Discharge Petitions, Agenda Control,
and the Congressional Committee System 1927-1976
Kathryn Pearson
Department of Political Science
University of Minnesota
[email protected]
Eric Schickler
Department of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley
[email protected]
Abstract
Since its inception in 1924, the discharge petition process has offered a simple majority of House
members a mechanism to circumvent gatekeeping imposed by committee chairs and party
leaders. Analysis of discharge petitions has been limited because until 1993, the names of the
members who sign were only made public in the relatively unusual cases in which the petition
reached the threshold of 218 signatures. However, we recently discovered all of the discharge
petitions filed up until 1976 at the National Archives. We have constructed a dataset that
includes the signatories on each of the 404 discharge petitions filed from the 70th through the
94th Congress, along with the order in which the members signed and each member’s district,
party, ideology, committee assignments, and seniority. We use this rich new dataset to test
hypotheses concerning agenda politics and the House committee system from the late 1920s
through the mid-1970s. We also compare the historic use of the discharge petition to its use in
the contemporary period, in which the signatures on all discharge petitions are public. We find
substantial shifts in the types of members using the discharge procedure over time. During much
of the conservative coalition era when southern Democrats and minority party Republicans
frequently voted together, northern Democrats rather than minority party Republicans were most
likely to sign discharge petitions. We also find that members with a greater stake in the
committee system, particularly senior legislators and members of top committees, were
significantly less likely to sign discharge petitions. Our evidence, however, does not support a
story of universal norms that include apprenticeship, as some scholars have suggested. Instead,
we find that even during the era of the “textbook Congress,” members’ behavior varies according
to their own power and stake in the system: junior members and those with low-quality
committee assignments demonstrate little reticence about challenging committee agenda control.
Prepared for presentation at the History of Congress Conference at Princeton University, May
18-19, 2007. We thank Eleanor Powell, Kjersten Nelson, Nicole Fox, Logan Dancey, Saul
Jackman, Ian Yohai, Nicole Wacker, and Kevin McClean for their valuable research assistance.
The helpful comments of Greg Huber, Rick Hall, David Mayhew, Jasjeet Sekhon, Rob Van
Houweling, Greg Wawro, Jason Wittenberg, Rocio Titiunik, Don Wolfensberger, Rick Beth, and
Larry Evans are gratefully acknowledged.
1
The ability of the majority party, committees, and chamber majorities to determine which
items reach the floor for action is a core feature of legislative organization. Congressional
observers and scholars have long debated whether party leaders and committees can block bills
that they oppose when confronted by a supportive floor majority. Since its inception in 1924 and
revisions in 1931, the discharge petition process has offered a simple majority of House
members a mechanism to circumvent gatekeeping imposed by committee chairs and party
leaders. If 218 members sign a discharge petition, the bill (or resolution) specified on the
petition is considered on the House floor, after a vote, under the terms on the petition. Unlike
other mechanisms to evade gatekeeping – such as Calendar Wednesday – the discharge process,
if used skillfully, has generally not been subject to dilatory tactics that mitigate its effectiveness.
As a result, members’ use of the discharge process offers an important window into the dynamics
of agenda control and the committee system in the House.
While thousands of measures routinely die in committee, discharge petitions reveal that a
group of members cared enough about a particular issue to mount a drive to bypass the usual
legislative process and circumvent committee gatekeeping. Discharge petitions, then, are a
particularly useful way to identify the initiatives a subset of members cared most about that were
being blocked from the congressional floor agenda, and by extension, which members were
dissatisfied with the existing patterns of agenda control in the House.
Nonetheless, scholarship on the discharge procedure has been limited. One reason has
been that until 1993, the names of the members who sign the petitions were only made public in
the 48 cases in which the petition reached the threshold number of signatures and was printed in
the Congressional Record.1 However, we recently discovered heretofore unexamined discharge
petitions filed from the 70th through the 94th Congress at the National Archives. From these 404
discharge petitions filed from 1927 through 1976, we have constructed a dataset that includes the
signatories on each discharge petition filed, along with the order in which the members signed
and information about each member’s party, state and district, ideology, committee assignments,
and seniority.
We use this rich new dataset to test hypotheses concerning agenda politics and the House
committee system from the late 1920s through the mid-1970s. We also compare the historic use
of the discharge petition to its use in the contemporary period, in which the signatures on all
discharge petitions are public. We find substantial shifts in the types of members using the
discharge procedure over time. During much of the conservative coalition era when southern
Democrats and minority party Republicans frequently voted together, northern Democrats rather
than minority party Republicans were most likely to sign discharge petitions. Indeed, from the
mid-1940s to late 1960s, Republicans were significantly less likely to sign petitions than were
northern Democrats, despite their minority party status for most of this period. Southern
1
The threshold has been 218 signatures in all congresses except for the 72nd and 73rd, when discharge petitions only
needed 145 signatures. Eleven of the 48 successful discharge petitions were in these two congresses. There were a
handful of occasions when members leaked the names of signatories to the press when a petition had not reached
218 signatures. This occurred in the case of the 1960 Civil Rights Act, as liberals sought to pressure additional
members to sign (Bolling 1965). More recently, the tactic was key to James Inhofe’s (R-OK) 1993 success in
passing the rules change making the names of discharge signatories public. By revealing the names of members
who had not signed on to support the rules change, Inhofe’s allies were able to pressure reluctant members to
support the popular change.
2
Democrats were also consistently less likely to sign petitions than their northern counterparts
from the late 1920s through the late 1960s. As northern Democrats gained greater control of the
committee system in the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the patterns begin to reverse, and
southern Democrats and Republicans increasingly used the discharge procedure for leverage.
Comparing signatories from 1927-1976 to those from 1993 to 2006, an era in which signatures
are publicly available, reinforces the significance of our findings.2 In the contemporary era,
majority party members have rarely signed discharge petitions and the procedure has become
almost exclusively a minority party tool.
While the pattern of discharge petition signatures we find in the contemporary era is what
one would expect in a legislature in which majority party members keep bills supported by the
minority off the agenda, the results for the earlier period show a substantially different pattern of
agenda control.3 In the conservative coalition era, southern Democrats and their GOP allies
evidently tended to support the existing patterns of agenda control in the House. Northern
Democrats most frequently sought to use the discharge petition to force items to the floor,
suggesting that their bills, rather than southern Democrats’ and Republicans’, were the ones kept
off the agenda.
Our results also provide insight into patterns of deference to committees across time.
While it has long been asserted that the “textbook Congress” committee system was protected by
norms deterring members from violating committee property rights over legislation (see, e.g.,
Bailey 1989; Froman 1967; MacNeil 1963; Oleszek 2004), there has been little systematic
evidence testing whether members in fact demonstrated such deference. We show that senior
members, members with high-quality committee assignments, and members of committees that
are frequent targets of discharge petition drives were less likely to sign discharge petitions during
the 1920s-70s. These results indicate that members were making investments in an
institutionally-defined, seniority-based system that allocates power. Our evidence, however,
does not support a story of universal norms that include apprenticeship, as some scholars have
suggested. Instead, we find that members’ behavior varies according to their stake in the
committee system: junior members and those with low-quality committee assignments
demonstrate little reticence about challenging committee agenda control.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the impact of committee membership and seniority is relatively
weak in the recent Republican-controlled Congresses and the Democratic-controlled 103rd
Congress. Seniority and committee assignments made no difference among majority party
members from 1993-2006; very few majority party members signed, regardless of whether they
had high quality assignments or accrued seniority. While seniority continued to matter – though
less consistently than in the past -- for minority party members during this period, membership
on top committees or committees that were frequent discharge targets had no effect. This
provides further evidence that the discharge process is now generally viewed simply as a
2
Data from 1977-1992 are not yet available at the Archives because thirty years must pass before discharge
petitions are released.
3
The contemporary patterns may well also be compatible with non-partisan, preference-based accounts. Our claim
is narrower: the conservative coalition era pattern is inconsistent with the majority party agenda control model.
3
minority party tool, rather than as an outlet for disaffected legislators in both parties.4 Taken
together, the results indicate that the set of members with a stake in extant patterns of agenda
control has changed considerably in recent years: in our earlier period, senior members of both
parties had a stake in protecting the committee system, with southern Democrats and
Republicans typically the most invested; in the more polarized contemporary House, majority
members appear far more invested in committee gatekeeping than do members of the minority
party.
In the next section, we briefly review prior research on the discharge process and outline
a series of hypotheses derived from prior theoretical and empirical research on agenda-setting in
the House. After providing a descriptive overview of our data, we then test these hypotheses in a
variety of ways. First, we analyze the pattern of signatures in each Congress separately, using a
common set of independent variables. We then pool the observations across Congresses from
1929-76, including fixed effects for each member. This allows us to mitigate concerns that our
Congress-by-Congress results reflect unmeasured heterogeneity that might account for the
observed effects of seniority and committee assignments (e.g., that the effect of seniority is due
to a cohort effect). Once again, seniority and committee assignments emerge as important
predictors of members’ propensity to sign. Finally, we examine each petition individually as a
dependent variable and examine the distribution of coefficient estimates. Along the way, we
analyze discharge petitions in the contemporary era in the same way to highlight the major
changes and the few remaining continuities.
Discharge Petitions and the Study of Congress
Discharge petitions provide members of the House of Representatives a majoritarian
option for bringing legislation to the floor that has been bottled up by committee chairs or party
leaders (Krehbiel 1991). The petition process was launched with a 1924 rules change, though
the procedure in place from 1925-30 included important loopholes that limited its usefulness.5
Since the adoption of the so-called “Crisp Rule” in 1931, however, members have had the ability
to discharge substantive legislation and special rules from committees, including the Rules
Committee.6 A member of Congress may file a discharge petition once a bill or resolution has
been stuck in committee for 20 days, or 7 days in the Committee on Rules (Beth 2003). Once
4
Interestingly, in the 1920s-60s, seniority mattered roughly equally for northern Democrats and Republicans.
However, seniority evidently had little impact for southern Democrats during this period. This suggests that even
junior southern Democrats – much like junior Republicans in the 104th-109th Congresses – were fully invested in the
prevailing system of agenda control.
5
The House initially adopted a discharge rule in 1910 but that version did not involve the use of petitions and
members quickly learned that it was not workable in the face of determined opposition. The 1924 version – adopted
by insurgent Republicans and minority Democrats -- avoided several of the earlier loopholes, but an enhanced GOP
majority in 1925 added several difficult obstacles for discharge supporters (Schickler 2001). In February 1932,
Speaker John Nance Garner (D-TX) announced that the signatories to discharge petitions would only be made
public if the petition reaches the threshold for success (145 at the time; 218 for most of the period). From 1925-32,
there was uncertainty concerning whether it was legitimate to reveal the names of signatories; thus, in a few cases,
the names were revealed to the press, but Garner’s ruling clarified that such actions were not permitted (Beth 1990;
Cannon’s Precedents, vol. 7, sec. 1008).
6
The rule was named for Charles Crisp (D-GA), the author and leading proponent of the change, who took special
care to design a rule that would be workable.
4
the petition garners 218 signatures, the signatories are entered into the Congressional Record.
After a motion to discharge passes on the floor, the committee under question is discharged.
Much of the scholarly discussion of the discharge petition has focused on whether it is an
effective tool for the minority party to force items onto the floor agenda. For example, Crombez,
Groseclose, and Krehbiel (2006) highlight the discharge rule as an important limit on agenda
control by the majority party and committee leaders. In the end, floor majorities can work their
will through such mechanisms. Skeptics of the discharge procedure’s importance counter that
petitions rarely reach the critical threshold of 218 signatures, and even when they do reach that
threshold, the underlying bills often die at later stages of the legislative process. Since 1931, a
total of 597 discharge petitions have been filed. Forty-eight petitions reached the requisite
number of signatures and were entered in the Congressional Record, and the House voted to
discharge the committee targeted 26 times, passing 19 of the measures (Beth 2003).7 Discharge
petition pressure contributed to the passage of additional measures, including eleven cases (ten
identified by Beth and an additional measure we identified in the 84th Congress) where petitions
reached 218 signatures but were considered under other procedures, eight of which became law.
The House also considered 32 measures that were the subject of petitions still pending. Of these,
all but three passed the House, and 17 were enacted. Beth estimates that sixteen percent of
discharge attempts since 1931 reached the signature threshold or made it to the floor through
some other route (Beth 2003). Even if one emphasizes the paucity of cases in which discharge
directly results in bill passage, such an observation does not necessarily indicate that the
procedure is without teeth. As Cox and McCubbins (1993: 259) point out in arguing against the
committee dominance view of congressional politics, “from the infrequency of successful
discharge petitions alone, one cannot validly infer that committees are strong or protected by
norms of reciprocity. It is just as possible that the committee, once the discharge petition was
filed, took whatever actions were necessary to forestall the petition’s passage—commencing
hearings, say, or incorporating certain provisions in a related bill.”
A more powerful potential critique is that the discharge rule itself is severely flawed as an
instrument to force items onto the agenda. In Setting the Agenda, Cox and McCubbins (2005:
85-86) argue that the majority party exercises an effective veto over which items reach the floor
and that the discharge petition is not a significant check on this power. They reason that “any
coalition seeking to use the discharge procedure to push legislation anathema to the Rules
Committee still faced a tougher parliamentary row to hoe than would an equally sized coalition
with Rules’ backing. If the coalition chose to place the bill on the appropriate calendar, they
would need to mount a second discharge petition in order to force the Rules Committee to report
a special rule for the bill (something that was allowed under the new [1931] rule). If instead they
chose to consider the bill immediately, they would have to do so under the general rules of the
House, which means that all points of order against the bill would be admissible, that all
amendments would be in order, and that the full array of dilatory tactics could be employed.” As
a result, “using the discharge procedure to get around committees does not do members any good
if they lack the backing of the Rules Committee or the majority party leadership” (86). Their
rationale overlooks a critical feature of the discharge rule, devised deliberately by Crisp in 1931
7
Beth finds 47 discharge petitions, but we identify one additional petition in the 84th Congress that reached 218 and
was entered in the Congressional Record. According to Beth (2003), two of these 47 measures became law, and
two others changed House rules.
5
to overcome such obstruction. Members favoring a bill bottled up in a legislative committee can
introduce a special rule for consideration of the bill while it is still pending in the substantive
committee. The resolution can include the same provisions – e.g., time and amendment
restrictions – as a special rule issued by the Rules Committee.8 Like other special rule proposals,
the resolution would be referred to the Rules Committee. After waiting the requisite seven days,
the bill supporter then can file a discharge petition against the special rule. By discharging the
special rule, the underlying bill can be brought to the floor under favorable time and amendment
rules and without need for approval by the Rules Committee (see Beth 2003).9 Richard Beth has
highlighted this procedure in Congressional Research Service reports on the discharge process
(Beth 1994, 2003a, 2003b). While the tactic has varied in its use over time, the vast majority of
discharge petitions filed in the past decade have targeted special rules for bills still pending in
committee.10 Thus, while the discharge process may be time-consuming and cumbersome, it is a
workable majoritarian option.
Agenda Control and Institutional Investment
Beyond the general claim that the discharge procedure is inconsequential, the party cartel
theory outlined by Cox and McCubbins generates the expectation that minority party members
will be the most frequent supporters of discharge efforts. The majority party’s veto over
legislation, according to Cox and McCubbins, implies that the set of bills emerging from
committee will be dominated by the majority party’s agenda (1993: 260). As a tool of the
majority party, the committee system will filter out minority agenda items that lack majority
8
A 1997 rule change specified that such a discharged special rule must address the consideration of only one
measure and must not propose to admit or effect a nongermane amendment.
9
John Patty (2006) has recently pointed out another potential limitation in the discharge procedure. Patty argues that
under a literal reading of the rules, the Speaker may be able to set time limits strategically to circumvent discharge.
Recall that a discharge petition can only be filed against a special rule if it has been pending for seven days in the
Rules Committee. The Speaker could set a deadline for the Rules Committee to report that is fewer than seven days.
This would essentially discharge the Rules Committee from the resolution, but since it was extracted via a time limit
rather than the discharge procedure, the resolution would not be privileged for floor consideration. We discussed the
possibility with two leading authorities on the discharge procedure and Rules Committee, Richard Beth of the
Congressional Research Service and Donald Wolfensberger, the former GOP staff director of the Rules Committee
from 1991-1996. Neither had ever contemplated the possibility of a discharge petition being circumvented in this
fashion and they were uncertain whether it would work in practice. In any case, Patty's argument applies only to the
period in which the Speaker has had the authority to set such time limits, which is after the main period examined in
this paper. (The authority to set time limits on referred measures was granted in 1975 and strengthened in 1995). For
the contemporary period, we have found no evidence that Republicans were aware of this loophole in the rules and
contemplated using it to defeat the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, which was enacted through the
discharge process over GOP leaders’ strenuous objections in 2002. Still, it may be that a combination of rules
introduced for other purposes has inadvertently created a loophole that might be exploited in the future. At the same
time, both Beth and Wolfensberger emphasized that any effort to exploit such a loophole would be widely viewed as
an illegitimate violation of the intent and meaning of the discharge procedure and therefore highly risky. It is also
worth noting that the Speaker would need to set the time limit when the special rule is first referred to the Rules
Committee -- which would either mean anticipating which petitions are likely to reach 218 signatures or setting time
limits of six days or less on all special rule resolutions introduced by individual members, making it seem unlikely
that the Speaker would ever use this loophole.
10
Interestingly, it appears to have taken several years for members to discover the tactic. It was first used in 1935
and was in wide use in the late 1930s, but its use in the ensuing decades was uneven (Beth 2003: Table 1). Starting
in 1995 – perhaps dating to Rick Beth’s 1994 report – the technique has been used in all but a handful of cases.
6
party support, and therefore minority members should be the most likely to turn to the petition
process. Furthermore, since discharge petitions are an assault on the majority’s agenda control –
even if an allegedly ineffectual one – one would expect majority party members to resist signing
the petitions. That is, if signing discharge petitions were costless for majority party members,
this would undermine the party leadership’s agenda monopoly. By contrast, since the minority is
largely shut out of the agenda-formation process, its members will have an incentive to support
efforts to evade gatekeeping. Therefore, according to the party cartel theory, minority party
Republicans should be the most frequent discharge petition signatories in the 1930s-70s (except
for the four years when the party was in the majority when minority party Democrats should sign
most often) and in 1993 and 1994, while minority Democrats should be the most frequent
signatories from 1995-2006.
Furthermore, Cox and McCubbins (2005: 86) argue that to the extent that the discharge
petition was effective, it was an instrument of the majority party leadership against the
occasionally recalcitrant Rules Committee. While discharge is generally ineffective and
inconsequential, they suggest that there may be a handful of cases in which it was successful –
namely, when the majority party leadership supported the effort. They cite the example of the
1938 passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. It is worth noting, however, that our data reveal
that of the thirty-eight petitions that reached the critical threshold for action from 1927-1976,
fifteen were signed by a majority of the majority party and seventeen were signed by a majority
of the minority party.11 This suggests that the petitions were a tool used by both parties. Even in
the contemporary era, when majority party members rarely signed discharge petitions (unlike
northern Democrats in the 1930s-60s), there were three discharge petitions that reached 218
without the support of majority party leaders or a majority of the majority party. Two of these
were in the Democratic-controlled 103rd Congress and one was in the GOP-controlled 107th
Congress. One successful discharge petition in the 103rd Congress led to a rules change (making
discharge petitions public) and the successful petition in the 107th Congress led to the enactment
of the landmark McCain-Feingold/Shays-Meehan campaign finance legislation.12 In future
drafts, we will separately consider the pattern of signatures on petitions reaching the critical
threshold of 218 to those failing to reach the threshold to see whether the partisan dynamics
differ. Preliminary analysis suggests that the determinants of signing the successful petitions are
similar to those for the unsuccessful petitions. In any case, the general expectation from Cox and
McCubbins is that the vast majority of petitions should be unsuccessful and, since their
inception, they should primarily be supported by minority party members.
We present an alternative hypothesis about agenda control generated by a close
examination of the House Rules Committee during the Conservative Coalition era. From
approximately 1937 through the early 1960s, southern Democrats and minority party
11
The remaining six were all filed in the period from 1931-35 when the threshold for action was 145 signatures, so
that a petition could succeed even if less than a majority of the House signed. There are six additional cases in
which a majority of the majority party signed yet the petition failed to reach the critical threshold; there are 20 cases
where most minority party members signed yet the petition failed.
12
A discharge petition for H.Res.203, a special rule for H.R.2356, the Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform bill,
was considered on the House floor once it reached 218 signatures in the 107th Congress. Twenty Republicans
signed the petition, and the bill was ultimately enacted into law. In the 103rd Congress, 45 Democrats supported the
successful petition to make discharge petition signatories public, and 54 Democrats signed the petition for a
balanced budget Constitutional amendment, which was considered on the floor but rejected.
7
Republicans dominated the Committee and evidently kept many bills favored by northern
Democrats off the agenda. Several scholars have also found that the Rules Committee was more
than a veto point during this era. Schickler (2001) and Lapham (1954) claim that the Committee
repeatedly pushed bills and resolutions to the floor that promoted conservative electoral and
policy interests at the expense of liberal Democrats’ interests. Examining six of the Congresses
in this era, Schickler and Pearson (2006) identify forty cases in which the Rules Committee
forwarded bills or resolutions to the floor that were designed to promote either new conservative
policies or conservative-backed investigations. These proposals were opposed by the
Democratic White House and the Rules Committee chairman, and often were opposed by the
majority leader. In nearly all of the cases, the battles in the Committee and on the House floor
revealed a deeply divided Democratic party, with a majority of northern members typically
arrayed against a majority of southerners, challenging the idea that the majority party has
consistently been able to block measures opposed by its members from reaching the House floor
(cf. Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2002, 2005). Given these results—combined with other evidence
that other key legislative committees also were led by conservative southern Democrats and their
GOP allies—we hypothesize that northern Democrats will be the most likely to resort to
discharge petitions to overcome existing patterns of agenda control during this era. Southern
Democrats should be the least likely to support discharge efforts due to their stake in the existing
structure of agenda power. We conjecture that the committee system’s role in holding back civil
rights bills accentuated this stake, although at this stage the evidence for this proposition is
indirect. We also expect Republicans, who enjoyed close working relationships with the
southerners on many key committees, including Rules, to be less likely to sign discharge
petitions during the conservative coalition period. By contrast, once the conservative coalition
lost its influence over the Rules Committee and other key committees in the 1960s and early
1970s, we expect to see minority Republicans and perhaps even southern Democrats turning to
the discharge process.13
Still another way to view the discharge procedure is as a potential challenge to committee
power. In the so-called textbook Congress era, many have argued that committees enjoyed
considerable independence and were able to use their gatekeeping power without substantial fear
of challenge (Deering and Smith 1997; Shepsle 1989). For example, Weingast and Marshall
(1988) claim that the committee system provides an enforcement mechanism for a giant
institutional “logroll” in which members trade influence with one another, gaining power in the
policy area they care most about (which, by assumption, is the jurisdiction covered by their
committee), while sacrificing the ability to determine policy in areas less salient to them.
Shepsle (1989: 244) argues that this committee-based equilibrium was upheld by “a system of
deference and reciprocity” that discouraged challenges to committee power. The discharge
procedure potentially undermines this institutional logroll by threatening committee gatekeeping.
As a result, one might expect norms of restraint to discourage members from signing discharge
petitions.
Indeed, scholars have repeatedly highlighted the role of norms of reciprocity and restraint
in deterring discharge petition drives. For example, Oleszek (2004: 143) notes that some
13
As noted below, it is striking that southerners begin to sign discharge petitions soon after the landmark civil rights
legislation of the 1960s was enacted. Indeed, many of the petitions in the early 1970s sought to roll back busing and
attracted wide southern Democratic support.
8
members who support legislation will not sign a petition to extract it from committee because
doing so violates House norms and infringes upon committee prerogatives (see also Bailey 1989;
Robinson 1963; Froman 1967; Teifer 1989). A few close observers of the House have even
claimed that some members refuse to sign any discharge petitions as a matter of principle (Clapp
1963; Galloway 1976) or because they view floor consideration of a bill not fully aired in
committee as dangerous (MacNeil 1963). By contrast, Epstein (1997: 290) argues that when
members who initially favor a bill decide not to sign a discharge petition, it may have nothing to
do with norms. Instead, “the decision to obstruct carried some information, and the median floor
voter, upon receiving that information, learned something about expected outcomes in that area.”
While many scholars have pointed to norms as an important influence protecting
committees, finding systematic evidence that norms affect individual behavior has been difficult.
A key problem is that universally-held norms should generate no variation in individual
behavior. The norms perspective misses the extent to which members receive varying benefits
from existing rules and practices; indeed, pressures for reform have repeatedly come from junior
members – often with relatively poor committee assignments – seeking a wider distribution of
power bases (Schickler, Sides, and McGhee 2003; Schickler and Sides 2000). Thus, we
hypothesize that members who are most invested in the existing structure of agenda control in
the House should be more reluctant to undermine the committee process by signing discharge
petitions. Several member characteristics should reflect this stake in the committee system.
First, we expect senior members to be less likely to sign discharge petitions. With seniority
comes greater power—or greater potential of attaining power—in the House and a concomitant
increase in commitment to the existing rules and structure of agenda control. Second, members
with high quality committee assignments in the “textbook era” should be less likely to sign
petitions because they disproportionately benefit from the existing system of strong committees
with broad jurisdictions. We measure the quality of assignments using several measures –
membership on an exclusive committee,14 the value of each member’s portfolio of assignments
as measured by so-called “Grosewart” scores,15 and whether the member is a chair, next in line
to be chair under strict seniority (committee bridesmaid from here on), or ranking minority
member on a major committee. We also examine the impact of serving on a committee that is a
frequent target of discharge petition efforts, with the expectation that those targeted should be
less likely to sign.
14
Exclusive committees include Appropriations, Rules, and Ways and Means. In the contemporary era we analyze
our data using this measure and a measure that includes the Commerce Committee, which is an exclusive committee
for Republicans and new Democratic members beginning in 1995. Democratic Caucus and Republican Conference
rules stipulate that members cannot serve on more than one exclusive committee without a waiver.
15
Groseclose and Stewart (1998) and Canon and Stewart (2002) develop these “Grosewart” scores based on
members’ observed patterns of committee transfers. Committees acquire a high value if members are observed
transferring onto them but rarely leave for another committee. Portfolio values are computed by summing the value
of each member’s committees. We rely only upon the scores for the post-1946 period. Prior to the Legislative
Reorganization Act of 1946, the committee values do not appear to have as strong face validity. We conjecture that
this is because restrictions on committee assignments were more lax, so that there are several committees that rarely
met but members stayed on because membership was costless (that is, they did not sacrifice any assignments by
staying on these committees). These committees have high value estimates using the Groseclose-Stewart approach,
but do not appear comparable to other top committees in practice. For example, the top six committees in the 62nd79th Congresses include War Claims, Territories, Rivers and Harbors, Roads, and World War Veterans Legislation.
9
Prior empirical work on the discharge procedure has yielded suggestive evidence
regarding some of these hypotheses, but has been severely limited by the available data. For
example, Burden (2005) shows that between 1935 and 2005, more discharge petitions are filed
when the Speaker is further from the floor median (relative to the majority party median’s
distance from the floor median), preferences are less heterogeneous, majority party margins are
smaller, under divided government, when reelection rates fall, in midterm election years, and
when filings become public. From these results, Burden concludes that discharge petitions are a
tool of the minority party, but he is not able to examine who filed the petition and who supported
the petitions at the individual level due to data availability. Analyses of signatories on specific
discharge petitions have been used on occasion to adjudicate between the effects of party and
preferences on support for high-profile legislation. Krehbiel (1995) and Binder, Lawrence, and
Maltzman (1999) analyze members’ cosponsorship and discharge petition signatures in the 103rd
Congress in support of “A to Z” legislation to reduce the federal deficit. The conclusions of
these studies differ; Krehbiel finds that preferences, not party, explain “waffling,” or the gap
between cosponsorship and signing the “A to Z” discharge petition, while Binder, Lawrence, and
Maltzman find that majority party members are deterred from signing the petition, controlling for
preferences. Both studies find that senior members are less likely to sign discharge petitions.
Similarly, Martin and Wolbrecht (2000) analyze cosponsorship and discharge petition signatures
on two petitions in the pre-reform era that reached the 218 signature threshold – the Equal Rights
Amendment in the 91st Congress and the School Prayer Amendment in the following Congress.
Martin and Wolbrecht find evidence of both partisan and policy effects, with majority party
Democrats more likely to sign both petitions when one controls for ideology. They also find that
junior members were more likely to sign the two petitions and that members of the targeted
Judiciary committee were less likely to sign. Studies of discharge petition signatories, then, have
mainly been limited to analyses of one or two discharge petitions from which it is difficult to
generalize.16 By focusing on all petitions filed from 1927-1976 and in the contemporary era, we
are able to overcome these limitations and provide systematic evidence concerning the use of the
discharge procedure and the dynamics of agenda control in the House.17
Discharge Petitions, 1927-1976
An overview of the frequency with which members have filed discharge petitions shown
in Table 1 reveals that from 1927 to 1976, members filed a total of 404 discharge petitions, an
16
Lindstadt and Martin (2003) is an exception. They outline and attempt to test an “informational cascades” model
of discharge petition signatures, drawing upon data from the contemporary period of public signatures. Lindstadt
and Martin argue that the entrepreneur who files a discharge petition should seek signatures from members who are
more likely to initiate a positive informational cascade that leads others to infer that the petition is in their interest to
sign. Lindstadt and Martin estimate event history models to explain the occurrence and timing of signatures. While
the results are mixed, they find that members ideologically close to the discharge sponsor are more likely to sign and
that senior members are less likely to sign. The latter finding differed from the authors’ initial expectations.
17
The contemporary period might differ from the 1927-76 period for a variety of reasons. We suspect that the main
difference is attributable to partisan polarization, but it is also possible that the public nature of petition signatures
gives rise to position-taking dynamics that influence the pattern of signatures. In the past, the secrecy of petitions
“provides a foolproof out for reluctant or half-hearted supporters of controversial legislation” (MacKaye 1963; see
also Maslow 1946; Teifer 1989: 322). One possibility is to compare today’s results with those for petitions that
either reached or came close to the critical threshold in the earlier period, since the expectation of secrecy broke
down when the petition reached or neared 218 signatures.
10
average of 16 per Congress. The greatest numbers of discharge petitions were filed in the
Congresses from 1933 to 1950. From the 73rd Congress to the 81st Congress, members typically
filed at least twenty petitions per Congress. More petitions were filed in the 75th Congress than
any other: members filed a total of 43 petitions, averaging 57.5 signatures each, and four of them
reached the 218 threshold. From 1955 to 1968, fewer discharge petitions were filed per
Congress than in the earlier era, but the average number of signatures per petition was well
above the average for the entire period. From 1969 through 1976, the number of discharge
petitions rises again to about ten to fifteen per congress. The same rates continue from 19771992 (Beth 2003).
[Insert Table 1 about here]
The average number of signatories per petition throughout the period is 64, with a
standard deviation of 65.6. Figure 1 is a density plot of the frequencies of signatories, per
petition, revealing that the number of signatories per petition is not normally distributed. Many
discharge petitions attract only a handful of signatures. Eighty-two petitions, or 20 percent,
received fewer than ten signatures, and 302 (75 percent) did not reach 100 signatures. From the
74th Congress on, when the requisite number of signatures was 218, thirty-three (9 percent) of the
petitions received at least 200 signatures.
[Insert Figure 1 about here]
Descriptive statistics suggest that discharge petitions are a tool of both the majority and
minority party. Of the total 404 petitions, 20 were signed by majority of the majority party and
37 were signed by a majority of the minority party. Data presented in Figure 2 show that
northern Democrats were consistently the most likely to use discharge petitions. From the 72nd
Congress through the 91st Congress, the average northern Democrat signed a greater proportion
of discharge petitions filed in each Congress than did the average southern Democrat. During
this same forty year window, northern Democrats usually signed more discharge petitions per
Congress than Republicans did as well. The only exceptions are the 76th and 78th Congresses
(1939-40 and 1943-44), during which the propensity of northern Democrats and Republicans to
sign is about equal, and the 73rd and 74th Congresses (1933-36), during which Republican
members sign more petitions. The pattern of disproportionately high signatures among northern
Democrats is particularly pronounced from the 79th to the 89th Congress (1945-66). These trends
change markedly by the early 1970s. During the 92nd and 93rd Congress (1971-74), northern
Democrats sign at lower rates than southerners and Republicans, and there is little difference
among members in each of the three groups during the 94th Congress (1975-76). These patterns
suggest that up until the early 1970s, northern Democrats were the group most dissatisfied with
the exercise of agenda control in the House and thus were most likely to seek to circumvent
committee gatekeeping.
[Insert Figure 2 about here]
Before analyzing the data in a multivariate context, we performed an exploratory factor
analysis on the petitions in each Congress. The number of factors with eigenvalues over 1.0
varied substantially across Congresses, with more factors estimated to be significant in those
11
Congresses with a higher number of petitions. In most Congresses, however, two or three factors
had eigenvalues greater than 1.0 and we therefore saved members’ factor scores for the first three
factors in each Congress. Interestingly, the first factor correlated extremely highly with the
simple count or proportion of petitions signed by each member. Starting in the 71st Congress, the
first factor correlated with the proportion of petitions signed at .91 or above in each Congress
through the 86th, and in several cases the correlations were in the .97-.99 range. From the 87th –
94th Congress, the correlations are a bit lower but never dip below .73 (89th Congress) and are
typically in the .8-.9 range. We also examined how each petition loaded on this first factor. In
the vast majority of cases, the loadings were positive. For example, in the 71st-76th Congresses,
each of the 160 petitions loads positively on the first factor (computed separately for each
Congress). While there are a few exceptions in later Congresses—particularly in the late 1960s
and 1970s—these results strongly suggest that the first factor is tapping a generalized propensity
to sign the petitions. We estimated the model presented in Figures 3a-3f separately on the firstdimension factor score for each member and on the proportion of petitions in each Congress
signed by the member. Given the high correlation between these two variables, it is not
surprising that the results are virtually identical. We focus below on the models using the
proportion signed as the dependent variable based on the assumption that it is more readily
interpretable.
To test our hypotheses about agenda control, we turn to multivariate analysis. We first
analyze each Congress separately, using the same baseline model to predict the proportion of
petitions signed by each member.18 Since the dependent variable is an aggregation of individual
binary decisions which are likely not independent of one another, the data present several
estimation challenges. We present the results for a binomial General Linear Model that accounts
for overdispersion.19 We explored a range of estimation approaches but the results were
remarkably robust; the results using OLS, for example, are virtually indistinguishable from those
reported. We account for coalitional divisions with a dummy variable that equals 1 if the
member is a southern Democrat and a dummy variable that equals 1 if the member is a
Republican. We also control for ideology by interacting first-dimension DW-NOMINATE
scores with dummy variables for southern Democrats, Republicans, and Northern Democrats.20
18
We run separate models, by Congress, from the 71st to the 94th Congress. We exclude the 70th Congress because
there were only two discharge petitions filed and their signatories were not overlapping. The two petitions were
signed by just 16 and 18 members.
19
The model was estimated in R using the logit link function. To allow for overdispersion, the model specified the
“quasibinomial” family (rather than the simple binomial family). We plan to replicate the analyses using the
Extended Beta Binomial model as well. We focus on the overdispersed binomial GLM results for several reasons:
first, unlike the EBB, it estimates the mean and the standard errors separately, so that the point estimates should be
unaffected if the equation for the variance (standard errors) is misspecified. Much like the EBB – but unlike OLS –
the overdispersed binomial GLM model accounts for the feature that proportions are better estimated when the
counts are higher (i.e., when there are 20 petitions as compared to 5 in a Congress), for heteroskedasticity (due to the
variance being greater when p is closer to .5), and for overdispersion (positive correlations across petitions for
individual members will lead to overdispersion). We find substantial overdispersion in many Congresses. Note that
the positive factor loadings for each petition also suggest that overdispersion is likely to be a problem: members who
sign one petition are more likely to sign the others. In practice, the OLS results are virtually identical to those
presented here. We thank Jasjeet Sekhon, Rocio Titiunik, Greg Wawro, Ian Yohai, and Eleanor Powell for their
help in sorting through these issues.
20
We drop the handful of third-party and Independent members since it is likely that the causal dynamics differ for
such members. Note that the results are exactly equivalent if one replaces the interaction between NOMINATE and
Northern Democrats with a simple main effect for the first-dimension NOMINATE, while keeping the NOMINATE
12
We capture members’ investment in the institution with four variables: a dummy variable that
equals 1 if a member serves on an exclusive committee, a variable indicating the logged number
of terms a member has served, a variable measuring the proportion of discharge petitions that
target a member’s own committee (referred to as “target committee proportion”), and a dummy
variable for committee leadership positions (i.e., chair, bridesmaid, or ranking minority member
status on a major committee).21 We present first differences and 95 percent confidence intervals
for each of these explanatory variables in Figures 3a-3f.
[Insert Figures 3a-3f about here]
Figure 3a compares the expected proportion of petitions signed by the median southern
Democrat to the proportion signed by the median northern Democrat, with seniority and target
committee proportion held at their mean and for non-exclusive committee members and noncommittee leaders (the modal category of those variables).22 The median southern Democrat is
less likely to sign than his northern counterpart in each Congress up until the 92nd (1971-72),
with the gap statistically significant in each Congress except the 89th (1965-66). The negative
coefficients are largest from the 1940s to the early 1960s – with the point estimates indicating
that the proportion of petitions signed by the typical southern Democrat was about .2 to .5 below
the proportion signed by northern Democrats. This gap is substantial, particularly considering
that the standard deviation in the proportion signed was typically in the .1 to .15 range. These
results make clear the extent to which southern Democrats supported the existing pattern of
agenda control as compared to their northern Democratic counterparts. It is striking that the
negative coefficients persist even when Democrats are in the minority (the 71st, 80th, and 83rd
Congresses). While this is not a simple story of southerners refusing to sign petitions on civil
rights issues – many of the Congresses had no discharge petitions that focused on civil rights at
all – it may be that the southerners’ stake in upholding committee gatekeeping was partly rooted
in the belief that committees offered a key protection in keeping civil rights bills off the
agenda.23
Figure 3b compares the median Republican to the median northern Democrat. The
median Republican is significantly less likely than the median northern Democrat to sign
discharge petitions in thirteen of the Congresses in our analysis, the 79th Congress through the
interactions with southern Democrats and Republicans (e.g. the main effect for NOMINATE would equal the
estimate we obtain here for the NOMINATE-Northern Democratic interaction -- since northern Democrats are the
excluded category in the analysis. Similarly, the estimates for the other interaction terms would be unaffected when
one computes marginal effects). We chose to interact ideology with the party/region groupings because one might
expect ideology to have different effects for the three groups of members – e.g., one might expect the most liberal
northern Democrats and most conservative Republicans to be more likely to sign (different) petitions. It turns out
that within all three groups liberals are generally more likely to sign discharge petitions than are conservatives
during the conservative coalition era. Thus, it is no surprise that simply including a main effect for ideology
generated substantively identical results.
21
We use the logged number of terms because it seems likely that an additional term would have a greater impact
for a member who has served one or two terms than for a member who has served many terms already. However,
the results are identical if one instead uses the raw number of terms.
22
Note that if one drops the NOMINATE measure and simply compares northern Democrats to southern Democrats
(and Republicans), the results are virtually identical to those presented here.
23
We do not want to push this too far. After all, the threat of civil rights legislation was quite distant in the late
1920s and well into the 1930s.
13
88th Congress, and the 71st and 90th-91st Congresses (see Figure 3b). Republicans were in the
majority during only three of these Congresses. It is striking, then, that in ten Congresses –
including each Democratic Congress from 1945-1964 – minority party Republicans were less
likely to try to circumvent committee agenda control than were majority party northern
Democrats. During this peak period for the conservative coalition, the expected proportion of
petitions signed by the median Republican was about .15 to .45 fewer than the proportion signed
by the median northern Democrat.24 These results underscore the significance of conservative
coalition agenda control that evidently kept more northern Democrats’ initiatives off the agenda
than initiatives from southern Democrats and Republicans. Republicans are significantly more
likely to sign discharge petitions in just four Congresses: during the 73rd and 74th Congress (i.e.,
the height of the New Deal), and then again during the 92nd and 93rd (but not 94th) Congress.
These positive coefficients are generally smaller than the negative ones, but they correspond with
the ebb and flow of the conservative coalition’s power. Indeed, it is striking that the same “vshaped” pattern of coefficients occurs for both southern Democrats and Republicans: during the
1930s, the estimates are relatively small for both groups, but then become large and negative in
the 1940s-50s before gradually moving back toward zero in the mid-to-late 1960s and even
becoming positive in the early 1970s.
Our results also show that members’ stake in the seniority-based committee system
negatively affects their likelihood of signing discharge petitions controlling for their party and
ideology. Figure 3c shows first differences comparing senior members to junior members—i.e.,
those with seniority one standard deviation above and below the mean. Twenty of the twentyfour point estimates are negative, with statistically significant estimates in fifteen Congresses
(each in the expected direction). While the magnitude of the estimates varies, they are generally
in the .05 range, suggesting an appreciable gap between senior and junior members (recall the
standard deviation in proportion signed is typically .1 to .15). Exclusive committee membership
depresses discharge petition activity as well. As shown in Figure 3d, members on the
Appropriations, Ways and Means, and Rules Committees generally sign fewer petitions than
their colleagues, all else equal. This effect is statistically significant in only about one quarter of
the Congresses we analyze, but the coefficient is consistently negative. Similarly, members
serving on committees that are frequently targeted show a tendency to resist this type of
infringement on a committee’s turf (see Figure 3e). The impact of membership on frequently
targeted committees has a statistically significant negative effect on a member’s propensity to
sign a petition in ten of the Congresses we analyze, and the coefficients are negative in all but
one Congress. Finally, the committee leadership variable has the expected negative sign in
twenty-one of twenty-four Congresses and is statistically significant in nine cases (see Figure 3f).
We conducted a variety of robustness tests in the Congress-by-Congress analysis. As
noted above, we replicated each of the models using factor scores as the dependent variable and
the results are indistinguishable from those presented.25 Additionally, adding second dimension
DW-NOMINATE scores to the baseline model did not affect the results. Neither did including a
main effect for the NOMINATE dimensions while excluding the interaction terms terms.
Dropping the NOMINATE measures and simply including the dummy variables for southern
24
Again, the results are virtually identical if one drops the NOMINATE measure and compares northern Democrats
to Republicans.
25
We used OLS with robust standard errors.
14
Democrats, Republicans, and the “investment” variables also produced essentially the same
results.
We also included alternative measures tapping members’ investment in the committee
system. For the post-1946 period, we substituted Groseclose-Stewart committee portfolio values
for the exclusive committee dummy variable. As expected, it typically generated a negative,
statistically significant estimate while leaving the other variables unaffected. We opted to
present the results with the exclusive dummy to allow a comparable set of analyses across the
full period. In addition, we estimated all of the models in OLS and the results were
indistinguishable from those presented here.26
Turning to the more recent Congresses, we have analyzed the discharge petitions for the
103 -109th Congresses (1993-2006). Unlike the conservative coalition era, there is a sharp
partisan divide: the majority of majority party members (Democrats in the 103rd and Republicans
from the 104th Congress on) signed no discharge petitions. The few exceptions tended to sign
just one or two petitions per Congress.27 In a multivariate analysis of the 103rd Congress,
minority party Republicans are significantly more likely to sign than northern Democrats.
Interestingly, there is a small positive effect for southern Democrats as well – as we found in the
early 1970s once northern Democrats had begun to gain control of key committees. We suspect
the southern effect is simply attributable to the remaining (though much smaller) policy gap
between northern and southern Democrats in 1993 and 1994. A significant negative effect for
seniority endures, as does the negative effect for exclusive committee membership. The results
for the Republican-controlled Congresses diverge even more sharply from the earlier era. In the
multivariate model in the GOP Congresses, the estimate for GOP partisanship is substantial,
negative, and significant – with even freshmen Republicans predicted to sign just about 0
petitions. The southern Democrat dummy is also negative but much smaller, which we again
attribute to a lingering policy gap among Democrats. While there is a hint of an effect for
seniority among minority party Democrats, the estimates for the other variables tapping
investment in the committee system are negligible for both Democrats and Republicans.28 These
results suggest that the set of actors with a stake in the existing structure of agenda power has
shifted considerably: all majority party Republicans generally defended gatekeeping, while
Democrats – regardless of the quality of their own assignments – frequently signed discharge
petitions.29
rd
26
We opted to present the more complicated overdispersed binomial GLM model because it is technically
appropriate given the nature of the data. We also obtained the same results using simpler GLM binomial estimation
without accounting for overdispersion.
27
This contrasts sharply to the GOP majorities in the 80th and 83rd Congresses. In the 80th Congress, just one third
of Republicans signed no petitions (as compared to approximately 90% in recent GOP Congresses). In the 83rd
Congress, 85 Republicans and 58 Democrats signed no petitions. In the 103rd Congress controlled by Democrats,
160 Democrats signed no petitions (61 percent) while just 5 Republicans signed no petitions (3 percent).
28
When we interact seniority with party in the earlier period, the interaction term is generally statistically
insignificant and is not consistently positive or negative. But in the last few Republican Congresses, seniority
appears to matter for Democrats but not Republicans.
29
As noted above, the public nature of the signatures may partly explain the results: as signing petitions becomes an
exercise in position-taking, long-term investments in the committee system may become less of an influence.
15
The results for the contemporary period bolster the claim that there is substantial
variation over time in the groups favored by existing patterns of agenda control. While minority
party members were the driving force behind petition signing in recent years, the conservative
coalition era is much different. Southerners and minority party Republicans were generally less
likely to sign petitions than were northern Democrats – particularly from 1945-64. Members of
both parties with a strong investment in the existing committee system – as measured by
seniority, exclusive committee membership, membership on target committees, and senior
committee leadership positions – also were less likely to sign petitions in the “textbook” era.
The models presented above have the limitation that they focus on the proportion of
petitions each member signs in each Congress, rather than capitalizing upon variation at the
petition-level. We have begun to address this concern in a variety of ways. We estimated the
baseline model for each Congress using each member’s decision to sign each petition as the unit
of analysis. The logit model was estimated separately for each Congress, using robust standard
errors clustered by member (since each member has multiple observations per Congress). We
included dummy variables for each petition to provide separate intercepts.30 One advantage of
this approach is that it allows us to refine our understanding of the impact of being a frequent
target of discharge petitions. For each petition, we include a dummy variable for whether the
member was on the committee targeted for this particular petition and for the proportion of other
petitions in the same Congress for which the member was on the target committee. Interestingly,
the resulting estimates were extremely similar to those obtained in the binomial GLM models.
To save space, we focus on the estimates for being on the target committee and for being a
frequent target for the other petitions in a Congress (Figures 4a-4b). Being on the target
committee for the petition in question has a negative point estimate in all but three Congresses
and is statistically significant in half the cases. Similarly, being a frequent target of other
petitions in a Congress has a negative point estimate in 18 of 24 Congresses, though it is
statistically significant in just four Congresses. Still, this latter result suggests that it is not just a
member’s direct interest in defending his or her committee’s control over the pending legislation,
but also the member’s more general stake in defending committee gatekeeping that deterred
signing petitions. We also experimented with including measures of each member’s ideological
position relative to the committee holding up the legislation and relative to the floor median.
Initial results for these variables were mixed, though including them did not change the estimates
for the variables discussed above. We plan on exploring the predictions of spatial models more
directly in the next draft of this paper.
Pooled Petition-Level Analysis, 1929-1976
One concern about the Congress-by-Congress analyses presented above is that it is
plausible that unmeasured heterogeneity across members may account for our results for the
investment variables. For example, it might be that our seniority estimates are really picking up
30
We also estimated the model using fixed effects for each petition instead of dummy variables (see Katz 2001 on
conditional and unconditional fixed effects logit estimation). The results were again virtually identical, but we focus
on the dummy variable approach because we were (thus far) unable to adjust the standard errors in the fixed effects
model for clustering by member.
16
on cohort differences in the propensity to sign rather than “life cycle” effects.31 To address this
concern, we created a pooled, petition-level dataset. Each observation is an individual member’s
decision to sign a single petition. Thus, putting aside missing data, we have 435*402
observations.32 We estimated a pooled logit model including fixed effects for each member.
Since there is no within-group variance for the partisan groups (Republican, southern Democrat),
we only include the investment variables in this specification.
The results, presented in Table 2, reinforce our findings from the Congress-by-Congress
analysis. Seniority once again has a statistically significant impact on the propensity to sign
discharge petitions. This analysis, then, should assuage concerns that our earlier findings reflect
differences in the types of members that accrue seniority. Membership on exclusive committees
and holding a leadership position on a major committee also remain statistically significant (see
column 1). Reinforcing the findings presented in Figures 4a-4b, the results suggest that
membership on the committee targeted by the discharge petition in question leads members to
resist signing, as does membership on a committee targeted by the other petitions filed in that
Congress.
As a robustness check, we estimated the same model separately for the Congresses before
and after the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 (see columns 2 and 3). The results were
much the same, with the exception that exclusive committee membership fell short of statistical
significance (though it was properly signed) in the earlier period.33
We also ran the baseline model separately for northern Democrats, Republicans, and
southern Democrats. The results, presented in columns 4-6 of Table 2, suggest that the dynamics
within groups were largely similar. The most noteworthy exception is that seniority has no
impact for southern Democrats, even as it has a powerful effect for both northern Democrats and
Republicans. A handful of other variables are properly signed but fall short of statistical
significance when the focus shifts to the region/party groups (e.g., being a frequent target has a
statistically insignificant impact for northern Democrats, though the point estimate is not
statistically distinguishable from the estimate for the entire sample). In sum, the results confirm
our hypothesis that seniority and committee-based investments in the structure of agenda power
deterred members from signing discharge petitions in the 1929-76 period.34
[Insert Table 2 about here]
31
The consistency of the estimates in Figure 3c across a long span of time make this alternative explanation seem
unlikely, but the fixed effects analysis allows for a more direct test.
32
As in the earlier analysis, we exclude the 70th Congress, which had just two petitions, neither of which garnered
more than 18 signatures.
33
For the 1947-76 period, we also ran the model substitute Groseclose-Stewart portfolio values for the exclusive
committee indicator and obtained identical results.
34
One potential concern is that the model does not include separate intercept terms for each petition (though
including petition intercepts in the Congress-by-Congress petition-level analysis did not affect the results there; see
Figures 4a-4b). We are in the process of attempting to add the intercept terms but encountered convergence
problems. We did estimate the member fixed effects models using the proportion signed in each Congress as the
dependent variable and pooling across Congresses. The results were substantively the same as those reported in
Table 2.
17
Petition-by-Petition Analysis
The final major element of our analysis is to examine the decision to sign each petition
separately. This allows us to refine the analysis and to see whether the estimated effects of our
key variables are driven by just a few petitions in each Congress. We restricted the sample to
petitions that were signed by at least 20 members. The independent variables were the dummy
variables for Republicans and southern Democrats, seniority,35 exclusive committee
membership, whether the member was on the committee targeted by the petition in question, and
the proportion of other petitions in that Congress for which the member was on the target
committee. For simplicity, we used OLS to estimate the model.36 Figures 5a to 5f present
histograms of the coefficient estimates.
[Insert Figures 4a-4f about here]
The most striking result is the consistent impact of seniority across petitions. As Figure
5a shows, the estimate for seniority is negative in the vast majority of cases. Similarly, the
southern Democrat dummy also produces negative estimates for the vast majority of petitions,
though there are more exceptions than is the case with seniority (Figure 5b).37 The consistent
negative estimates for these two variables suggest that the results using the more aggregated
measures are not driven by a particular narrow subset of issues. The estimates for the other
independent variables are less consistent but still are consonant with the aggregate results
presented above. For example, the estimates for Republicans tend to be negative but vary widely
across petitions (see Figure 5c).
Interestingly, the distribution of estimates for the two target committee variables are
similar to one another. In both cases, the point estimates tend to be negative, though there are
more exceptions than with seniority or the southern Democrat dummy. These results again
suggest that membership on the committee targeted by the discharge petition in question leads
members to resist signing (shown in Figure 5d), but so does membership on a committee targeted
by the other petitions filed in that Congress (shown in Figure 5e). Similarly, exclusive
committee membership also has a negative impact on signing at the petition-level, again
supporting the hypothesis that members’ general investment in the committee system dissuaded
them from signing discharge petitions (see Figure 5f).38
35
We used the raw number of terms rather than logged terms in this model but will re-run the analysis using logged
terms for the next draft of the paper.
36
When we attempted to estimate the model using logit, we confronted the perfect predictor problem (i.e,. some of
the variables were perfect predictors of the decision to sign certain petitions). We present the OLS results mainly to
indicate the pattern of estimates across petitions, but would not place great stock in any particular point estimate.
We also estimated the models interacting majority party status with target committee membership. The results
suggest that the impact of being on the target committee did not differ systematically depending on majority party
status.
37
Fifteen of the twenty cases in which southern Democrats had a positive estimate of .10 or greater occurred from
1965-76; the remaining five were spread across the preceding thirty-six years.
38
We did not include senior committee leadership positions in this set of models but will do so in the next draft.
18
Discussion and Next Steps
While the analyses presented above are preliminary, several conclusions emerge that
appear to be robust. First, the pattern of discharge petition signatures in the 1940s-60s belies the
notion that the majority party has consistently acted as a cartel that keeps minority party
priorities off the agenda. The relatively low rate of discharge petition signatures by Republicans
as compared to northern Democrats shows that minority members were more satisfied with the
prevalent exercise of agenda control than were northern Democrats, who constituted a majority
of majority party members for most of this period. The sharp contrast with the contemporary
period – in which minority party members are much more likely to sign petitions than are
majority members – reinforces the conclusion that agenda dynamics have shifted dramatically
from the conservative coalition era to the present.
Second, members with a stake in the existing seniority-based structure of committee
power were significantly less likely to sign discharge petitions. This is reflected in the negative
impact of seniority, target committee membership, committee leadership positions, and exclusive
committee membership on signing petitions. This is not a story of universal, all-powerful norms.
Instead, members’ stake in the committee-based system varied, and this variation explains
differences in the propensity to sign discharge petitions. We interpret these findings to mean that
systematic differences in members’ deference to committees were in large part a function of their
investment in the prevailing institutional structure.
We are planning several extensions of the present analysis. First, we will undertake more
extensive comparisons of the dynamics surrounding successful and unsuccessful petitions.39
Second, we will examine which committees tend to be targeted by discharge efforts. One
hypothesis is that committees that are ideological outliers will be the targets of more petitions
with more signatures.40 We also plan to consider the interaction of policy substance with
procedure. In particular, we will ask what types of bills are subject to discharge efforts and how
do the observed patterns of signatures differ by substantive area?41 We also plan to construct
issue-specific policy preference scales using the discharge petition data. This would allow us to
estimate members’ preferences on a given issue – such as civil rights – without being limited to
the narrow set of bills that actually made it to the House Floor and were subjected to a roll call
vote. Furthermore, we can construct measures of members’ “private” preferences on policy
issues from those petitions that fell short of the 218 threshold in the 1927-76 era. We thus view
this paper as a first exploration of a rich new data source for congressional scholars.
39
As noted above, our preliminary analysis of this issue suggests that the coefficient estimates are similar for
petitions that reach the threshold of 218 signatures as compared to petitions that have fewer signatures. One could
also compare “early signers” to “late signers” for petitions that either reach or come close to reaching the 218
signature threshold.
40
We thank Rick Hall for this suggestion.
41
This builds on the Katznelson and Lapinski (2006) work on policy substance.
19
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22
Table 1. Discharge Petitions, by Congress and Party Control
Congress
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
Years
1927-1929
1929-1931
1931-1933
1933-1934
1935-1936
1937-1938
1939-1940
1941-1942
1943-1944
1945-1946
1947-1948
1949-1950
1951-1952
1953-1954
1955-1956
1957-1958
1959-1960
1961-1962
1963-1964
1965-1966
1967-1968
1969-1970
1971-1972
1973-1974
1975-1976
Party Control
Republican
Republican
Republican
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Republican
Democratic
Democratic
Republican
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Democratic
Total DPs
2
5
12
31
33
43
36
15
21
35
20
34
14
10
6
7
7
6
5
6
4
12
15
10
15
404
DPs reaching 218* Mean sigs per DP
0
16
0
63
5*
72.7
6*
43.7
3
50.5
4
57.5
2
61.8
1
52.5
3
80.4
3
72.7
1
65.7
3
74.5
0
41.1
1
110.2
1
110.3
1
58.6
1
148.3
0
80
0
108.2
1
79.3
0
49.5
1
48.2
1
42.9
0
70.1
0
42.9
38
64
*In the 72nd and 73rd Congresses, these petitions reached the 145 signature threshold in place under the
rules.
23
0
P ro p or ti on o f P etitio n s
.1
.2
.3
Figure 1: Density Plot of Signatures on Discharge Petitions
0
50
100
150
Number of Signatures
200
24
Figure 2: Mean Proportion of Petitions Signed
(Northern Democrats, Southern Democrats, Republicans)
0.7
0.6
Proportion Signed
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
70
72
74
76
78
80
82
84
Congress
86
88
Northern Democrat Mean Proportion Signed
Southern Democrat Mean Proportion Signed
Republican Mean Proportion Signed
90
92
94
25
-.6
Median S. Dem.- Median N. Dem.
-.4
-.2
0
.2
Figure 3a: Expected Proportion of Petitions Signed for Median Southern Democrat as Compared to
Median Northern Democrat, By Congress
70
75
80
Congress
85
90
95
26
-.6
Median Repub. - Median N. Dem.
-.4
-.2
0
.2
Figure 3b: Expected Proportion of Petitions Signed for Median Republican as Compared to Median
Northern Democrat, By Congress
70
75
80
Congress
85
90
95
27
-.2
high vs low seniority.
-.1
0
.1
Figure 3c: Expected Proportion of Petitions Signed for High vs. Low Seniority Members, By
Congress
70
75
80
Congress
85
90
95
Note: First difference for change from one standard deviation below the mean level of seniority to one
standard deviation above the mean. Calculated for median northern Democrat who does not serve on an
exclusive committee and is not a senior committee leader, and with target proportion set at mean.
28
-.2
Effect of Exclusive Committee Membership.
-.1
0
.1
Figure 3d: Expected Proportion of Petitions Signed for Exclusive vs. Non-Exclusive Committee
Members, By Congress
70
75
80
Congress
85
90
95
Note: Calculated for median northern Democrat with target proportion and seniority set at mean and senior
committee leader at its mode (i.e., non-leader).
29
-.15
Effect of Target Committee Membership.
-.1
-.05
0
.05
.1
Figure 3e: Expected Proportion of Petitions Signed for Frequently Targeted Committee Members,
By Congress
70
75
80
Congress
85
90
95
Note: First difference for change from one standard deviation below the mean “target committee proportion”
to one standard deviation above the mean. Target committee proportion refers to the share of petitions in
that Congress for which the member was on the committee targeted by the discharge effort. Calculated for
median northern Democrat who does not serve on an exclusive committee and is not a senior committee
leader, and with seniority set at mean.
30
-.4
Effect of Being Leader on Major Committee.
-.2
0
.2
Figure 3f: Expected Proportion of Petitions Signed for Senior Committee Leaders vs. Non-Leaders,
By Congress
70
75
80
Congress
85
90
95
Note: Calculated for median northern Democrat with target committee proportion and seniority set at mean
and exclusive committee at its mode (i.e. non-exclusive committee member).
31
-2
Effect of Target committee membership
-1
0
1
Figure 4a: Logit Coefficients for Effect of Membership on the Petition’s Target Committee (with 95%
confidence intervals)
70
75
80
Congress
85
90
95
Note: Logit model is estimated separately for each Congress, with intercept included for each petition.
Dependent variable is each member’s decision to sign each petition; robust standard errors clustered by
member. We will provide first differences in next draft of the paper.
32
-6
Effect of other Target committee membership
-4
-2
0
2
Figure 4b: Logit Coefficients for Effect of Membership on the Target Committee for Other Petitions
(with 95% confidence intervals)
70
75
80
Congress
85
90
95
Note: Logit model is estimated separately for each Congress, with intercept included for each petition.
Dependent variable is each member’s decision to sign each petition; robust standard errors clustered by
member. We will provide first differences in next draft of the paper.
33
Table 2: Members’ Propensity to Sign Discharge Petitions, 1929-1976, with Fixed Effects for Member
(Pooled Logit Model)
Seniority logged
-.157
(.014)
Model 2:
71st - 79th Cong.
-.066
(.025)
Exclusive Committee
-.174
(.038)
-.071
(.058)
-.341
(.064)
-.145
(.059)
-.192
(.059)
-.241
(.096)
Member of Target
Committee
Proportion of other petitions
MC on target committee
-.345
(.037)
-.264
(.052)
-.447
(.054)
-.283
(.054)
-.419
(.062)
-.352
(.096)
-.310
(.129)
-.558
(.234)
-.391
(.171)
-.207
(.191)
-.297
(.210)
-.587
(.324)
Major Committee Leader
(chair, ranking, bridesmaid)
Number of observations
Number of groups
Log Likelihood
-.359
(.049)
162,256
2132
-56552.04
-.224
(.087)
91,365
1120
-30632.73
-.542
(.071)
67,609
1305
-24824.53
-.526
(.077)
59,654
827
-25147.31
-.193
(.075)
61612
892
-21937.35
-.397
(.118)
40,959
414
-9434.17
Model 1
Model 3:
80th - 94th Cong.
-.265
(.022)
Model 4:
Northern Dems.
-.181
(.021)
Model 5:
Republicans
-.205
(.024)
Model 6:
Southern Dems.
.023
(.037)
Cell entries are coefficients from fixed effects models described in the text. The dependent variable is the decision to
sign each petition. Models have been estimated in Stata 9. Standard errors are in parentheses. Members with no
variation on the dependent variable – in practice, members who signed no petitions in their career – are dropped from
the analysis; for these cases, there is no variation to explain beyond the member fixed effects and thus they are
automatically dropped in the xtlogit FE model. The number of groups dropped are: 278 in models 1 and 2; 164 in
model 3; 170 in model 4; 44 in model 5; 168 in model 6; 69 in model 7.
0
20
Density
40
60
Figure 5a: Distribution of Coefficient Estimates for Seniority in Predicting the Decision to Sign Each
Discharge Petition, 1929-1976
-.06
-.04
-.02
Coefficient estimate
0
.02
35
0
.5
1
Density
1.5
2
2.5
Figure 5b: Distribution of Coefficient Estimates for Southern Democrat Indicator in Predicting the
Decision to Sign Each Discharge Petition, 1929-1976
-1
-.5
0
Coefficient estimate
.5
36
0
.5
Density
1
1.5
2
Figure 5c: Distribution of Coefficient Estimates for Republican Partisanship in Predicting the
Decision to Sign Each Discharge Petition, 1929-1976
-1
-.5
0
Coefficient estimate
.5
37
0
2
Density
4
6
Figure 5d: Distribution of Coefficient Estimates for Membership on the Petition’s Target Committee
in Predicting the Decision to Sign Each Discharge Petition, 1929-1976
-.4
-.2
0
Coefficient estimate
.2
.4
38
0
.5
Density
1
1.5
2
Figure 5e: Distribution of Coefficient Estimates for Membership on the Target Committees for Other
Petitions in Predicting the Decision to Sign Each Discharge Petition, 1929-1976
-1.5
-1
-.5
0
Coefficient estimate
.5
1
39
0
Density
5
10
Figure 5f: Distribution of Coefficient Estimates for Exclusive Committee Membership in Predicting
the Decision to Sign Each Discharge Petition, 1929-1976
-.2
-.1
0
Coefficient estimate
.1
.2