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Issue Ownership in the Modern Congress

The focus of this work is to understand the individual decision making process that determines each members degree of issue concentration and the types of issues each chooses to pursue in her legislative career. Are these choices dominated by legislator's preferences alone or are they significantly influenced by institutional constraints? Under what conditions are members generally free to select their issues? Under what conditions are they constrained (individually or collectively) in their choices?

In theory, newly-elected legislators have substantial freedom to pursue issues of their choosing. They bring to their new job a core set of political beliefs, prior professional experience, and often, a select list of issues they hope to address during their legislative careers. However, the ability of individual legislators to freely select their issues is not unfettered; each new member has partisan associations, campaign promises, and the general interests of their constituents to consider. Once sworn in, each member's actions are further constrained by institutional structures that limit any single member's ability to control collective and individual agendas, especially in the U.S. House of Representatives.

My research is centered on two main lines of inquiry: 1) the legislative activities of individual members, and 2) the collective legislative actions of partisan groups within Congress. It incorporates elements of the literature on legislative careers, especially those works that explore the influence of elections on congressional behavior (Arnold 1990; Fenno 1966, 1973, 1991; Hall 1996; Hibbing 1991; Mayhew 1973; Matthews 1960; Wawro 2000). My work is also influenced theoretically by the writings of issue ownership scholars (Petrocik 1996; Kaufmann and Petrocik 1999; Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994), who argue that candidates for public office will attempt to steer campaigns toward specific issues where they have a comparative advantage over their partisan opponent.

In combining elements of these two distinct literatures, I construct a set of hypotheses about the individual and collective motivation for legislative activity that emphasize reelection concerns. More specifically, I explore the influence of tenure in Congress, constituent homogeneity, partisan affiliation, ideology, and institutional constraints on the ability of members to individually and collectively gain ownership over specific issues.

While previous scholarly work on legislative behavior has focused largely on the later stages of the legislative process (where the individual preferences are harder to distinguish from institutional factors that shape the options under consideration), I choose to focus on bill introduction. It is at this stage that the individual actions of legislators can be analyzed with minimal contamination from partisan influences that complicate analysis of later stages. Working with a mixed group of undergraduate and graduate students, and funding from the National Science Foundation and the Dirksen Congressional Center, we content coded each legislative bill introduced in both chambers during the 97th through 104th Congresses (1981-1996). For ease of use, and to enable comparisons of bill introduction activity with later stages of the legislative process, we used the coding scheme developed for the Policy Agendas Project housed at the University of Washington. I then focused my analysis on those legislative bills that were public and substantive, eliminating any bills that were private, commemorative, or introduced under the Ôby requestÕ rule. The analyses reported on in my dissertation employ a variety of methods, including a longitudinal study of individual and collective issue ownership across several congressional terms.

T. Jens Feeley (Ph.D.)