The effect of majority party agenda setting on roll calls

How well can roll calls detect the causal impact of majority party agenda setting in Congress? Estimating the counterfactual required to assess the effects of majority party agenda setting is complicated by time-varying differences in the political environment and the fact that measures commonly used to control for compositional changes may themselves depend on the extent of agenda control being exercised. Using techniques popularized by recent work focused on causal inference, I characterize whether agenda changes occuring during changes in majority party control in the US House of Representatives are consistent with predictions from models of majority party agenda control. Comparing how the same members in consecutive Congresses are affected by changes in party control and using fixed effects to account for time-varying differences between consecutive Congresses helps isolate the changes in the agenda attributable to agenda setting. The analyses highlight the challenge in consistently estimating the effects of agenda control and suggest that although recent transitions produce patterns consistent with the predictions of agenda setting theories, the average effect over the post-Reconstruction period is harder to interpret as being produced by agenda control.