How congressional leaders define loyalty: validating US House party voting scores with party leadership records

ABSTRACT

Measures of party unity are commonplace in the study of legislative voting, particularly in assessments of party influence. Scholars have employed a range of measures in studying loyalty and reward in the U.S. House, but all are proxies for the scores that House party leaders construct for their own processes. These loyalty scores have never been examined in empirical scholarship. Drawing on archived leadership records, I construct leader loyalty scores for House Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s based on leadership-selected key votes in each session. I show that the content of the leader lists was very sensitive to political context as the leadership responded to short-term challenges, but in the aggregate, leader loyalty scores are closely related over time to other indicators. As predictors of party rewards—in the form of committee posts and legislative success—the leadership’s measure provides some clearer evidence of reward, particularly in comparison to conventional party unity scores.

KEYWORDS:

• Party voting
• party loyalty
• party unity
• party leadership
• key votes

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the Dirksen Center and its director, Frank Mackaman, as well as to Cheryl Gunselman (Foley Papers, Washington State University) and Justine Sundaram (O'Neill Papers, Boston College) for their assistance in my research, and I thank Jan Box-Steffensmeier for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Papers, Burns Library, Boston College. Series V, Box 6, Folder 13; Box 7, Folders 1-6; Box 8, Folders 1-3; Box 9, Folders 1-2. Congressional Papers of Thomas S. Foley, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Holland and Terrell Libraries, Washington State University. Box 52, Folders 1364-1365.

2 The one exception to this rule is the 97th Congress. In this Congress—the last in which Democrats separated ‘Speaker preference’ and ‘key votes’—the key vote list is far smaller than in either the 96th or 98th Congresses, and I use the full ‘Speaker preference’ list for scoring.

3 Scores for each Congress are based on the combined set of key votes for both sessions for the 95th– 98th and 100th Congresses. For the 99th Congress, because of missing second-session key votes in the archives, the scores are based on first-session key votes only.

4 Prestige committees include Ways and Means, Appropriations, Rules, and Commerce—the top four committees in value to members in this time period. Committee value has changed in the intervening decades, with Rules in particular declining in prestige as its autonomy has eroded in the post-1994 House. See discussion and evidence based on the Groseclose and Stewart (1998) method of committee ranking in Stewart (2018).

Additional information

Funding

The archival portion of this research was supported by a Congressional Research Award from the Dirksen Congressional Center.