Progressive Ambition and Legislative Organization

1. Progressive Ambition and Legislative Organization Gregory Robinson Department of Political Science Michigan State University

2. Theoretical Framework Insights from Schlesinger (1966), Fenno (1973), Mayhew (1974), etc. What goals do we assume drive elected officials? What activities do they engage in to pursue these goals? How do they use (and/or shape) political institutions to aid their ambitions?

3. The Argument Legislatures are principally organized to help members pursue reelection Organization also reflects the desire of members to pursue higher office. The pursuit of one goal vs. the other presents a tradeoff� Most institutional structures aid reelection, but some aid progressive ambition.

4. Progressive Ambition & Committee Membership in the House of Representatives Mayhew�s Legislative Activities: Credit Claiming Position Taking Advertising �Higher aspirations seem to produce...[a] distinctive mix of activities. For one thing credit claiming is all but useless. It does little good to talk about the bacon you have brought back to a district you are trying to abandon� Office advancement seems to require a judicious mix of advertising and position taking� (75-6).

5. Progressive Ambition & Committee Membership in the House (cont.) Does Mayhew�s statement describe a particular committee? Can�t be a distributive committee. And the exclusive and control committees are party committees Judiciary Committee � High demand, but no distributive value

6. Progressive Ambition & Committee Membership in the House (cont.) Why Judiciary�? Controversial issues Abortion Busing Constitutional Amendments Flag burning, etc. Impeachment politics

7. Progressive Ambition & Committee Membership in the House (cont.) Hypothesis: House Members on the Judiciary Committee are more likely to run for Senate than Members not on the Judiciary Committee. Preliminary analysis finds support�

8. Progressive Ambition & Partisan Theories of Congressional Organization If the majority party uses special rules to control the floor agenda in the House of Representatives to produce non-median outcomes

9. Progressive Ambition & Partisan Theories of Congressional Organization (cont.) And if even members running for higher office benefit from the party reputation created and sustained (in part) by the party�s agenda in the House

10. Progressive Ambition & Partisan Theories of Congressional Organization (cont.) Then members running for higher office have an incentive to support their party�s attempts to control the agenda But higher office ambition ? move toward the preferences of a new constituency

11. Progressive Ambition & Partisan Theories of Congressional Organization (cont.) Can members do both? Yes By supporting the party when they must, and moving toward the preferences of their new constituents when they can Hypothesis: A change in constituency preference consistent with a run for higher office produces static behavior on rules votes but a change in behavior on final passage votes proportional to the change in constituency preferences.

12. Progressive Ambition in a Fused Executive System: The Select Committee System and the Government in the British House of Commons 1979 Reform in the House of Commons established a set of departmentally-aligned select committees to oversee, investigate, and provide recommendations to the government departments with which they were aligned. A new path for ambition?

13. Progressive Ambition in a Fused Executive System (cont.) Proposition 1: The most important dimension in predicting a member�s success in moving up the career ladder in the British system is party loyalty.

14. Progressive Ambition in a Fused Executive System (cont.) Proposition 2: All else equal, a member who has demonstrated knowledge and expertise in a given policy area is more likely to be given governing responsibility within that policy area.

15. Progressive Ambition in a Fused Executive System (cont.) Proposition 3: One place to demonstrate knowledge and expertise in a policy area is on a committee charged with oversight of that policy area.

16. Progressive Ambition in a Fused Executive System (cont.) Hypothesis: In a fused executive system, a member who participates in a committee with responsibility over a particular policy area is more likely than other members to receive an executive position in the department that makes policy in that area.

17. Progressive Ambition in a Fused Executive System (cont.) Intuition: In a system with so much party loyalty already built in, members should seek ways to distinguish themselves from their colleagues (if they want to move up the career ladder). The Select Committee represents one such way.

18. Conclusion Static ambition explains much of legislative behavior and legislative organization I hope to convince that considering progressive ambition as a factor in our theories is worth the added complexity

19. Data needs � Committees Essay Who ran (I have this from 101st-108th Congress) Committee membership (ditto) Initial committee requests, transfer requests More individual House member data (Age, background, prior offices, etc.) Profiles of gubernatorial races (maybe�)

20. Data needs � Parties Essay W-NOMINATE scores on special rules votes versus scores on final passage votes (and perhaps other vote types�) Measures of District and State preferences (two-party presidential vote?) Who ran (already have some of this) When they announced (maybe)

21. Data needs � UK Essay House of Commons membership Select Committee membership Government membership Measure of party loyalty?

22. Schlesinger (1966) Quotes �The direction of ambitions fostered by an office depends upon the way in which officeholders� typically treat the office� (p. 11). �The ambitions of any politician flow from the expectations which are reasonable for a man in his position� (p. 9). �The structure of political opportunities in the United States, of course, has grown out of existing institutional arrangements. But it also affects these arrangements, modifying and reinforcing the relationships among institutions� (p. 200).

23. Schlesinger (1966) Quotes (cont.) �A man in an office which may lead somewhere is more likely to have office ambitions than a man in an office which leads nowhere.� (p. 8). �It makes little difference to the theory of ambitions whether men adopt the ambitions suitable to the office or attain the office because of their ambitions.� (p. 9). �[T]he constituency to which the legislator is responding is not always the one from which he has been elected�[I]t is more important to know what he wants to be than how he got where he is now� (p. 5).

24. Labour Party Leader Jo Grimond (1979), quoted in King (1981) MPs becoming �an amalgam of civil servant and researcher with a dash of welfare officer thrown in.� �More and more MPs�wanted to be members of the Government. Even before they were members they wanted to be in touch with government policies. They were by nature insiders not critics.�