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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
If one were asked to describe the process of policy change in the United States in one word, that word would surely be ‘incremental’. Students of the Congressional process can point to a number of factors which account for delay in changes of policy; it is only recently that they have begun to examine the occasional departures from Congressional intractability in matter of public policy. This paper seeks to further our understanding of how internal legislative conditions can produce or inhibit policy change. While the first scholars to call attention to this phenomenon noted that policy changes followed critical realignments, others have made a more general case for the ability of Congress to pass important legislation, arguing that Congressional potential for policy change depends largely upon the interactive effects of both majority and minority size and unity. Policy changes have been enacted by those Congresses with large and/or cohesive majorities and small and/or disorganized minorities. These conditions often follow realigning elections, but occur at other times as well.
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9 One might argue that looking at turnover on those committees which would be handling legislation in the seven policy areas proposed by Ginsberg would be preferable to using turnover on the top three House Committees. However, such a procedure would present difficulties. Firstly, without having the specific bills that eventually became the statutes coded by Ginsberg, it is impossible to know which committees would be handling them. Secondly, the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 altered the number of committees, so it would be difficult to look at total committee turnover over time. Since every bill needs a rule before it comes to the floor, and Appropriations and Ways and Means are responsible for funding programmes as well as generating revenues for this purpose, it seems satisfactory to use only these three committees as an indicator.
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15 The Durbin-Watson test for auto-correlation for this regression falls into the inconclusive range. The Durbin-Watson statistic was therefore used to obtain an estimate of rho in the fashion suggested by Wonnacott, Ronald J. and Wonnacott, Thomas H., Econometrics (New York: John Wiley, 1970), p. 143Google Scholar. The resulting coefficient was 0·267. Although it is not necessary to introduce data transformation in small samples when rho is less than 0·3, little is lost by such methods. Consequently, the analysis was re-done using the Cochran-Orcutt transformation. No substantial change in the interpretation results. The beta weighs for the LPPC index and committee turnover are 0·68 and 0·26 respectively, and the significant levels remain unchanged. The explained variance decreases slightly, but is still 62 per cent.
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