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Committees and the Decline of Lawmaking in Congress
Jonathan Lewallen
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The public, journalists, and legislators themselves have often lamented a decline in congressional lawmaking in recent years, often blaming party politics for the lack of legislative output. In Committees and the Decline of Lawmaking in Congress, Jonathan Lewallen examines the decline in lawmaking from a new, committee-centered perspective. Lewallen tests his theory against other explanations such as partisanship and an increased demand for oversight with multiple empirical tests and traces shifts in policy activity by policy area using the Policy Agendas Project coding scheme.
He finds that because party leaders have more control over the legislative agenda, committees have spent more of their time conducting oversight instead. Partisanship alone does not explain this trend; changes in institutional rules and practices that empowered party leaders have created more uncertainty for committees and contributed to a shift in their policy activities. The shift toward oversight at the committee level combined with party leader control over the voting agenda means that many members of Congress are effectively cut out of many of the institution's policy decisions. At a time when many, including Congress itself, are considering changes to modernize the institution and keep up with a stronger executive branch, the findings here suggest that strengthening Congress will require more than running different candidates or providing additional resources.
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
One. Committees and Congress in the Policy Process
Two. Myths and Realities of Congressional Lawmaking
Fig. 2.3. Committee Reported Bill Trends, 1981–2018. (Source: THOMAS/Congress.gov, calculated by the author. Panel A (top) displays the data as counts, Panel B (bottom) as proportions. The points represent the averages in each congress, the gray shaded areas represent a standard deviation above and below the averages.)
Fig. 2.3. Committee Reported Bill Trends, 1981–2018. (Source: THOMAS/Congress.gov, calculated by the author. Panel A (top) displays the data as counts, Panel B (bottom) as proportions. The points represent the averages in each congress, the gray shaded areas represent a standard deviation above and below the averages.)
Fig. 2.5. Committee Markup Averages, 1981–2018. (Source: THOMAS/Congress.gov, calculated by the author. House markup ratios are displayed in the left panel and Senate markup ratios in the right.)
Fig. 3.8. Predicted Values for House Legislative Activity, Multiple vs. Primary Referral Era. (Note: Y-axes are on the logarithmic scale due to transforming beta regression results.)
Fig. 3.9. Predicted Values for Senate Legislative Activity from Previous Cloture Motions. (Note: Y-axes are on the logarithmic scale due to transforming beta regression results.)
Fig. 5.4. Predicted Values for House Legislative Hearings from Federal Outlays. (Note: Y-axes are on the logarithmic scale due to transforming beta regression results.)
Fig. 5.5. Predicted Values for Senate Reported Bills from Federal Outlays. (Note: Y-axes are on the logarithmic scale due to transforming beta regression results.)
Fig. 6.10. Trends in Committee Lawmaking vs. Enacted Law Titles. (Source: Congressional Bills Project, Michelle Whyman’s law titles dataset [housed at the Comparative Agendas Project]; calculated by the author.)