Interconnecting Tissue: A Quantitative Analysis of The Inter-Branch Policy Conversations

Leah A. Murray, State University of New York -  Albany

In my work, I attempt to refute the notion that the president initiates while the Congress follows, hindering and or helping, by looking more closely at how bills on the governing agenda fare in Congress. My expectation is that once we design our analyses in a more neutral way, with neither Congress or the president being center, we will get a better understanding of who sets the governing agenda. I specifically avoid a presidential bias in my approach to studying the separation of powers relationship. In this way I expect to find that the Congress is an agenda setter, just differently than the president. In the agenda setting conversation, Congress plays a crucial role in developing alternatives that provide the context for the president's goals.

There are three major ways to study the inter-branch relationship; they differ in the focus of the study. First is to center the analysis on the president, second on the Congress and third, focusing on both at once, or as was coined as tandem-institutions by Mark Peterson (1990). Presidency-centered studies have as their unit of analysis an exclusively presidential item, such as campaign promises and their independent variable presidential skill. They see how far along in Congress a presidential initiative moves as a result of the president's personal abilities. Tandem-institutions studies again have exclusively presidential items, such as administration bills, as their unit of analysis but differ in that their independent variables are contextual. These studies examine how far a presidential initiative travels in Congress as a result of the time or the resources inherent to the institution. Finally, Congress-centered studies, such as Chamberlain and Moe and Teel, have as their focus the Congress exclusively. The unit of analysis is legislative statutes and the independent variable is whether the president or the Congress was preponderant at the inception of the statute. 

The most important thing I discovered through my review of the literature was that the more the study focused on one branch, the more it found that branch setting the agenda. Other types of studies, focusing on the agenda itself, or partisanship or individual policies, have different agenda-setting explanations. Clearly, the jury is still out on whether the president is actually the preeminent agenda setter or whether many other players may have as vital roles. In my work I try to neutralize the center of the study by focusing on bills in hearing in Congressional committees that the CQ Almanac identified as having jurisdiction over the national agenda. I examine whether a bill moves forward from a hearing to floor activity as a result of previous Congressional activity or presidential initiative.

Steven Shull and Lance LeLoup argue, "since the 1930s, presidents may have had the advantage in setting the national agenda" except in the context of divided government when "Congress increasingly frames, publicizes, and pursues its own agenda" (1993: 81). In order to examine that aspect of the inter-branch relationship, I selected four distinct party possibilities. I expected the influence on the alternative defining capacities of the Congress and the president to wax and wane given the partisan structure of the branches. Thus, the four combinations of Congress and president represent a divided party situation, two united party situations thirty years apart, and a split party situation. These combinations are the 87^th Congress, Kennedy's first year, the 91^st Congress, Nixon's first year, the 97^th Congress, Reagan's first year, and the 103^rd Congress, Clinton's first year. With this selection I also have two Democratic presidents and two Republican presidents. In each combination, I examined bills in hearing for the first years. Choosing the first year allows me to give the president his strongest year in agenda setting. The president has just been elected based upon campaign promises that become the basis for his presidential agenda (Fishel, 1985). He has an electoral mandate for his initiatives, for as Peterson argued "the most important time for action in an administration is the first year in office" (1990: 120). 

The bills in hearing are from a select number of committees that cover a representative and important part of the policy process. Each year, the CQ Almanac lists between fifteen and twenty key votes per chamber that comprise the national agenda for Congress. Over four decades, several committees were consistently responsible for the national agenda. The committees I examine from the House are Ways and Means, Judiciary, and Education and Labor and from the Senate are Labor and Public Welfare, Finance, and Judiciary. Other committees were also responsible for hearing these key votes, but I chose these committees because they do not overly deal with appropriations bills and reauthorization bills. They also overlap thus linking the jurisdiction between the two chambers. For the presidential requests, I used the Relational Database of Historical Congressional Statistics - 1788 to present. This database tallies all the requests made by every president since Washington including state of the union addresses. There were 662 requests made by the four presidents. Using this selection process, I have collected data on 998 bills which indicate how far along in the process the bill makes it and whether the president made a request for the legislation and/or whether the Congress had heard the legislation in the previous two Congresses. Of the 998 bills, 334 of them had congressional history.

With this data I am able to test two major hypotheses. First, a bill with a presidential request attached to it will advance further in the process than a Congressional bill alone. Second, a bill with Congressional history will advance further than one without. I expect that either Congressional deliberation or presidential initiative will send a bill forward in the process. I also expect that many bills on the CQ Almanac national agenda in Congress would have a presidential request attached to it.

Of the 998 bills, the president made requests on 92. Given what we know of the agenda setting process, it is a little surprising that this percentage is so low. I would expect that in his honeymoon year, more than ten percent of the bills being heard by committees responsible for the national agenda would be accompanied by a presidential request. Of the 662 requests made by the four presidents, 14 percent of them were bills in hearing. Perhaps most of his requests were made on items that went to other committees. However, these committees were responsible for legislative topics ranging from the Air Force to income tax to veterans. This low percentage of bills in hearing having a presidential request in the first year calls a bit of the honeymoon power into question.

My first hypothesis (a bill with a presidential request attached to it will advance further in the process than a Congressional bill alone) was confirmed. Of all 998 bills, 38 percent were reported to the floor and 15 percent were passed into final law. Of those with a presidential request, 35 percent were reported to the floor and 18 percent were passed into law. Bills with a presidential request and without congressional history were reported to the floor at 28 percent and 15 percent were passed into law. We see that presidential requests have the power to advance a bill through Congress as well as if not better than the general bill population. My second hypothesis (a bill with Congressional history will advance further than one without) is not confirmed. Bills with congressional history were reported to the floor at 37 percent and 15 percent were passed into law. Of those bills without a presidential request and with congressional history, 10 percent were passed into law. We see that congressional history does not have the power alone to get a bill passed into final law.

An interesting finding is that the majority of bills have neither a presidential request nor congressional history. These bills do better getting reported to the floor; 40 percent. They also do almost well as the general population in getting passed into final law; 14 percent. Congress is doing well on its own in getting bills passed into law and reporting them to the floor for activity. The Congress does not necessarily need a presidential request or congressional history to pass legislation. However, the most interesting finding is that of those bills having both presidential request and congressional history, 45 percent were reported to the floor and 27 percent passed into law. If a bill tracks both congressional history and has a presidential request attached, it is almost twice as likely to become law and more likely to get floor activity. 

This research demonstrates that the president's request for legislation alone does not send the Congress into a frenzy of passage activity. We need to keep examining the Congressional end of the governing agenda. The value of this research is the neutrality of the unit of analysis. When the unit of analysis does not bias the study at the outset to find the president in charge, we discover that Congress has much more input into its governing agenda. 

References

The Congressional Index. Commerce Clearing House: 1957, 1959, 1961, 1967, 1969, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1989, 1991, 1993.

Chamberlain, Lawrence H. The President, Congress and Legislation. 2^nd ed. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1967.

The Database of Historical Congressional Statistics. Compiled by Elaine K. Swift, Robert G. Brookshire, David T. Canon, Evelyn C. Fink, John R. Hibbing, Brian D. Humes, Michael J. Malbin, and Kenneth C. Murtis.

Edwards, George C. and Andrew Barrett. "Presidential Agenda Setting in Congress." In Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era, edited by Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2000.

Fishel, Jeff. Presidents and Promises: From Campaign Pledge to Presidential Performance. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1985.

LeLoup, Lance T. and Steven A. Shull. Congress and the President: The Policy Connection. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1993.

Moe, Ronald C. and Steven C. Teel. "Congress as Policy-Maker: a Necessary Reappraisal." Political Science Quarterly 85 no. 3 (1970): 443-470.

Peterson, Mark A. Legislating Together: The White House and Capitol Hill from Eisenhower to Reagan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.