John D. Wilkerson
Asst. Professor of Political Science
Center for American Politics and Public Policy
Box 353530
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
jwilker@u.washington.edu
December 1998
Prepared for delivery at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science
Association Meetings. I am grateful to Randy Calvert, Bryan Jones and Peter
May for their feedback and suggestions.
For more than three decades, social choice theorists and legislative scholars
have studied how legislative outcomes in Congress can be manipulated through
strategic amendments and voting. This paper addresses the central limitation
of this research, a virtual absence of systematic empirical research, by
examining 76 "killer" amendments considered during the 103rd and
104th Congresses. It traces the effects of these amendments for their related
bills using archival sources, tests for strategic voting using NOMINATE
as the baseline measure of legislators preferences' across a range of issues,
and explores why some killer amendments are more strategically important
than others using OLS regression. The findings indicate that successful
killer amendments and identifiable strategic voting are extremely rare.
In none of the 76 cases examined could the defeat of a bill be attributed
to an alleged killer amendment's adoption.