Party Discipline in the Contemporary Congress: Rewarding Loyalty in Theory and in Practice

When describing how party leaders determined whose legislation to bring to the House floor for consideration from 1995 to1998, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich explained that the loyalty of the bill’s sponsor was important: “Jim Nussle (R-Iowa), who had been heroic on a huge range of things for the party, had to have that opportunity (to have his ethanol legislation considered).”1 Near the end of the 107th Congress, Republican leaders pulled Congressman Christopher Smith’s (R-NJ) legislation to provide loans to small businesses in developing countries from the House calendar to punish him for deviating from the party position on unrelated legislation (Pomper 2002). In the contemporary congressional environment, do party leaders systematically reward loyalty and punish disloyalty in the legislative process as a way of implementing party discipline, or are these examples anomalies? The legislative calendar provides party leaders with many opportunities to exert discipline. This chapter evaluates how majority party leaders allocate legislative opportunities to their rank-and-file members. The empirical focus is on how party leaders in the congresses from 1987-2002 decided which members ’ bills, amendments, resolutions, and “suspensions ” were considered on the House floor, and under what conditions. I pay particular attention to the interplay between the majority party’s electoral motive of maintaining a partisan majority and the policy motives of enhancing party unity and passing legislation. Despite increases in the power and prerogatives of party leaders in the post-reform Congress, congressional party discipline is difficult to identify. Some scholars question whether parties matter at all controlling for members ’ policy preferences (e.g., Krehbiel 1993, 1998, 2000). Many find that parties exert influence in post-reform congressional politics (e.g., Aldric