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A Revised Theory of Winning in House-Senate Conferences*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Gerald S. Strom  and
Barry S. Rundquist
Gerald S. Strom
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Chicago Circle
Barry S. Rundquist
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Abstract

The question, “Who wins in House-Senate conferences?” has largely been answered for recent Congresses. But the question, “Why does the Senate win?” has not been adequately answered. The research reported here presents and tests some necessary conditions of a theory that provides an answer to this question. The Senate wins because it is most frequently the second acting chamber and, because it has constitutionally derived power over House decisions, giving it the capacity to get the adjustments it makes in House bills accepted in conference. In the minority of cases in which the Senate acts first, the House “wins” in conference. Unlike earlier attempts to explain conference outcomes, the theory proposed here is consistent with the overall pattern of House dominance in the legislative process.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 71 , Issue 2 , June 1977 , pp. 448 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1977

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Footnotes

*

We wish to thank John Ferejohn, Susan Hansen, Lester Seligman, William Wilschke, and two anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as Cheryl Frank, James Gerl, and Beatrice Villar for their assistance.

References

1 Fenno, Richard F. Jr., The Power of the Purse: Appropriations Politics in Congress (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), pp. 616–678 Google Scholar; Ferejohn, John A., Pork Barrel Politics: Rivers and Harbors Legislation, 1947–1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 116–126 Google Scholar; Manley, John F., The Politics of Finance: The House Committee on Ways and Means (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 269–370 Google Scholar; Vogler, David J., “Patterns of One-House Dominance in Congressional Conference Committees,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 14 (1970), 303–320 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vogler, David J., The Third House: Conference Committees in the United States Congress (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

2 The evidence is consistent, even though different writers use different definitions of “winning.” Fenno used differences in dollars at the bureau level and declared a victory for the chamber whose version was closest to final conference version; Manley used various measures including expected total revenue gain or loss; and Vogler used the codings of Congressional Quarterly. See also, Steiner, Gilbert Y., The Congressional Conference Committee: Seventieth to Eightieth Congresses (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1951)Google Scholar for an alternative set of results which show the House predominates in conference.

3 Fenno, pp. 661–670.

4 Manley, pp. 272–279.

5 Vogler, , “Patterns of One-House Dominance,” p. 309 Google Scholar.

6 Kanter, Arnold, “Congress and the Defense Budget: 1960–1970,” American Political Science Review, 66 (March, 1972), 129–143 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 In the present study, 136 conferences in the 92nd Congress were identified and separately coded four times, twice at one-month intervals by the senior author, and once each by two graduate students who were purposely kept unaware of the main hypothesis of this study. If the conference bill was closer overall to the House bill, that conference outcome was coded a House victory; if the conference bill was closer to the Senate bill, it was coded a Senate victory; and if the conference bill was equally close to the House and Senate bills, it was coded a draw. “Closeness,” however, is a subjective judgment. This is problematic, but is somewhat less so if the subjective judgments of different coders agree. For the 92nd Congress, the reliability of the coding was very high. Intracoder reliability was 95 per cent; intercoder reliability averaged 83 per cent. On only three bills were there major disagreements (i.e., one coder coding a House victory, another a Senate victory or vice versa). These three were declared unclassifiable. All other disagreements involved one coder coding a draw while another coded a House or Senate victory.

8 Fenno, , Power of the Purse, pp. 668–669 Google Scholar.

9 McCown, Ada C., The Congressional Conference Committee (1927; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1967), pp. 61–64 Google Scholar.

10 Fenno, pp. 667–670.

11 Manley, , Politics of Finance, p. 274 Google Scholar. See also, Gross, Bertram M., The Legislative Struggle: A Study in Social Combat (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), pp. 317–327 Google Scholar.

12 Vogler, , “Patterns of One-House Dominance,” p. 319 Google Scholar.

13 Ferejohn, , Pork Barrel Politics, p. 118fnGoogle Scholar.

14 See especially, Fenno, , Power of the Purse, pp. 649–652 Google Scholar; and Froman, Lewis A. Jr., The Congressional Process: Strategies, Rules, and Procedures (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), pp. 5–15 Google Scholar.

15 Fenno, , Power of the Purse, p. 678 Google Scholar.

16 Froman, pp. 155–158, and Ferejohn, pp. 118–119.

17 Note further that of the 30 conferences which resulted in a draw, 21 per cent (N=95) were on bills that originated in the House and 26 per cent (N=38) were on Senate bills.

18 Vogler, , “Patterns,” p. 309 Google Scholar.

19 Vogler, , “Patterns,” p. 309 Google Scholar.

20 This confirms Fenno's hypothesis that it is a characteristic of the Senate that explains conference outcomes; Fenno, , Power of the Purse, p. 666 Google Scholar. The invariance of the legislative sequence on appropriations bills, however, prohibited him from examining this particular characteristic of the Senate. Manley faced the same problem in his study of tax social-security tariff legislation.

21 Ferejohn, , Pork Barrel Politics, p. 123 Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., p. 119.

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