House Appropriations After the Republican Revolution
38 Pages Posted: 13 Aug 2009 Last revised: 2 Sep 2009
Date Written: August 24, 2009
Abstract
This paper applies the theory of “conditional party government” (CPG) to the interaction between the majority party and the Appropriations Committee in the period following the Republican Revolution of 1995. In effort to extend the analysis of Aldrich and Rohde (2000a), we examine how actions within the Committee have changed over time and analyze whether behavior and outcomes continue to match the expectations of CPG. What we find is that under both the Republican majority and the Democratic majority, intra-party cohesion and inter-party conflict remained high. Thus, in both periods, the conditions of the CPG theory continued to be met. As a result, during the entire period following the Republican Revolution, the role of the party remained paramount and the party leadership maintained its influence over the direction of policy. Both the Republican majority and the Democratic majority continued to use the Appropriations Committee as a vehicle for policy change and therefore, during both periods (106th-109th and 110th-present) the party leadership continued to monitor committee actions, blocking policy shifts away from what they wanted and facilitating changes in the desired direction.
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