IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/jothpo/v19y2007i1p83-99.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Agendas, Side Issues and Leadership in the US House

Author

Listed:
  • William Hixon

    (Lawrence University, P.O. Box 599, Appleton, WI 54912–0599, USA; william.hixon@lawrence.edu)

  • Bryan W. Marshall

    (Department of Political Science, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056–2807, USA; marshabw@muohio.edu)

Abstract

We introduce a view of congressional party leaders as strategic manipulators of issue dimensions, similar in spirit to Riker's (1982, 1986) heresthetics. Party leaders have incentives to add to bills content from a secondary dimension in order to attract moderates’ support. This strategy can be cheaper than compromising along the liberal-conservative dimension. Empirically, moderates differ in their second-dimension preferences from non-moderates–a necessary condition for the strategy to work as we suggest it might. House passage of a 1997 emergency appropriations bill illustrates this strategy. Our view of party leadership challenges to some extent the argument that legislative parties reduce the dimensionality of congressional decision making and questions the one-dimensional picture of congressional politics.

Suggested Citation

  • William Hixon & Bryan W. Marshall, 2007. "Agendas, Side Issues and Leadership in the US House," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 19(1), pages 83-99, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:19:y:2007:i:1:p:83-99
    DOI: 10.1177/0951629807071020
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0951629807071020
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0951629807071020?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Krehbiel, Keith, 1993. "Where's the Party?," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 23(2), pages 235-266, April.
    2. Snyder, James M. & Groseclose, Tim, 2001. "Estimating Party Influence on Roll Call Voting: Regression Coefficients versus Classification Success," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 95(3), pages 689-698, September.
    3. McLEAN, IAIN, 2002. "William H. Riker and the Invention of Heresthetic(s)," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 32(3), pages 535-558, July.
    4. Enelow,James M. & Hinich,Melvin J., 1984. "The Spatial Theory of Voting," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521275156, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Keith Poole, 2007. "Changing minds? Not in Congress!," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 131(3), pages 435-451, June.
    2. Dhillon, Amrita, 2003. "Political Parties and Coalition Formation," Economic Research Papers 269591, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    3. Jane Green, 2007. "When Voters and Parties Agree: Valence Issues and Party Competition," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 55(3), pages 629-655, October.
    4. Scott Feld & Samuel Merrill & Bernard Grofman, 2014. "Modeling the effects of changing issue salience in two-party competition," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 158(3), pages 465-482, March.
    5. Luigi Curini & Paolo Martelli, 2009. "Electoral Systems and Government Stability: A Simulation of 2006 Italian Policy Space," Czech Economic Review, Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies, vol. 3(3), pages 305-322, October.
    6. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/eu4vqp9ompqllr09iepsg269m is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Jonathan Pool, 1992. "The Multilingual Election Problem," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 4(1), pages 31-52, January.
    8. Daniela Giannetti & Itai Sened, 2004. "Party Competition and Coalition Formation," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 16(4), pages 483-515, October.
    9. Witterblad, Mikael, 2008. "Essays on Redistribution and Local Public Expenditures," Umeå Economic Studies 731, Umeå University, Department of Economics.
    10. Torsten J. Selck, 2005. "Improving the Explanatory Power of Bargaining Models," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 17(3), pages 371-375, July.
    11. Sadiraj, V. & Tuinstra, J. & Winden, F. van, 2005. "On the size of the winning set in the presence of interest groups," CeNDEF Working Papers 05-08, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance.
    12. Eijffinger, Sylvester & Mahieu, Ronald & Raes, Louis, 2018. "Inferring hawks and doves from voting records," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 107-120.
    13. A. Kamakura, Wagner & Afonso Mazzon, Jose & De Bruyn, Arnaud, 2006. "Modeling voter choice to predict the final outcome of two-stage elections," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 689-706.
    14. Thomas Bräuninger, 2007. "Stability in Spatial Voting Games with Restricted Preference Maximizing," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 19(2), pages 173-191, April.
    15. Cho, Seok-ju & Duggan, John, 2009. "Bargaining foundations of the median voter theorem," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(2), pages 851-868, March.
    16. Tanner, Thomas Cole, 1994. "The spatial theory of elections: an analysis of voters' predictive dimensions and recovery of the underlying issue space," ISU General Staff Papers 1994010108000018174, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    17. Stefano Camatarri & Francesco Zucchini, 2019. "Government coalitions and Eurosceptic voting in the 2014 European Parliament elections," European Union Politics, , vol. 20(3), pages 425-446, September.
    18. Michel Le Breton & John A. Weymark, 2002. "Social choice with analytic preferences," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 19(3), pages 637-657.
    19. Tovey, Craig A., 2010. "The instability of instability of centered distributions," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 59(1), pages 53-73, January.
    20. Grégoire Rota Graziosi, 2004. "La fragmentation politique, une revue de la littérature," Revue Française d'Économie, Programme National Persée, vol. 18(4), pages 193-223.
    21. Daniel Finke & Stefanie Bailer, 2019. "Crisis bargaining in the European Union: Formal rules or market pressure?," European Union Politics, , vol. 20(1), pages 109-133, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:19:y:2007:i:1:p:83-99. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.