Strategic party leadership: The politics of procedural choice in the United States House of Representatives.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In recent years, new institutionalist scholars have contributed a great deal to our understanding of how member preferences and institutional features affect the character of legislative politics. This dissertation, however, argues that much of the new institutionalist work in the field of congressional politics thus far has ignored an important component of congressional life: autonomous political leadership.
The two leading new institutionalist approaches to legislative organization, pivotal voter and partisan theories, differ considerably over the importance of political parties in Congress and the nature of congressional policy outcomes, but they share a deterministic approach to congressional leadership, employing a variant of principal-agent theory in which the actions of majority party leaders are largely determined by follower preferences. According to pivotal voter theory, congressional leaders essentially act as agents of the entire chamber, using the institutional prerogatives at their disposal to encourage centrist policy outcomes. Partisan theorists, on the other hand, suggest that leaders act as agents of the majority party, and that strong leadership is possible only when a high degree of preference homogeneity exists within the majority party. In these situations, majority party leaders use their powers to encourage non-centrist policy outcomes that reflect the majority party's median position.
In contrast to the deterministic logics of these two perspectives, the argument presented here suggests majority party leaders, acting independently of member preferences, matter in congressional politics, and that both centrist and non-centrist outcomes can occur. Specifically, I argue that through their manipulation of the rules process, majority party leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives can independently affect congressional policy making, structuring choices for members and influencing the nature of legislative outcomes. The theory presented in this dissertation, which I call “strategic party leadership,” argues that there are four types of congressional leadership behavior: party agency, autonomous party leadership, chamber agency, and autonomous chamber leadership, each corresponding to a particular causal pattern that incorporates member preferences, leadership strategies, and procedural choice. I examine this theory through case studies of the rules process for ten major bills in the U.S. House of Representatives from the 103<super>rd</super>, 104<super>th</super>, and 105<super>th</super> Congresses.