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Agendas, Side Issues and Leadership in the US House

Lawrence University, P.O. Box 599, Appleton, WI 54912–0599, USA; william.hixon{at}lawrence.edu

Bryan W. Marshall

Department of Political Science, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056–2807, USA; marshabw{at}muohio.edu

We introduce a view of congressional party leaders as strategic manipulators of issue dimensions, similar in spirit to Riker's (1982, 1986) heresthetics. Party leaders have incentives to add to bills content from a secondary dimension in order to attract moderates’ support. This strategy can be cheaper than compromising along the liberal-conservative dimension. Empirically, moderates differ in their second-dimension preferences from non-moderates–a necessary condition for the strategy to work as we suggest it might. House passage of a 1997 emergency appropriations bill illustrates this strategy. Our view of party leadership challenges to some extent the argument that legislative parties reduce the dimensionality of congressional decision making and questions the one-dimensional picture of congressional politics.

Key Words: Congress • dimensionality • heresthetics • legislative parties • roll-call voting

Journal of Theoretical Politics, Vol. 19, No. 1, 83-99 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0951629807071020


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