Good Public Policy Voting in the US Congress: An Explanation of Financial Institutions Politics
| Author | John E. Owens |
| Published date | 01 March 1995 |
| Date | 01 March 1995 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1995.tb01700.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political
Studies
(1995),
XLIII,
66-91
Good
Public
Policy
Voting
in
the
US
Congress: an
Explanation
of
Financial
Institutions
Politics
JOHN
E.
OWENS
University
of
Westminster
Two
important themes in the literature
on
the United States Congress are that
members experience difficulty transacting complex technical legislation
-
because
most are not experts
~
and that they make their decisions
on
the basis of what will
help them
win
re-election, by following the economic preferences
of
their interest
group or electoral constituencies.
The
few writers who have examined congressional
decisionmaking
on
financial institutions regulatory policy have generally
accepted
the conventional re-election premise and argued that legislators follow the economic
preferences of their interest group of electoral constituencies. Using
a
case
study
of
how members
of
a
House
committee make decisions
on
complex financial institutions
regulatory policy,
the
article
offers
an alternative political explanation which takes
better account of the complexity of congressional decisionmaking and
the
specific
nature
of
the policy issues which are decided. Through a
close
analysis of internal
committee politics, the research demonstrates the crucial roles played
by
subject
specialists and the importance of party-mediated cue-passing.
An important theme in the literature on the United States Congress
is
the
difficulty House members and senators experience transacting complex
technical legislation. Not all members of Congress are well prepared, well
educated,
or
scholarly. ‘A typical image’,
House
Speaker Thomas
S.
Foley
observed recently, ‘is that of the patient
staff
member trying
to
explain to a
senator
or
representative what reactor
cores
do
when they overheat and
what meltdown means..
.
We members of Congress are not now
nor
have
we ever been all that smart.” Partly because Congress needs professional
expertise
-
rather than amateur knowledge
-
the House
of
Representatives
and the Senate have
created
internal divisions of, and specializations of,
labour based on standing committees, and expanded their professional
staffs
in order to provide legislators with an independent capacity
to
gather
and evaluate information, expedite
the
flow
of legislation, and foster the
’
Thomas
S.
Foley,
‘Comment’ in William
H.
Robinson and Clay
H.
Wellborn (eds).
Knowledge,
Power ond
(he
Congress
(Washington,
DC,
Congressional Quarterly
Press,
19911,
p.
39.
T
Politlal
Studin
Association
1995.
Published
by
B(ackwcll
Publaherr.
108
Cowky
Road.
Oxrord
OX4
IJF.
UK
and
238
Main
Stmi,
Cambridge.
MA 02142,
USA.
JOHN
E.
OWENS
67
growth of policy expertise, institutional memory and greater stability in
polic y-making.
The importance of congressional committees (and subcommittees) does
not imply, of course, that all members are primarily interested in policy-
making. Indeed
a
second common theme
of
the literature on congressional
decision-making is that legislators are motivated by their wish to be re-elected.*
The quest for re-election, argues Mayhew, often leads members to engage
in only superficial attempts at policymaking by ‘credit claiming’, which
generates interest only
in
the small number
of
measures most directly
related to their constituencies;
or
‘position-taking’, which requires only the
publicizing
of
an issue rather than any serious attempt to address a particular
problem. The common assumption of a re-election motive, moreover, has led
many scholars to conclude that legislators pay unusual attention to the
opinions and demands of interest groups.’ Especially where issues are
complex and technical, high information costs restrict ordinary voters’
knowledge of the issues and constrain their representative’s behaviour.
Meanwhile, those who are prepared to pay high information costs
-
notably
interest groups
-
are able to press their demands intensely and to supply
legislators with resources (votes, money, information) which seek to influence
policy decisions and help convince voters
to
re-elect them. Denzau and Munger
take this argument further when they show that re-election-oriented legislators
are most likely to respond to organized group pressures when unorganized
constituents are uninformed or indifferent about policy
alternative^.^
Although the re-election assumption is the conventional wisdom in the
literature on congressional decision-making, not all scholars have accepted its
validity, at least in all cases. Parker, for example, argues that because Congress
erects formidable barriers to entry, and the costs of policing legislators’
behaviour are high, legislators enjoy considerable freedom to ignore the wishes
of constituents and party leaders. Instead, he suggests that legislators can more
usefully be viewed as discretion-maximizers who frequently vote altruistically
according
to
their own notions of the public interest, rather than with the
parochial interests of constituents
or
interest
group^.^
Fenno’s work shows that
members of congressional committees are motivated by good public policy and
influence goals, as well as by the desire to be re-elected. According to Fenno,
different combinations of these goals motivate legislators to devise rules
*
David
R.
Mayhew,
Congress: the Etectoral Connection
(New Haven CT and London, Yale
University Press, 1974).
’George
J.
Stigler, ‘The theory
of
economic regulation’,
Bell Journal of Economics,
1
(1971),
3-21; Anthony Downs,
An Economic Theory ofDemocracy
(New York, Harper and Row, 1957),
p. 93; Gary
S.
Becker, ‘A theory
of
competition among pressure groups for political influence’,
Quarterly Journal of Economics,
98 (1983), 371-400; Sam Peltzman, ‘Constituent interest and
congressional voting’,
Journal of
Law
and Economics,
27 (1984), 181-210.
Arthur
T.
Denzau and Michael
C.
Munger, ‘Legislators and interest groups: how unorganized
interests get represented,’
American Political Science Review,
80 (1986), 89-106.
Glenn
R.
Parker,
Institutional Change, Discretion, and the Making
of
Modern Congress
(Ann
Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press, 1992).
See
also Arthur Maas,
Congress
and
the Common
Good
(New York, Basic, 1983), pp. 64-74; Joseph
P.
Kalt and Mark A. Zupan, ‘Capture and
ideology in the economic theory
of
politics,’
American Economic Review,
74 (1984), 301-22; James
B.
Kau
and
Paul
H. Rubin, ‘Self-interest, ideology, and logrolling in congressional voting’,
Journal
of
Law
and Economics,
22 (1979), 365-84.
Q
Political
Studies
Association,
1995
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