Is the Senate More Liberal Than the House?

The Journal of Politics

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 1973, Pages 332-366

  Kernell, Sam ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84971847757     PISSN: 00223816     EISSN: 14682508     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2129073     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. This theme has been introduced by Nelson W. Polsby in “Policy Analysis and Congress,” Public Policy, 18 (September 1969), 61–74, and in “Strengthening Congress in National Policy-Making,” Yale Review, 59 (June 1970), 481–497.
2. “The Senate and Its Leadership,” reprinted from the Congressional Record (Nov. 27, 1963) in The Senate Institution, ed. Nathaniel Stone Preston (New York: Van Nostrand-Reinhold Books, 1969), 62.
3. James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (Washington, D. C: Brookings Institution, 1968), passim, and Frederic N. Cleaveland, ed., Congress and Urban Problems (Washington, D. C: Brookings Institution, 1969), passim.
4. An Act of Congress (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969), 3–69. The primary exception is civil rights legislation. Sundquist, Politics and Policy, 221–286. A number of good case histories have recorded congressional treatment of civil rights legislation, among them Howard Shuman, “Senate Rules and the Civil Rights Bill: A Case Study,” American Political Science Review, 51 (December 1957), 955–975; and Daniel Berman, A Bill Becomes a Law: The Civil Rights Act of 1960 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1962). However, David Mayhew has suggested that House liberalism on this issue may be more apparent than real. He writes, “Because everyone knew that the Senate was in fact the resolving body in this period, there was always a certain unreality in House treatment of civil rights questions.” Party Loyalty Among Congressmen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 6.
5. Theodore R. Marmor, “The Congress: Medicare Politics and Policy,” in American Political Institutions and Public Policy, ed. Alan P. Sindler (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), 3–66, and especially 33–66. Also Eugene Fein-gold, Medicare: Policy and Politics (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1966), and Sundquist, Politics and Policy, 308–321.
6. The Power of the Purse (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1966), 572–615.
7. (Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1963), chap. 6, 69–84.
8. The importance of seniority for both committee and floor-leadership recruitment has been examined in great detail. For general surveys of the role of seniority see George Goodwin, Jr., “The Seniority System in Congress,” American Political Science Review, 53 (June 1959), 412–437; Nicholas A. Masters, “House Committee Assignments,” American Political Science Review, 55 (June 1961), 345–358; and Donald R. Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World (New York: Random House, 1960), 118–146. For examination of the developmental-institutionalization aspects of seniority see Polsby, Miriam Galla-her, and Barry Spencer Rundquist, “The Growth of the Seniority System in the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review, 63 (September 1969), 787–807; Polsby, “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review, 62 (March 1968), 144–168; Michael Abram and Joseph Cooper, “The Rise of Seniority in the House of Representatives,” Polity, 1 (Fall 1968), 52–85; and H. Douglas Price, “The Congressional Career Then and Now,” in Congressional Behavior, ed. Polsby (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1969), especially 42–50, et passim. The first four references deal with the development of seniority primarily within the House while the last deals exclusively with the Senate.
9. James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy ( Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 241–249. However accurate this supposition may have been, it has not in recent years proved “self-perpetuating” as Professor Burns speculated. Wolfinger and Hollinger have demarked a pronounced trend in “safe seats” within the Democratic Party from the rural South to the urban North. Raymond E. Wolfinger and Joan Heifetz Hollinger, “Safe Seats, Seniority, and Power in Congress,” in Readings on Congress, ed. Raymond E. Wolfinger (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 36–57.
10. Burns, Deadlock, passim; Froman, Congressmen, 85–98, 110–121.
11. Froman in substantiating this argument examines roll-call votes which measure support for a “larger federal role,” and finds that leaders are slightly less supportive of a larger federal role, and thus more conservative, than nonleaders. While House Democratic leaders scored 6.74 on a 9.0 point scale, nonleaders’ average score was 7.45, a difference of less than one point. An even smaller divergence was found between Republican leaders and nonleaders. While the leadership scored 1.20, the nonleaders scored a strikingly close 1.24. One could argue that the findings better support the null hypothesis that no difference exists between leaders and nonleaders. Froman, Congressmen, Table 6.2, 80. However, even if the results were more conclusive they could not be taken as definitive because of the nature of the sample. The sample, those bills which reach the floor and are subject to a roll-call vote, is more likely than the total population of bills to be supported by the leadership. Obviously, many pieces of legislation which various leaders do not favor fail to obtain floor action. For a critical discussion of House leadership, see Richard Boiling, House Out of Order (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1966), chaps. 3, 4, 10.
12. Boiling, House Out of Order, 78. Also, William H. Riker, Democracy in the United States (New York: Macmillan Co., 1953), chap. 5; Randall B. Ripley, Majority Party Leadership in Congress (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), 184.
13. “Legislating for Urban Areas: An Overview,” in Congress and Urban Problems, 374.
14. The closest this claim has come to being explicitly stated is by William Morrow. In reference to authorizations and appropriations for “virtually all programs” he said, “…history confirms that Senate committees have been more lenient with administration requests across-the-board than have House committees,” and noted that “.…this inter-house pattern has institutionalized itself to the point of affecting the role patterns of most committees.” Congressional Committees (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 71–72.
15. Fenno, Power of the Purse, 533. Several sets of statistics evidence the House’s more thorough division of labor. During the Eighty-ninth Congress, the House work was apportioned among 125 subcommittees and the Senate’s among 99 subcommittees. Whereas 51 percent of the Senate Democrats chair two or more committees or subcommittees, only 12 percent of the House Democrats do so. Froman, “Organization Theory and the Explanation of Important Characteristics of Congress,” American Political Science Review, 62 (June 1968), 524. The presence of about one-fifth more subcommittees explains only in part the greater number of committee meetings which the House conducted. During the Eighty-eighth Congress, the House held two-thirds more meetings ( almost twice as many subcommittee meetings ). In addition, a higher percentage were held in closed sessions, 45 to 38 percent respectively. Figures drawn from Table 4 and 98–99 of Morrow, Congressional Committees.
16. Polsby, Congress and the Presidency (2d ed., Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 67.
17. “Policy Analysis,” 61–74, and “Strengthening Congress,” 481–497.
18. The seminal study of Congress’ role in initiation of public policy was Lawrence Chamberlain, The President, Congress, and Legislation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946). Perhaps die most thorough examination of this area of congressional policy-making is James A. Robinson’s analysis of foreign policy legislation, Congress and Foreign Policy-Making ( Homewood, III.: Dorsey Press, Inc., 1962, rev. 1967).
19. The “presidential boxscores” for each session can be found in the yearly Congressional Quarterly Almanac.
20. Congressional Quarterly Almanac: 1961 (Washington, D. C: Congressional Quarterly Service, 1962), 95.
21. J. Roland Pennock, “Party and Constituency in Post War Agricultural Price-Support Legislation,” Journal of Politics, 18 (May 1956), 167–210. More recently John Heinz finds that the main reason for party differences on farm-support legislation can be found in congruent constituency interests. “The Political Impasse in Farm Support Legislation,” Yale Law Journal, 71 (April 1962), 954–970.
22. A case in point was Senate treatment of President Nixon’s Family Assistance Program in 1970. Passed essentially intact by the House, the bill ran into trouble in the Senate Finance Committee. After a number of administrative changes at the request of Chairman Russell Long, the revised bill failed to be reported out of committee by a vote of fourteen to one. It was opposed by liberal Democrats for providing too little assistance ($1,600 minimum payment ) and by conservative Republicans for being too expensive. Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 28 (Oct. 16, 1970), 2,555–2,556.
23. Throughout the analysis significance levels ( based on chi square ) will be used to reject the null hypothesis. The reader may find application of significance levels for the entire population disconcerting. If it helps, simply treat the population as but a sample of yet a larger universe of congressional decisions occurring before and after the period under study. However, I find David Gold’s argument more congenial to my use of the statistic here: “When lack of statistical significance by any test is found in a universe or a given set of data (keep in mind, not a sample), we can say that in the empirical world the association produced by nature is no greater than that produced by chance (e.g., random pairing) process.” “Statistical Tests and Substantive Significance,” The American Sociologist, 4 (February 1969), 44.
24. Robert Peabody evaluates the “prevailing practice of routine advancement” in “Party Leadership Change in the United States House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review, 61 (September 1967), 675–693. For a case study of a contested election which still evinces routine advancement through floor offices see Polsby, “Two Strategies of Influence: Choosing a Majority Leader, 1963,” in New Perspectives on the House of Representatives, ed. Robert Peabody and Nelson Polsby (2d ed.; Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1969), 325–358.
25. “The Internal Distribution of Influence: The House,” in The Congress and Americas Future, ed. David B. Truman (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 69.
26. With respect to scores of opposition to the “conservative coalition” on roll-call votes, committee chairmen rank more conservatively than party leaders. Barbara Hinckley, Stability and Change in Congress (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1970), 131–133.
27. In the Eighty-sixth Congress, the House Democratic majority was also large (65 percent). Again there was a movement to curtail the power of the formidable Rules Committee. Speaker Sam Rayburn could not be persuaded to go along with rule changes, however, offering only to use his “good offices” with Chairman “Judge” Smith to get legislation through the Rules Committee. Rayburn was largely unsuccessful as was subsequent use of the discharge petition, Calendar Wednesday, and suspension of the rules. Tom Wicker notes that the frustration of the Eighty-sixth created the momentum for reform in the Eighty-seventh. JFK and LBJ: The Influence of Personality Upon Politics (Baltimore: Penguin Books, Inc., 1968), 40–55. The large Democratic majority also led to the formalization of the Democratic Study Group.
28. Kenneth Kofmehl, “The Institutionalization of a Voting Bloc,” Western Political Quarterly, 17 (June 1964), 256–272
29. Personal correspondence with Robert E. Cuthriell of Congressional Quarterly, Inc., in August, 1970.
30. Personal correspondence with Robert E. Cuthriell.
31. “The Two Presidencies,” Trans-action (December 1966), Tables 1, 8.