Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress

Abstract

Fink reviews "Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress" by Sarah A. Binder.

Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress. By Sarah A. Binder. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 236p. $59.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Evelyn C. Fink, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Sarah Binder provides an impressive review of many reforms in the U.S. House as they affected the ability of the majority to enact and the minority to obstruct legislative outcomes. She examines selected reforms from the entire history of the House for an indication of the degree to which the reforms were motivated by policy needs. Binder impressively documents the increasingly common belief that changes in procedural rules are motivated by short-term policy preferences. She also conjectures that reforms are constrained by inherited rules.

Binder adds to the growing literature on genesis of rules reforms in legislatures by her careful documentation of historical changes as well as an interesting set of logistic regressions. Appealing to the sensibilities of both traditional and rational-choice scholars, Binder argues that two main predictors are behind the development of procedural change. The first is partisan need, which she identifies as the inability of a majority party coalition to enact short-term policy preferences. The second is partisan capacity, or the ability of the majority party to push through needed procedural changes. Each contributes to the literature on procedural reform. She finds that partisan capacity is dominant in predicting the suppression of minority rights in the nineteenth century but that partisan need dominates the twentieth century.

Binder takes a strong position differentiating the role of the capacity of a party to enact change from the need for procedural reform. Partisan need is concePtualized from Fink and Humes ("Electoral Forces and Institutional Change in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1860-1894," paper presented at the American Political Science Association, New York, 1994) as an indicator that "changes [in procedures] will increase [the majority] chance of legislative success" (p. 11). But instead of measuring need by the policy preferences of the majority and minority coalition, Binder claims that the presence of minority obstruction is a sufficient predictor. She accordingly uses the number of obstructive motions in Congress in the nineteenth century and the number of discharge petitions and recorded votes for the twentieth century. This changes the focus of need onto the behavior of the minority party alone. She argues that minorities will invent new methods of obstruction as the potential for outcomes deleterious to them increases.

The inclusion of a dummy variable signifying the expansion of minority rights in the previous Congress does not exactly fit the emphasis on minority party creativity. Yet, for the twentieth century, this last characterization of "partisan need" has the strongest effect. Binder finds that partisan majorities concede expanding minority rights when forced to do so by a bipartisan coalition, but these are generally rescinded in the next Congress. New partisan majorities take back what previous majorities conceded. While this is strong evidence for a partisan-based interpretation of rules as a procedural funnel to policy outcomes, it does not quite fit the other measures of obstruction. Certainly, we would like to understand theoretically why a majority party chooses to invest valuable legislative time rescinding concessions from the previous Congress.

Binder measures partisan capacity using Hurley, Brady, and Cooper's ("Measuring Legislative Potential for Policy Change," Legislative Studies Quarterly 2(November 1977): 385-97) measure of relative party strength. This measure emphasizes the size of the majority party vis-a-vis the minority party in interaction with its degree of cohesion. Binder argues that large and/or more cohesive majority parties are more likely to enact procedural reforms, ceteris paribus, because they can (p. 221). Others use different measures of cohesion or size to indicate a preference for reform as well as capacity and a different selection of congresses and rules reforms to test their hypotheses. For example, Binder does not include the imposition and deletion of the gag rule on slavery petitions in the antebellum period as either a suppression or creation of minority rights. Furthermore, as Binder does not measure majority party policy preferences as a predictor, if they do in fact have an effect, then it is included in both her partisan need and partisan capacity measures to the extent that each is correlated with majority policy preferences.

Binder provides impressive documentation of many of the reforms in the U.S. House of Representatives. Where available, contemporaneous quotations are used to illustrate the rhetoric behind specific reforms. She checks the rhetoric with the reality of the times by showing a strong correlation between the coalitions that passed the various procedural reforms and those that passed the key policies of the period-evidence of short-term policy preferences influencing procedural reform. Unlike Dion (Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew, 1997), Binder does not test the conventional rhetoric behind any specific reform. But what she gives up in depth is more than made up in breadth, and the two books together provide useful, if somewhat contradictory, explanations.

Finally, Binder offers two strong suggestions for further research on procedural reform. First she argues that the inheritability of rules constrains the choices of future majorities. Binder documents how the U.S. Senate was unable to move toward substantial limitations on minorities by virtue of its "inherited rules": The Senate is a continuing body that never enters a state of majority rule under common parliamentary law, and its one chance to create majoritarian control of procedural change was destroyed when the Senate chose to eliminate the previous question from its rules in 1806. Second, Binder argues for greater development of the role of public opinion and the executive branch in fostering procedural reform. For example, the development of cloture in 1917 in the Senate appeared to rely on President Woodrow Wilson's use of public opinion, tying the lack of cloture to an irresponsible position on necessary defense issues.

In conclusion, this beautifully written book adds greatly to the ongoing debate about the genesis of procedural reform. It will be of great use to congressional scholars, especially given the breadth of its archival research. While many may contend with the conceptualization of measures and the selection of cases, it provides a strong benchmark for how broad testing will proceed. Furthermore, Binder's suggestions of path dependence and the criticality of public opinion indicate new research avenues.