The Monkey Cage

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association is sponsoring the WalkingWorks Capitol Hill Challenge, in which members of Congress and their staffs can wear pedometers and compete to see who walks the most. The New York Times piece about this is here. In the piece, we learn that Senator George Voinovich (R-OH) is particularly devoted to the contest. We also learn that his staff calls him “The Voin.”

The New York Times gives some examples of who’s walking, including The Voin, Sen. Kay Bailey “The Hutch” Hutchinson (R-TX), Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), and Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY), among others. But I wanted the full roster. Here it is.

Based on miles walked per participating staff member, Smith is in front (144.65 miles). The Hutch leads the Senate side (68.41 miles.) Among Senators, The Voin is actually in third, with The Grass right behind.

Bringing up the rear? Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), with a paltry .23 miles per staff member (1.14 total). Since you have to have 5 staff members participating, this tells us that each member has walked about 1,200 feet — i.e., not quite a round trip from one end of the Capitol to the other (see here.) That, in my estimation, is pretty weak.

Maryland residents, call Senator Mikulski’s office and tell them to walk! I guarantee you that if Mikulski orders it, it will be so.

Posted by John Sides at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Courtesy of a student who is interning in Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) office:

Wyden is not up for re-election for 4 more years. The ad is meant to advertise his bill, The Healthy Americans Act.

The ad itself is not particularly clever — see, inter alia, the “photocopying your butt” routine — but it strikes me that this is an interesting new (?) tactic: make relatively cheap on-line videos, presumably using campaign funds, to promote your legislation. Will more bills end up advertised in this fashion? Are there other similar ads out there?

[Addendum: See this Roll Call article (gated).]

Posted by John Sides at 08:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

These ratings are from Knowlegis, and reflect the first half of the 110th Congress. The ratings and rankings data are here. Their criteria are described here. Yes, they have caveats.

I’ve rendered their Senate data as a graph. Higher scores on the x-axis indicate more power. Intuitive results abound:

• Most Democrats are towards the top, and most Republicans towards the bottom. Power depends in part on majority status.

• Party leaders and committee chairs are toward the top.

• Seniority matters. Many members at the bottom are freshmen.

The most subjective portion of their ratings is the “Sizzle/Fizzle” factor, which accounts for why Obama, Clinton, and McCain are towards the top — despite little institutional power in the traditional sense — and Larry Craig is at the bottom.

I have plotted the data to highlight the ratings and downplay the rankings. Rankings are often dubious measures because they distort the underlying ratings by placing observations on an interval scale. In terms of ratings, Carl Levin and Robert Byrd are .04 units apart (45.08 and 45.04, respectively) while Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy are about 45 units apart. In terms of rankings, each pair of Senators is one unit apart.

The plot reveals that a lot of Senators have roughly similar amounts of power, despite the rankings. Without any measure of uncertainty, however, there is no sense of how much of a difference is really meaningful.

And, of course, it’s not clear what these power ratings would explain that could not be captured by seniority and leadership positions.

[Hat tip to Scott Adler.]

Posted by John Sides at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Dan Drezner writes in the Chronicle about political science methodology and Walt/Mearsheimer.

Does the public understand how political science works? Or are political scientists the ones who need re-educating? Those questions have been running through my mind in light of the drubbing that John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt received in the American news media for their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy … From a political-science perspective, what’s interesting about those reviews is that they are largely grounded in methodological critiques — which rarely break into the public sphere. What’s disturbing is that the methodologies used in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy are hardly unique to Mearsheimer and Walt. Are the indictments of their book overblown, or do they expose the methodological flaws of the discipline in general?

The most persistent public criticism of Mearsheimer and Walt has been their failure to empirically buttress their argument with interviews. … To the general reader, such critiques must sound damning. International-relations scholars know full well, however, that innumerable peer-reviewed articles and university-press books utilize the same kind of empirical sources that appear in The Israel Lobby. Most case studies in international relations rely on news-conference transcripts, official documents, newspaper reportage, think-tank analyses, other scholarly works, etc. It is not that political scientists never interview policy makers — they do (and Mearsheimer and Walt aver that they have as well). However, with a few splendid exceptions, interviews are not the bread and butter of most international-relations scholarship. (This kind of fieldwork is much more common in comparative politics.)

… the claim that political scientists can’t write about policy without talking to policy makers borders on the absurd. The first rule about policy makers is that they always have agendas — even in interviews with social scientists. … Further, most empirical work in political science is concerned with actions, not words … Other methodological critiques are more difficult to dismiss. … Mead enumerates several methodological sins, in particular the imprecise manner in which the “Israel Lobby” is defined in the book. … Many of the reviews of the book highlight two flaws that, disturbingly, are more pervasive in academic political science. The first is the failure to compare the case in question to other cases. …

Continue reading "Drezner on political science methodology and Walt/Mearsheimer" »

Posted by Henry at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Congressional Quarterly recently published (here, ungated) some interesting statistics about the allocation of earmarks in the fiscal year 2009 spending bills. As the table below shows, there seems to be a marked racial disparity in the average amount of earmarks to members of the U.S. House. On average, districts represented by white legislators received nearly twice the aggregate amount of federal funds than did districts represented by African-American legislators. The mean value of earmarks to white legislators also outpaced the average sums secured by Latino members of the House.

Given the proclivity of members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to secure disproportionate amounts of pork for their districts (see the most recent, ungated treatment by Diana Evans here), an explanation for the racial disparity may rest in the racial balance of the congressional appropriations panels. Of the 37 Democratic House members who serve on the House Appropriations Committee, just five (roughly 14 percent) are African-American. Latino legislators also maintain a slim presence on the HAC, with just two Hispanic members serving on the committee. Most importantly, however, none of the African-American legislators who serve on the HAC chairs a subcommittee of the full panel. Given that most studies of pork politics show that HAC subcommittee chairs— aka “The Cardinals”— bring disproprotionately more earmarks home to their districts than other legislators (see one such study by some of my colleagues here ), the racial disparities in the earmark data should not be surprising. In fact, the greater earmarking average for Latino legislators might in part be accounted for by Jose Serrano’s (D-New York) chairmanship of a HAC subcommittee. (Serrano secured over $13 million in earmarks for the current fiscal year for his district.)

Rather than asking why minority representatives seem to be squeezed out of the pork trough, the more relevant question might be why Blacks and Latinos are under-represented on the HAC and why so few minority legislators have ascended to Cardinal rank. As one of my other colleagues, Chris Deering, has shown (here, gated), the queues for securing chairmanships on the most important House committees have historically been significiantly longer than for other types of committees. Given that several African-American legislators fall second or third from the top of several subcommittee ladders, it may be that racial disparities in earmarking will lessen without action by party leaders. Still, given that the Democratic panel that makes committee assignments prefers to put electorally safe members on the HAC and given that Black members typically represent solidly Blue districts, the diminished representation of minority legislators on the HAC and amid Cardinal ranks seems worthy of review by Democratic leaders in the House.

Posted by Sarah Binder at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here’s a nifty website for any of you with an appetite for (congressional) pork. Make it Jeff Flake! is devoted to lobbying House Republican leaders to name Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) to a vacancy on the House Appropriations Committee. Yes, Flake is the persistent critic of earmarking and author of many failed efforts to curb congressional earmarking. And yes, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees are plum prizes for loyal partisans eager to steer funds to their own districts and states and to their party colleagues seeking to shore up their electoral prospects. Even in an era of deeply polarized legislative parties, earmarking is one of the few congressional pursuits played across party lines. (Despite the president’s castigation of a Democratic Congress for its appetite for pork, even Republicans enjoy a little pig roast. Remember the “Bridge to Nowhere”?)

Will Flake and his supporters succeed? Unlikely. As studies of committee assignment politics have shown— from Lawrence, Maltzman, and Wahlbeck’s study of Speaker Joe Cannon’s assignments at the turn of the 20th century to Frisch and Kelly’s book on contemporary assignment politics— party leaders take a heightened interest in who sits on the chamber’s most prestigious committees. Seats on the Appropriations Committee are prizes to be awarded to loyal team players, not to vocal critics of the leadership like Rep. Flake.

Even without Flake on the HAC, Congress did take tentative steps in 2007 to curb its appetite, by some estimates cutting in half the amount of money spent on earmarks. Still, Congress’s earmark reforms have primarily required greater and more precise disclosure of earmarks and their sponsors. There are now several websites (here and here) that feature user-friendly earmark databases. Thanks to Google Earth, you can even map the earmarks. Here are the earmarks for the defense appropriations bill as originally passed by the House last year:

If the “Law of Available Data” holds true, expect to see many more studies of the politics of earmarking in the near future.

Hat tip to Mark Spindel for the earmark map.

Posted by Sarah Binder at 04:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While most political junkies sit on the edge of their seats awaiting Super Tuesday, Congress junkies have their eyes on the first congressional primaries of 2008— occurring this Tuesday in Illinois. House primaries can be pretty sleeper affairs, but not so this year in the 3rd Congressional District west of Chicago. There, Rep. Daniel Lipinski, who is seeking his third term, is running in the year’s first seriously contested Democratic primary.

The strongest challenge to Lipinski comes on his left from a Cook County prosecutor who has the backing of the liberal netroots. Lipinski is being challenged for his votes and views on issues of abortion, funding for stem cell research, and troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Why focus on Lipinski for a political science blog? Because he is a card carrying member of the American Political Science Association, a well-known face at annual meetings of APSA’s Legislative Studies Section, and author of Congressional Communication (University of Michigan Press, 2004). Lipinski’s book explores the content of House members’ communications (mainly newsletters) with constituents, and assesses the electoral consequences of such communication. Dan is one of a small breed of political scientists turned member of Congress, and we wish him well.

Can you name other political scientists who are serving or have served in the House or Senate? No fair googling.

Finally, can you name a political scientist who ran for Congress, but didn’t make it? Here’s a hint (ungated) .

Posted by Sarah Binder at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

“Who is Barack Obama?”

Just days before Super-Duper Tuesday, the National Journal has begun to release its annual study of the 2007 voting records of all House and Senate members. According to the NJ’s vote study, Obama is the most liberal senator in the Senate; Hillary Clinton trails, coming in with the 16th most liberal voting record. (For those loyal NJ readers, this may ring a bell: John Kerry’s voting record in 2003 earned him a similar ranking as the most liberal senator when he ran for the Democratic nomination in 2004.) I would share other noteworthy senators’ scores with Monkey Cage readers, but National Journal is holding all the other rankings under wraps until March. But don’t hold your breath for John McCain’s voting score to determine whether or not he is a true conservative. Camping out in New Hampshire kept McCain from casting enough votes to be scored.

NJ calculates ideological scores over three different policy areas— economic, foreign policy, and social issues. NJ this year selected 99 votes that mapped most closely on a liberal-conservative dimension across the three issue areas. Absences are not counted, with the denominator of total votes adjusted to reflect only those votes cast by the senator. Obama missed a third of the votes, casting a “liberal” vote 65 out of 66 times at bat. (Note that Clinton missed significantly fewer votes.) Isolate the 65 votes in the study that both senators were present for, and their records are identical on 63 of the votes— suggesting that voting absences largely account for the 15 point difference between the two leading Democratic presidential contenders.

How reliable are the NJ scores? Because of the selective character of the NJ rating system and the unevenness of senators’ participation, we should compare the NJ ranking to the 2007 ideological rankings produced by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal— developers of the widely-used NOMINATE scores. Using all non-unanimous votes and a far more complicated computational algorithm, Poole and Rosenthal’s 2007 scaling places Obama as the 10th most liberal senator, with senators such as Russ Feingold, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden to Obama’s left. So is Obama a liberal? Undoubtedly, but likely not the most liberal. (After all, last week the Clinton camp was accusing Obama of favoring Ronald Reagan.)

And how did McCain fare in Poole and Rosenthal’s scaling? Keeping in mind that he missed over 40% of the votes included in the Poole analysis, McCain managed to cast one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate, with just 7 senators to his right.

Agents of change come from everywhere.

Posted by Sarah Binder at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Two studies in Legislative Studies Quarterly recently caught my eye.

The first (gated) cby Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen, sexplores the impact of war casualties on the vote shares of Republican Senate candidates in 2006. Controlling for the range of economic, political, and demographic forces that typically shape congressional election outcomes, Kriner and Shen show that the number of war casualties negatively affected the change in Republican candidates vote shares between 2000 and 2006 at the state level. Even with historically low numbers of war deaths, Senate candidates from the president’s party appear to pay a price for war. Granted, the price for incumbent GOP senators running in the hardest hit states was between two and four percentage points. But in closely contested races like those in Missouri and Virginia, the authors argue that the human cost of war may have been decisive in Democratic wins.

In a second piece, (gated) or (ungated), Christian Grose and Bruce Oppenheimer ask a similar question about the impact of war deaths on House elections in 2006. Capitalizing on the uneven distribution of war deaths across congressional districts, Grose and Oppenheimer show that voters punished Republicans, contingent on the number of war deaths in the district. Interestingly, the authors show that Democrats escaped blame for war; voters held only the in-party accountable for the administration’s conduct of the war.

As Republicans attempt this November to regain House seats lost in 2006, expect Democrats to keep hammering home the local human costs of war. National forces— as experienced at the local level— do seem to matter in contemporary congressional elections.

Posted by Sarah Binder at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With increasing frequency, congressional observers refer to the “sixty-vote” Senate. Lacking a rule that would allow a simple majority to vote to end debate and bring the chamber to a vote, the Senate instead relies on its Rule 22 — otherwise known as the cloture rule — to end debate. If 60 senators — three-fifths of the chamber — vote to invoke cloture, the chamber moves to a vote on the underlying amendment, motion, or bill.

I’ve been curious about reports that cloture voting is at an all-time high in the Senate. So I ginned up the simple graph below that shows the average number of cloture motions filed per month, reaching back to 1973. Not only did Senate leaders rely more often on cloture last year than ever before, the chamber’s reliance on cloture increased exponentially. No wonder a House member joked last year (was it really a joke?) that it takes 60 senators to vote to order pizza. (Because I grew up in New Haven, the home of truly awe-inspring pizza, I do not take pizza jokes lightly.)

Why the surge in cloture motions? Senate Democrats blame Republican filibusters, and argue that GOP obstruction aims to derail the Democrats’ agenda. Republicans accuse Democrats of jumping the gun on cloture before measures have been fully debated. The truth likely falls somewhere in between. Still, roughly half of the cloture motions were filed on measures related to Iraq or other Democratic priorities. It seems quite plausible that Republicans would prefer to block, rather than vote on, a wide range of Democratic initiatives. Of course, as the chart shows, Democrats did their fair share of filibustering when Republicans controlled the Senate in recent years. A recent Brookings report provides a fuller assessment of the arguments and evidence here.

Posted by Sarah Binder at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In addition to the stimulus checks that received a great deal of attention, the economic stimulus package proposed last week by President Bush and House leaders contains a provision to allow Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for one year to purchase home loans up to $729,000 in high-priced housing markets. Currently, the limit for so-called conforming loans is $417,000. Because the alternative “jumbo” loans tend to cost about ¾ of a point more than conforming loans, this change has significant implications in areas in which the average home loan is non-conforming.

For example, according to Money Magazine, the average home price in San Francisco—the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi— is $656,000. Thus, if the stimulus package were to be enacted into law, a San Francisco homeowner with a mortgage equal to the value of the average home could refinance and save $410 a month on their mortgage. Calculate this over a 30-year mortgage, and we are talking about a golden state.

If you don’t think elections have consequences, the average home price in Dixon, Illinois—in the district of the previous House speaker, Dennis Hastert— is $107,000.

Posted by Forrest Maltzman at 06:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)