War for the Floor: Partisan Theory and Agenda Control in the House of Representatives

This article extends recent research on partisan agenda control in the U.S. House of Representatives to the issue of procedural control of the legislative agenda via special rules. In particular, we draw out a facet of cartel and conditional party government theories that has not been addressed in prior analyses: the simultaneous interrelationship between positive and negative agenda control. Using roll-call data on two procedural matters—votes to order the previous question on a special rule and votes to adopt a special rule—over the 1953–2002 period, we found that, in the area of procedural control of the floor agenda, the majority party’s amount of agenda control depends to a significant degree upon the party’s homogeneity and power. In recent work, Cox and McCubbins (2002, 2005) have elabo-rated on their theory of parties in Congress by focusing on the ability of the majority party, as a procedural cartel, to control the floor agenda of the U.S. House of Representatives. In this article, we build upon their efforts by considering the concept of agenda control as it relates to one of the primary mechanisms used to shape the floor agenda: procedural decisions contained in the special rules that govern consid-eration of bills coming before the House. Prior research has been largely confined to questions surrounding the nature of special rules, while the variation in the use of special rules and changes in party success in this area have received much less attention. To further our understanding of this aspect of legislative organization, and to elaborate the theoretical and empirical relationship between positive and negative agenda control, we take as our starting point two closely related perspectives, cartel theory and conditional party government theory. We posit that, although there are not large-scale conflicts between the two theories, there are some differences between them with regard to procedural control