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Full-Text Articles in American Politics
Effort, Intensity And Position Taking: Reconsidering Obstruction In The Pre-Cloture Senate, Kathleen Bawn, Gregory Koger
Effort, Intensity And Position Taking: Reconsidering Obstruction In The Pre-Cloture Senate, Kathleen Bawn, Gregory Koger
Gregory Koger
Effort is a crucial element of the legislative process — writing bills, forming coalitions, crafting strategies, and debating. We develop a model in which legislative decisions are the product of competitive effort by two teams, one trying to pass new legislation, and the other to block it. Teams choose effort levels based on preferences over the policy outcome, political rewards for effort, and opportunity costs, and the team that produces more effort wins. We apply this model to four cases of major legislation from the pre-cloture Senate: passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the Ship Purchase Act of …
Filibustering And Majority Rule In The Senate: The Contest Over Judicial Nominations, 2003-2005, Gregory Koger
Filibustering And Majority Rule In The Senate: The Contest Over Judicial Nominations, 2003-2005, Gregory Koger
Gregory Koger
This chapter proves a simple point: the Senate could be a much more majoritarian chamber than it is. Presumably, as in the House, the majority party would benefit from restrictions on filibustering. Howevver, senators have been reluctant to make major reforms, even when they are members of the majority party and their party’s agenda is being thwarted by Senate minorities. The”nuclear option” contest over judicial nominations from 2003 to 2005 illustrates one source of this stability: the minority party may refrain from obstruction in the face of a threat to curtail the right to filibuster.