How Elections and Parties Influence Legislative Effectiveness

Abstract:

This paper considers why some legislators are more effective
than others at advancing their preferred policies. Existing
studies on this subject, since they do not control for
underlying proposal content, fail to distinguish between
effective and accommodative legislating, and are unable to
identify causal influences on individual effectiveness. In this
paper, I use new data on U.S. Senate Amendments to address these
shortcomings. Specifically, I apply a novel text-processing
algorithm to identify a series of ``natural experiments'', where
one Senator introduces identical amendments under different
institutional settings. My results, unlike all previous studies,
suggest that majority-party membership does \emph{not} increase
effectiveness, but running for reelection does, at least for
minority-party Senators and especially for the most electorally
vulnerable of them. Overall, these findings suggest that Senate
policy-making institutions may be oriented more towards
incumbents' electoral incentives, regardless of party, and less
towards partisan competition than some recent scholarship
suggests.