional behavior (Cox and McCubbins 2005;

Shepsle andWeingast 1994;Smith2000).Yet despitethe extensive literature that has addressed this ques

tion over the past few decades, the importance ofparty leaders in legislative politics is far from conclu

sive. The purpose of this study is to improve our the

oretical understanding of legislative leadership by

offering a broader approach to testing Aldrich and

Rohde's theory of conditional party government

(CPG; Aldrich and Rohde 1997;Rohde 1991) andKrehbiel's theoryfpivotalpolitics (Krehbiel1991,1998). The primary question this study addresses is

whether leaders are strongerwhen the preferences of

themajority party are more homogenous and when

they are distinct from the preferences of theminorityparty, as Aldrich and Rohde argue, or whether lead

ership is not significant in shaping outcomes, as

Krehbiel maintains.

To test these competing theories, most congressional studies have focused on the impact of legislators' policy preferences on the power of party leaders

and on policy outcomes. Frequently, these studies

rely on roll-call votes to identify members' policy

preferences to determine whether the conditions of

CPG have been met. The researchers then explore

how thepresence of CPG shapes the power delegatedtoparty leaders (AldrichandRohde 1997;Rohde

1991). Alternatively, some studies examine whether

policy outcomes are determined solely by the

members' policy preferences or if the party leaders

have an independentffectAldrich ndRohde 1997;Krehbiel 1991, 1998).

This study deviates from these past approaches by

examining leadership in state legislatures and byusing a unique political event?the adoption of the

Republican "Contract with theAmerican People"?to test these theories. Rather than relying on roll-call

votes to determine legislators' policy preferences as

is done in congressional studies, I categorized a state

as having met the conditions of CPG depending on

whether theRepublican Party in the state adopted its

own version of the "Republican Contract with the

American People" in the 1994 election. In essence, I

used the adoption of a state-level contract as an indi

cator as towhether therewas intrapartyhomogeneityin party members' policy preferences and interparty

polarization. I then compared the power of the legislative leaders in these states in the 1995 legislativesession with the power of leaders in states inwhich

the parties did not adopt such a contract.

By expanding the empirical focus to state legislatures and by using this alternative method to identifythe conditions of CPG, this study offers a consider

ably different approach to testing these theories. The

Richard A. Clucas, Professor of Political Science, Portland StateUniversity; e-mail: [email protected].

317

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318 Political ResearchQuarterly

benefitof thisapproach is that thefindingsfromthe study should give us far greater confidence in the

accuracy and generalizability of the theories. If the

theories are correct,we would expect them to explain

behavior in other legislatures beyond Congress andby using alternative forms ofmeasurements. Of equal

importance, the study allows us to improve our know

ledge of state legislative politics.In the section that follows, I explain Aldrich and

Rohde's (1997) argument and compare itwith theper

spective on leadership put forward in the pivotal politics theory ffered yKrehbiel (1991, 1998).After

that, I explain the history of these state contracts and

why they rovide good test fAldrich andRohde's

theory. In the subsequent sections, I describe the

methods, data, and findings. Usinga nationwide sur

vey of state legislators to rank thepower of themajor

ityparty leaders in the 49 state lower houses, I find

that the leaders in the states that adopted their own

contracts were significantly stronger in the 1995 legislative session than the leaders in states where the

Republican Party did not adopt a contract. In addition,

the leaders were stronger in states where public opinion polls identified greater ideological polarizationbetween the state parties. These results provide strong

support for the theory of CPG and counterevidence

againstKrehbiel's

theory.

Theory

The theoretical debate on congressional leadershiphas spawned threeprimary schools of thought.One of

these schools has grown out of the work by Krehbiel

(1991, 1998), which de-emphasizes the importance of

party leaders and instead emphasizes the importance of

themedian or pivotal voter in shaping policy outcomes.

Cox andMcCubbins (1993,2005) offern alternative

perspective. Theymaintain that

parties

and their leaders

have always played an influential role in theHouse,

even during periods of themid-twentieth centurywhen

they are frequently identified by scholars as being less

significant. third chool is offered yAldrich andRohde (1997) andRohde (1991),who arguethat he

power of congressional leaders is not constant, but that

"under specifiable conditions," congressional partiesare more "likely to expand the power granted to party

leadership and organizations, and to increase the

resources channeled to them to act on those powers"

(Aldrich ndRohde 1997,546).1For this tudy, am

interested in exploring thepositive theories put forward

byAldrichandRohde andbyKrehbiel.

Aldrich andRohde (1997) argue that heprimaryconditions inwhich partisans are likely to expand the

power of their leaders are when the policy preferences of themajority party aremore homogenous and

when there isa

clearer distinction between themajority party's preferences and those of the minority

party.When these conditions are met, themajority

party will expand the resources provided to the lead

ership so that the leaders are better able to help the

party to obtain itspolicy preferences.Krehbiel's (1998) work raises questions, however,

as towhether we should expect increased polarization to generate stronger leaders. Krehbiel arguesthatCongress is governed by majority rule and, as a

consequence, legislative outcomes are determined

by themajorityof the

membership ofthe

entireHouse and not by themajority party. Krehbiel por

trays legislative parties and leaders as playing a mar

ginal role at best in this process. The factor that

determines the outcome of public policy is not the

activities of the party or their leaders but the positionof themedian or pivotal voter within the legislature.For us, the implication ofKrehbiel's argument is that

the increased polarization between the parties would

not be expected to produce an increase in the powerof party leaders because the principle of majorityrule will not have

changed.The

parties maybe more

polarized, but outcomes will still be determined bythe pivotal voter's position. A more complete explanation forwhy Krehbiel's theory leads to thehypothesis that an increase in polarization will not producemore powerful party leaders is provided in Aldrich

andRohde (1997).In his review of the literature, Smith (2000) is par

ticularly critical of the pivotal politics thesis, writingthat the "empirical case against parties is unconvinc

ing and appears to be fading as new evidence ismar

shaled" (p. 203). Yet the research supporting CPG is

also incomplete. One of the problems in the theoreti

cal debate is narrowness in scope, both in how

researchers discern preferences and in the subfield's

nearly complete concentration on the U.S. House of

Representatives. The primary method that is used to

discern preferences is through the use of roll-call

votes. The potential problem with relying on roll-call

votes, as Rohde (1994) argues, is that "roll call votes

are not preferences; they are decisions which are the

consequence of the interaction of preferences and the

alternatives that are before the legislators" (p. 346; also

see Smith 2000). This is not to say that roll-call votes

should not be used as a means to assess legislators'







Clucas / he ContractwithAmerica 319

preference. Certainly, the use of roll-call data has

proven quite valuable inbuilding our understanding of

leadership. But it does tell us that itwould be worth

while to test these theories using alternative measures

to operationalize preferences. Highton and Rocca's

(2005) recent orkonpositiontaking ymembersofCongress underscores the importance of using alter

native measures. They found that the positions that

representatives take on abortion roll-call votes differ

from the public positions they take in other arenas.

Highton and Rocca attribute this difference to the

involvement of the parties when votes are cast.

The theoretical research has also been constrained

by its narrow focus on the U.S. House. The primarybenefit of testing these theories at the state level is

that the existence of 99 state house chambers offers

an opportunity to determine whether these theories

apply to legislatures generally or if they are only rel

evant in explaining Congress. Ideally, a good theoryshould be able to explain behavior not just in one

institution but in different settings. If congressionaltheories cannot be applied to other assemblies, then

their value is limited and their accuracy suspect. State

legislatures provide a good place for testing congressional theories because they are sufficiently similar to

Congress thatwe would expect the theories devel

oped in studying Congress would apply to them. If

the congressional theories can also explain state legislative behavior, itgives us greater confident in their

accuracy. If they do not fit, it offers an opportunity to

rebuild our theories so that they can ultimately incor

porate other assemblies.

There have been some efforts to test these theories

at the state level (Aldrich and Battista 2002; Bianco

andSened2005;Wright and Schaffner002); yetthetotal number of studies is remarkably small, espe

cially given how important this debate is within the

congressional literature.Moreover, these past state

level studies have been primarily concerned with theimpact of party on committee representativeness

(Aldrich and Battista 2002) and public policy(Bianco and Sened 2005;Wrightand Schaffner002)but not with the distribution of power delegated to

party leaders.

The purpose of this study is tohelp expand our the

oretical knowledge of legislative leadership by exam

ining the forces that shape legislative leaders' power in

the 49 state lower houses and by using an alternative

measure to discern preferences. Even though my

approach is different from these earlier works, wewould still expect the theoretical arguments to apply.If the theory of CPG is correct, we would expect to

find stronger leaders in legislatures inwhich there is

intraparty homogeneity and interpartypolarization. If

Krehbiel's pivotal voter theory is correct, we would

not expect these conditions to have an effect on

leaders' powers.

State Contracts

The unexpected magnitude of the Republican

Party's success in the 1994 congressional election has

been attributed in part to the party's ability to nation

alize the vote around key public policy issues and

voter disillusionment with the Clinton presidency

(Jacobson 1996). At the center of the party's effort to

encourage voters to focus on national politics rather

than local issues was its creation of the Republican

Contract with theAmerican People, which laid out anational agenda that the party would follow if it

regained control of Congress. The actual impact of

theContract on voting behavior within the electorate

is considered minor, yet the Contract is considered

important in shaping the actions of the new

Republican majority in the U.S. House. During the

campaign, the Contract established a set of policy

goals uniting House Republicans and differentiatingthem from Democratic candidates. After the

Republican Party gained majority status, the party's

leadership used theContract as a blueprint for actionand to keep theRepublican majority workingtogetherAldrich ndRohde 1997).

In addition to its success in the congressional elec

tion, theRepublican Party also did remarkably well

in state legislative races in 1994, gaining seats in

almost every partisan chamber thatheld elections that

year. In total, theRepublican Party gained 514 seats

nationwide, allowing it to reach almost the same

number of seats held byDemocrats (Storey 2006). As

a result, the party gained a slight advantage over

Democrats in the number of legislatures they controlled. Prior to the election, theRepublicans Partyheld amajority in29 legislative chambers; afterwards

they controlled 50 (Council of State Governments

1994-1995, 1996-1997).Like at the national level, part of theRepublican

Party's strategy to gain seats in state legislatures was

to create electoral contracts at the state level thatwere

similar to thenational Contract with America, thoughtailored to fit thepolitical situation in each individual

state. The leaders of the national Republican Party

worked closely with their state party counterparts toencourage state leaders to adopt state-specific con

tracts. The national party's goal was to coordinate







320 PoliticalResearchQuarterly

state party activities with congressional races tomake

the election, both for Congress and subnational

offices, "a referendum on the fundamental values and

ideologyespoused by theRepublican party" (Little1998,p. 174).Republican Partyleaders innearlyall

states considered creating separate contracts; ulti

mately, 20 states produced documents that resembled

the national Contract both in the general ideologicaltone presented in the state contract and in theway in

which the contracts were promoted. In general, the

creation of these documents reflected the combined

efforts of theRepublican National Committee, state

party organizations, and Republican state legislators.The Republican National Committee provided

advice; state party officials coordinated the efforts to

develop each contract; and state legislative leaders

worked with their caucus members to identify the

specific ssues tobe included Little 1997, 13).Thecontracts were publicly endorsed by Republican can

didates for the legislature and state office, often at a

prominent media event. The contracts were then publicized during the election by state Republican Party

organizations and widely used by Republican legislative andidates ntheircampaigns Little1998, 139).

The existence of these state-level contracts is valu

able for studying legislative leadership because the

use of the contract represents a situation inwhich the

Republican Party was trying tomake it clear to voters thatRepublican candidates shared policy preferences and that these preferences were considerablydifferent from the preferences held by Democratic

Party candidates. The party, as Little (1998) notes,was making the election a referendum on two

choices. In essence, theuse of the contract was meant

to tell voters that therewas intraparty homogeneityand interparty polarization?the two criteria that

Aldrich and Rohde argue are central toCPG. Yet not

every stateRepublican Party adopted a contract. As a

result, the presence of these contracts in some statesbut not others provides a unique opportunity to test

the theory of CPG. If the theory is correct, we would

expect to find stronger leadership in those states in

which the party adopted the contract, since these

were the states inwhich the conditions of CPG were

more closely being met.

Whether a focus on theRepublican Contract with

America provides a good test of CPG, however,

depends on whether the adoption of the contract in

different states provides a valid indicator of the con

ditions spelled out in the theory.On the surface, theuse of the contracts seems to provide a reasonable

means to capture the presence of the conditions laid

out in CPG. By adopting these contracts, the state

Republican parties were clearly trying to convey to

voters thatpartymembers shared similar policy preferences and that these preferences were different

from those held by Democrats. Looking beneath the

surface, Little's (1997) work provides additional evidence that the state-level contracts offer a valid indi

cator of these conditions. Little did not directlymeasure the extent towhich intraparty homogeneityand interparty polarization led to the adoption of

these contracts; yet he makes it clear that these

factors?especially intraparty homogeneity?playedan important role in whether a contract was adoptedinmany states. Looking at the states that did not

adopt contracts, Little found that the Republican

Party was too divided inmany states to agree on a

contract. In other states, one of themajor parties heldsuch a large advantage in the legislature that the

Republican Party decided itwas counterproductive or

unnecessary to create a contract. Little writes:

Rhode Island Republicans were too busy with a

divisive September 13thprimary tobe concerned

with a general election agenda.... Party leaders

in Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Florida and

California were unable to coordinate factions

who differed on the content of such a document.

Republican party officials inWisconsin and

Michigan indicated that their states are so region

ally diverse that a statewide contract would be

counterproductive, ifnot impossible_Leadersin Hawaii decided that interests varied too

greatly across the islands tomake a single partydocument feasible, (pp. 12-13)

In addition to looking at the states that did not

adopt the contract, it is important to consider how

Republican candidates responded in states that

adopted the contract.What is important tonote is notjust that these contracts were adopted but that the

Republican candidates made them an integral com

ponentof their ndividualcampaigns.Little (1998)found that thepresence of these contracts was helpfulto Republican candidates by providing them with

both "issues and publicity" (p. 186). The candidates

used the contract "as theirmessage to voters" (p. 186).Little's analysis suggests that theRepublican candi

dates did not simply view the contracts as amarket

inggimmick thattheypromptly gnored fterthe

signing ceremonies took place but that they usedthem to convey theirown policy preferences to voters.

Given the importance that state legislators place on








the re-election incentive (Rosenthal 1989; Thompsonand Moncrief 1992), it is hard to imagine that indi

vidual candidates would have actively promoted a

common agenda unless the candidates or their con

stituencies held common policy preferences.

In sum, the adoption of the contracts provides a

reasonably good indicator of the conditions laid out

inCPG theory. From looking at the intentions of the

Republican Party, it is clear that theparty leaders putforward the state-level contracts as means to demon

strate to voters that therewas agreement among partymembers over policy preferences and that these preferences differed from those held by theDemocrats.

From Little's (1997, 1998) research, we know that

many of the states that did not adopt the contract did

not have homogenous parties, and that in the states in

which the contracts were adopted, the individual candidates relied on the contracts to communicate shared

preferences to district voters. The use of the contract

may not be a perfect indicator of the conditions in

CPG, but theuse of roll-call voting, which is themain

measure used to assess these conditions, is itself a tar

get of frequentcriticism (Herron 1999; Krehbiel

2000; Rohde 1994; Smith2000). Certainly, ightonand Rocca's (2005) study provides evidence that

other forms of position taking besides roll-call voting

may provide a more valid indicator of legislators'

policy preferences. Thus, there is value inusing otherindicators besides roll-call votes to discern preferences. Moreover, the use of these contracts providesa more readily available means to test the theory of

CPG than in trying tofind a consistent measure usingroll-call votes to identify preferences across the

states. In otherwords, theuse of the contacts providesameans by which we can actually test the theory at

the state level. Even if the use of the contracts is not

a perfect indicator of these conditions, the decisions

by party leaders to adopt and legislative candidates to

promote these contracts certainly suggest that theenvironment in these states were closer to the condi

tions inCPG than in those states thatdid not adopt a

contract. As a result, the adoption of the contract in

some states but not others offers a good opportunityto test the theory of CPG outside of the traditional

focus on Congress and in a much larger number of

institutions.

The remainder of this article examines the relative

influence ofmajority party leaders in state legislatures

during the 1995 legislative session. If the CPG theory

is correct, then we would expect to see strongerleaders in those states that adopted theirown Contract

with America than in states that did not. Such a finding

would also providea challenge toKrehbiel's (2000)theory. Since an increase in polarization would not

affect the basic principles ofmajority rule, we would

not expect party leaders in states with contracts to

become more influential than those in states without

contracts. On the other hand, ifwe do not find differences in the power of legislative leaders in contract

and noncontract states, itwould provide a challenge to

Aldrich andRohde's (1997) theory hile providingsupport forKrehbiel's argument.

Method and Data

The theory of CPG depicts the change in leaders'

power as occurring in two steps. In the first step, the

party members allocate additional resources to partyleaders when intraparty preferences become more

homogenous and interparty preferences more polarized. House rules are changed, strengthening the

tools at the leaders' disposal. In the second step, the

party leaders use theirnew resources to help thepartyobtain its goals. The increased resources enable the

leaders to become more powerful. In testing the

theory,ldrich andRohde (1997) andRohde (1991)have examined how past changes in partisan alignment have affected House rules, providing greater

resources toHouse leaders. They then examine howthe increased resources lead to stronger leadership.For example, Rohde examines how the growing sup

portfor liberalpolicies beginning n the late 1950s

eventually led to theHouse reforms of the 1970s. The

Democratic Party leadership then used these reforms

to exercise greater influence over decision making,

reaching a zenith under JimWright's strong speaker

ship in the late 1980s.

DespiteAldrichandRohde's (1997) focuson thesetwo distinct steps, it is not essential thatboth steps be

examined to test the theory.The theorymay posit thatchanges in policy preferences lead to changes in the

resources given to leaders, yet ultimately, the theoret

ical argument leads to the conclusion that leadershipwill be strongerwhen those conditions aremet. Thus,to test the theory, it is reasonable to focus simply on

power rather than on resources. Certainly, the question of what causes some leaders to be more powerful than others is a farmore interesting one than how

do changes inmembers' policy preferences affect the

tools delegated to leaders. What makes leadership of

interest to scholars is not that some leaders are betterendowed with more resources but that some leaders

actually have a greater influence over the legislative








process than others. In addition, as Rohde (1991, 38)

makes it clear, the power exercised by two different

leaders may not be the same, even if they are operat

ingwith the same resources. Thus, in analyzing the

impact of the state-level contracts, my concern is not

whether the leaders are granted more resources in thestates where the contracts were approved but whether

the leaders in these legislatures were in fact more

powerful than those in other states.

To accomplish this task, I drew on the results of a

nationwide survey of state legislators conducted in

1995 to develop a score for themajority party leader

ship's influence in each state legislature. I then esti

mated a series of regression models to test the

hypotheses outlined above. The use of the survey provided twomain benefits. First, the survey questions

allowed me to develop a reasonable measure ofleaders' power. The surveys included a question

specifically asking the legislators to assess the powerof the party leaders. To be sure, an individual legislator's perceptions of the leader's power may be wrong.But by aggregating responses for a state, we are

likely to cancel out the off-setting biases of individ

ual legislators and arrive at a valid measure of a

leader's actual influence.

The other benefit of using a survey is that it

allowed me to examine leadership inmost state legis

latures rather than in just one institution.With a sin

gle survey, however, the study cannot capture how

changes inpolicy preferences over time affect leader

ship, which is the focus ofmost congressional stud

ies. The use of a cross-sectional research designrestricts the ability to test change. Instead, the survey

allowed me to testwhether leadership ismore powerful across the states depending on whether or not the

conditions of CPG were met. Even though the studydoes not offer a diachronic study of power, we would

still expect the theory of CPG to apply when com

paring power across institutions.The 1995 survey was conducted by John Carey,

RichardNiemi, andLyndaPowell (2000b) as partoftheir research on term limits (the survey results are

available fromCarey, Niemi, and Powell 2000a). The

survey was sent to all U.S. state senators and to

approximately three quarters of all state lower house

members. The survey had a response rate of 47 per

cent, leading tomore than 3,000 cases (Carey, Niemi,

and Powell 1998). In this study, I examine only the

responses from state lower houses to avoid the addi

tional complexities that would arise by includingboth chambers. For a variety of reasons, state senate

leaders are generally considered less powerful than

their house counterparts (Rosenthal 1998, 52-53). In

addition, the lieutenant governors inmany states playa formal role in leading the state senate. Including the

senate would require an extended discussion of these

differences and their theoretical importance and the

addition of several other variables in the regressionmodel to capture the distinct characteristics of state

senates. Because these changes would greatly

lengthen the article and lead to repeated digressions,I thought itwould be best to examine senates in a separate analysis. I also excluded the nonpartisan, uni

cameral Nebraska legislature. The survey included a

question that asked respondents to rate the "relative

influence" of the "Majority Party Leadership" in

"determining legislative outcomes" in their chamber.

The respondents were provided a 7-point scale from

no influence to dictates policy to assess the leader

ship's influence.2

For the dependent variable in this study, I used the

mean of the respondents' answers to this question in

each state. I used all the responses in each state to cal

culate thismeasure rather than just the responses from

the majority party members, so that the measure

included as many perspectives as possible. The lead

ership scores for the 49 lower houses are presented in

Table 1. The table also shows the number of respondents (AT) from each state chamber thatwas used to

create themeasure and the percentage this number

represents in terms of total chamber membership

(Response Rate). IfAldrich and Rohde's (1997)theory is correct, we expect that the respondents in

those states thathad adopted a contract would rank the

majority party leadership as having greater influence.

The primary independent variable of interest is

whether the stateRepublican Party adopted a contract

that was similar to the national Contract with the

American People. In his study of state legislativeelectionresults n 1994,Little (1998) identified 0

states that adopted contracts thatwere similar to thenational Contract. I created a dummy variable coded

1 for the states that Little identified as having a simi

lar contract and 0 for all others.

In addition to examining the impact of the contract

on the distribution of power, I also included two other

variables that were designed to test the theory of

CPG. The firstof these variables was one thatmea

sures the extent towhich the political parties in each

state were ideologically polarized. To capture partisan ideological polarization, I used Erikson, Wright,

and Mclver's (1994) Index of Mass Polarization,which measures the mean ideological distance

between Republicans and Democrats within each








Table 1The Relative Influence of theMajority Party

Leadership

Response

Ranking State Score N Rate

1 llinois2New York3 Rhode Island4Massachusetts

5West Virginia6Washington7 Arizona

8Hawaii9 Pennsylvania

10Georgia11 Indiana

12 Kentucky

13Maryland14 issouri

15New Mexico16 Oregon

17New Jersey18Michigan19Wisconsin

20 Montana

21 Iowa22 Ohio

23 Tennessee

24 North Carolina.

25 Alaska

26 New Hampshire27 Idaho28 NorthDakota

29 Wyoming30 Utah

31 Minnesota

32 Colorado33 Connecticut

34 Oklahoma35California

36 Vermont

37 Florida38Virginia

39 Kansas

40 SouthCarolina41 SouthDakota

42 Nevada

43 Delaware

44 Maine45 Texas

46 Louisiana

47 Alabama

48 Arkansas

49Mississippi

6.362 58 0.496.236 72 0.486.233 30 0.306.210 62 0.396.182 55 0.556.181 72 0.736.121 33 0.556.069 29 0.576.063 79 0.395.982 57 0.325.952 63 0.635.920 50 0.50

5.915 71 0.505.889 63 0.395.879 33 0.475.878 41 0.685.862 29 0.365.855 55 0.505.839 56 0.575.824 74 0.745.763 59 0.595.725 40 0.405.700 30 0.305.693 75 0.635.692 26 0.65

5.674 129 0.325.628 43 0.615.607 56 0.575.568 44 0.735.554 56 0.755.537 54 0.405.516 31 0.485.511 45 0.305.500 36 0.365.480 25 0.315.459 61 0.415.404 52 0.435.360 50 0.50

5.290 62 0.505.184 38 0.315.143 49 0.705.050 20 0.485.000 19 0.464.816 76 0.504.260 50 0.334.167 24 0.233.972 36 0.343.543 35 0.352.917 24 0.20

state. The index provides an alternative way to assesswhether the conditions of party government were present in each statebut one thatcaptures these conditions

from a different perspective. As discussed above,Little (1997, 12-13) repeatedlypoints at divisionswithin theRepublican Party as an important cause for

why many states did not adopt their own contracts.

Little's analysis suggests that the contracts may be

particularly revealing as towhether intraparty homo

geneity existed in each state. Erikson, Wright, and

Mclver's (1994) index does not measure intraparty

homogeneity. Rather, itmeasures the extent towhich

therewas interparty polarization. By relying on the

mean ideological scores ofRepublican and Democratic

identifiers, the index reveals how far apart the two

parties were ideologically but not how homogenous

theywere internally. If theCPG theory is correct, we

would expect there to be stronger leaders in states in

which the parties were more polarized.3 Their work

does not provide Mass Polarization scores for eitherHawaii orAlaska, so these two states have been left

out of the regression model.

One potential problem with the index, however, is

that itwas based on surveys conducted between 1976

and 1988, which means that itmay not be a valid

measure of partisan ideology for the 1995 session.

However, in studying the relative stability of their

measurements for the entire period, Erikson, Wright,andMclver (1994) found themtobe quite stable,especially the measure of ideology. Although the

potential exists that the relative ideological positionsof the states may have changed greatly after 1988,

Erikson, Wright, and Mclver's analysis suggests that

the index should still provide a reasonably good mea

sure of the distance in partisan ideology across the

states in 1995.

The last variable I included to test the theory of

CPG was a dummy variable for the states inwhich

the partisan control of the lower house switched to

the Republican Party following the 1994 election.

Aldrich and Rohde (1997) make thecase that the

transition toRepublican rule in theHouse in 1994 ledto an increase in conservative Republican representatives and a decline in more moderate Democrats,

causing the intrapartyhomogeneity on policy and the

interparty polarization to be strengthened and the

powers of the leadership enhanced. Many politicalcommentators argue that the Republican tide also

brought more conservative state legislators into office

(Broder 1995; Trumbull 1994). By includingthis

dummy variable in themodel, it allows us to deter

mine whether a transition toRepublican rule in state

legislatures led to an increase in the leadership'spower that was similar to that found in theU.S.

House.4








Table 2

Descriptive Statistics

Variable Median SDin.ax.

Leadership influence 5.514 5.692 0.702 2.917 6.362

Ideological polarization 35.4 35.3.215 18.64.0Professionalism 0.260 0.243 0.149 0.061 0.900

Majority party eatadvantage 0.273 0.267 0.203 0.000.758

Several other variables were included in the

regression model, which have been found to influ

ence thepower of state legislative leaders. By includ

ing these variables, it provides an opportunity to

determine the impact of the state-level contracts

when holding other relevant factors constant. These

variables assessed the impact on leadership of differences in legislative professionalism, the types of

career opportunities offered members, the size of the

majority party's seat advantage, the presence of

divided government, and the character of each state's

political culture. Because my concern in this analysisis to understand how the state contracts affected lead

ership, letme only briefly discuss each of these vari

ables and how they aremeasured.

Many state legislative scholars maintain that the

spread of legislative professionalism has led to a

decline in the power of legislative leaders (Moncrief,Thompson, and Kurtz 1996; Rosenthal 1989), thoughClucas (2007) found that legislators inmore professional legislatures tend to delegate greater power to

party leaders. To measure professionalism, I used

King's (2000) 1993-1994 measure of legislative professionalism. Career opportunities refer to both the

financial incentives that are offered tomembers to

remain in a state legislature and the possibilities for

political advancement elsewhere (Squire 1988). State

legislatures are placed into one of three categories:

career legislatures, which provide members with sufficient financial benefits to remain in legislative service

indefinitely; dead-end legislatures, which do not pro

vide such benefits; and springboard legislatures, which

offermembers good opportunities to advance tohigheroffice. Research has found that themore career legislatures tend to produce more powerful leaders (Clucas

2001, 2007). I used Clucas's (2001) categorization of

legislative career opportunities in 1995 to create two

dummy variables for themodel, one for springboard

legislatures and the other for dead-end ones. The base

category is the career legislature.Past research on how the size of majority party

affects leadership has been mixed, with some scholars

maintaining that a larger advantage reduces the lead

ership's influence (Francis 1989; Jewell and Whicker

1994), whereas others have found that the influence

of themajority party leadership is greater when its

party controls more seats (Clucas 2007). The measure

for majority party advantage was the difference

between the number of seats held by themajority and

minority parties in each chamber, divided by the total

number of members in that chamber. In addition, I

included a dummy variable for the presence of

divided government, which could have the potentialto limit a party leader's power.

I included two dummy variables to control for the

effect of political culture on thepower delegated to the

party leaders. Two recent studies examined how the

distribution of power in state legislatures differs

depending on how the stateswere classified inElazar's

(1984) research on political subcultures inAmerica(Clucas2001;Maddox 2005).These studies ound hat

political culture and the power of legislative leaders

were statistically related, though both of them questioned the substantive significance of these findings.To control for the effects of political culture, I included

dummy variables for moralistic and individualistic

states. The base category is the traditionalistic states.

Finally, I included a separate dummy variable for

Southern states because the leadership scores for these

states were considerably lower than those for other

states.5Table 2 presents thedescriptive statistics for thecontinuous variables used inmy analysis.

The Regression Results

Table 3 shows the results for the regression model.

Were themajority party leaders stronger in states that

had created theirown contracts? The answer found in

the regression analysis is that theywere. The coeffi

cient indicates that the scores for the leaders in these

states were on average .360 points higher than the

scores for the leaders in other states. On a cursorylook, this difference may not appear great, but it is

important to keep inmind that the scores for all the








Table 3Factors InfluencingMajority Party

Leadership Power

Unstandardized

Coefficient

Note: Adjusted R2 = .44; SE = .532;N = 47.

*p < .10. **p < .05. ***/? < .01.

SE

Standardized

Coefficient

Contract adopted .360** .165253

Ideological polarization .027** .012349

Republicans gain majority .069 .250038

Professionalism .143 724 .030

Springboard legislature .082 .240053

Dead-end legislature -.036 .265.025

Majority party seat -.535 .488.147

advantageMoralistic state -.535* .290.365

Individualistic state -.205 .301.133

Southern state -.858** .313 -.516

Divided government -.257 .173 -.182

Constant 5.066*** .535

party leaders across the nation were generally high,with only a limited range of differences. The highestscore was 6.362 and the lowest 2.917. When lookingat non-Southern states, the scores ranged only from

6.362 to4.816. The mean ranking shown inTable 1 is

5.514, with a standard deviation of .702. Thus, the

coefficient for the contract constitutes slightlymore

than half a standard deviation change in the leader

ship scores, which represents ameaningful difference

across the states. The coefficient was also statistically

significant.Of additional interest is the coefficient for ideo

logical polarization. For each one unit increase in the

polarization measure, the leadership score increases

an average of .027 points. Given that the polarizationscores range from a low of 18.6 to a high of 54.0, the

estimated difference in leadership power between the

least and most polarized legislatures is almost 1

point. In other words, themore polarized legislatorshad much stronger leaders. This coefficient was also

statistically significant.On the other hand, the legislative leaders in the

states in which theRepublican Party gained control

in the 1994 election were essentially no more powerful than those states in which therewas not a transi

tion to Republican rule. The table shows that the

leadership scores in the states in which the

Republicans gained power after the election was on

average .069 points higher than in other states,which

is substantively small and statistically insignificant.Most of the other coefficients had only a mini

mal effect on the dependent variable and were not

statistically significant. The sole exceptions were the

measures for political culture, Southern states, and

divided government. The leadership scores in the

moralistic states were more than half a point lower

than the scores for states with traditionalistic culture.

The leadership scores for Southern states were also

consistently lower than those for non-Southern states.

Finally, the leadership scores in states with divided

government were on average .257 points lower than

those in which the government was unified, thoughthe coefficient was not statistically significant.

On the surface, the lower scores for themoralistic

states do not seem unreasonable, given the importancethat is placed on widespread political participation in

the moralistic political culture and the importance of

hierarchy in the traditionalistic one. However, the

importance of culture is questionable. When runningthe regression using dummy variables to capture all

eight of Elazar's (1984) subcultures, therewas no logical relationship between subcultures and leadership

scores, which raises suspicion as to the relevance of

culture.6As towhy the leadership scores are lower in

Southern states is unclear, though it could reflect the

fact that the question asks respondents to assess the

influence of majority party leadership. It is possiblethat the question produced unreliable results from

some Southern states because many of these states had

only limited party leadership in the legislature until

recently (Harmel andHamm 1986; Hamm and Harmel

1993). On the other hand, theparty leadersmay simplybe less powerful in the South than they are elsewhere.

Finally, it does make sense that the power of the legislative leaders would be constrained when confronted

by divided government.With the governor's office in

the hands of the opposition party, themajority party

leadership could certainly be expected to have less

influence over policy outcomes.

Looking at the standardized coefficients, it is clear

that the adoption of a contract and the presence ofideological polarization are particularly important in

explaining the distribution of power across the states.

Overall, the two most important factors in explainingthe differences across the state was Elazar's (1984)

measure of political culture and whether the statewas

in the South. Beyond these two factors, the presenceof a state-level contract and greater ideological polarization between themajor parties were the two most

important factors in explaining differences in the

leadership scores.7

In sum, the regression model provides strong evidence that the distribution of power in state legislatures in 1995 was related to the adoption of state








contracts and the extent to which the parties were

polarized in each state. The states that had adoptedtheir own contracts had themost powerful leaders, as

did those in which the state parties were more polarized. These findings are consistent with the results of

Aldrich and Rohde's (1997) research on CPG.

Conclusion

The theoretical literature on congressional leader

ship has been dominated in recent years by a debate

over which positive model best explains the role and

power of congressional leaders. Despite the prominence of thisdebate, legislative scholars have focused

most of their attention on testing the theory by study

ing the relationship between roll-call behavior and

leadership inCongress. This article helps expand myefforts to test these theories by examining leadershipin amuch larger number of legislatures and by offer

ing a far differentmethodological approach. Rather

than testing the theory solely inCongress, I examined

majority party leadership across states. Rather than

relying on roll-call votes to determine the extent to

which intraparty preferences are homogenized and

interparty preferences are polarized, I comparedstates based on the decision by stateRepublican parties to adopt their own Contract with theAmerican

People and by relying on survey data. Despite this

broadly different approach, the findings are consis

tentwith what one would expect from Aldrich and

Rohde's (1997) theoryfCPG. In the tates nwhich

intrapartypolicy preferences were themost homogenous and the interparty preferences were themost

polarized, the leadership was perceived as being the

most powerful. The fact thatCPG explains the distri

bution of power across the states and in using such a

differentmethodological approach greatly improvesour confidence in the theory.Although these findings

strengthen our confidence inCPG, they also provide

a challenge to pivotal politics theory. Pivotal politics

theory simply does not provide a satisfactory explanation for why the influence of themajority partyleaders over public policy would increase with the

adoption of these state contracts or where the party

preferences were themost polarized.The findings also provide valuable insight into the

nature of state legislative leadership. From past

research, we know that the power of state legislativeleaders is affected by such institutional and politicalfactors as theprofessional character of the legislature, the

career opportunities that are offered to the legislators,and the size of themajority party. The findings from

this study show how the alignment of policy preferences affects legislative leadership. In this case, I

found that legislative party leaders were stronger in

stateswhere the stateRepublican Party put forward itsown Contract with America and theRepublican Partycandidates used that contract to convey their policy

preferences tovoters. I also found that the leaders were

stronger in states inwhich therewas greater ideological polarization between the Republican and

Democratic parties in the electorate. These findingstell us that in the states, majority party leaders are

stronger in legislatures inwhich thepreferences of the

majority party are more homogenous and when the

parties are polarized, as CPG theory argues.

Notes

1. In more recent work, Cox and McCubbins (2005) also

argue that increased homogeneity may lead to a greater delegation of power to leaders, though their procedural cartel theoryforesees leaders being delegated substantial power, even when

the party is not homogenous. See Lebo, McGlynn, and Koger

(2007) for a recent effort that synthesizes conditional party government and Cox and McCubbins's cartel model.

2. The question used to create themeasure was as follows: What

do you think s therelative nfluence f thefollowing ctors in

determining legislative outcomes in your chamber? [Check one box

in each row.]

No Influence Dictates Policy

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Majority Party Leadership*- 1-- - t- I

Minority Party Leadership*- t-- - 1- 1

Committee Chairs 1- t--- 1- 1

Governor 1- t- t- - t- 1

Legislative Staff 1-- - t- t- 1.

Bureaucrats/Civil Servants *- t- f---

Interest Groups*--f- *- 1- i

Mass Media *- f- 1- 1- 1- l








3. The correlation between thismeasure of ideological polar

ization and the states that adopted a contract was small (-.137),

which indicates they are measuring different phenomena.

4. There were no state lower house chambers that year in

which there was a transition toDemocratic Party rule.

5. I also examined the impact of two other variables on the

majority leaders' power. The first measured the length of time that

theRepublican Party had been out of power in the states that tran

sitioned to Republican rule. The second measured the degree of

electoral competition in each state. Neither of these variables had

an impact n thedependent ariable,nordid they mprove he fitof themodel. As a result, I have excluded them from the model.

6. If political culture matters, thenwe would have expected to

find a pattern in the coefficients as one moves along Elazar's

(1984) continuum from one dominant culture to a mixed culture

to another dominant one. Yet there was no pattern. Instead, the

direction and size of the coefficients for each type of culture were

quite different from one to the next.

7. A visual inspection of the scatterplot of the residuals revealed

no heteroscedasticity. There was also no multicollinearity.

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