5| Taking Care of Business: The Legislative Effectiveness of the CHC
H 3 The Hispanic Caucus will be more legislatively effective in the core Latin
issue areas of health, education, public lands, and immigration92 than on legislation in other issue areas.
Data & Methods
In order to test the legislative effectiveness of the Hispanic Caucus, it is first necessary to determine the best way to measure legislative effectiveness. There are two primary methods to measure effectiveness in prior research. One method calculates a legislator’s effectiveness as their “hit rate,” or the percentage of bills sponsored by that legislator that pass the House or Senate. Another method calculates effectiveness as simply a count of the number of a member’s sponsored bills that pass. The latter strategy is preferred in recent scholarship, on the basis that relying on the hit rate measure
produces biased or inefficient estimates of legislative effectiveness because the measure does not account for the total number of bills introduced by an individual member of Congress. A member with a hit rate of 100% who only sponsors one bill should not
92I do not include government operations legislation in this hypothesis, despite the fact that many CHC bills are coded as government operations, because relatively few of these bills are explicitly Latinx- focused. Government operations, as a broad issue area, includes many appropriation measures and related bills that are often considered legislative necessities and which do not necessarily affect one demographic group more than others.
necessarily be considered more effective than a member with a hit rate of 50% on thirty sponsored bills, i.e. passing 15 bills (Anderson et al. 2003, 362). The majority of prior studies of legislative effectiveness rely on one or the other of these measurements, though others rely on surveys of legislators and staffers to construct a reputation-based measure of legislative success (Miquel and Snyder, Jr. 2006).
Volden and Wiseman (2014) utilize yet another measure—the Legislative Effectiveness Score—to assess the effectiveness of individual legislators. For each member of the House from the 93rd to the 110th Congress, they code each bill introduced by a member as commemorative, substantive, or substantive and significant. Each bill’s progress through the legislative process is recorded, based on completing certain steps: introduced in the House, received action in committee, received action beyond
committee, passed the House, and became law (19). These 15 measures are then combined and normalized, with greater weight given to receiving action in or beyond committee, passing the House and becoming law. Thus, a sponsor whose legislation receives a floor vote or passes the House is considered more effective than a sponsor whose legislation dies in committee, and accordingly has a higher LES.
Another issue that arises when studying is legislative effectiveness is the term “legislative effectiveness” itself. Most studies of legislative effectiveness treat the term as interchangeable with “legislative success”. However, other studies take issue with this conflation of the two terms. According to Hasecke and Mycoff (2007), legislative effectiveness refers to a situation where “a member has been able to get a policy
objective, consistent with his or her own preferences enacted into law,” while legislative success is taken to mean “sponsoring a bill that is chosen as the legislative vehicle” for
enacting a particular policy objective. An individual member can thus be effective without necessarily being successful (609; see also Adler et al. 2003).
Here, I refer to legislative effectiveness as defined by Hasecke and Mycoff, rather than legislative success, because I am looking at the effectiveness of the Hispanic Caucus when it comes to any legislation that targets Latinx interests regardless of whether the legislative vehicle is an item sponsored by a member of the Caucus. I opt against
measuring the effectiveness of the Caucus as either its hit rate or as a count of the number of bills supported by the Caucus that pass the House, because such measurement ignores the fact that the vast majority of bills do not get out of committee, much less receive a final passage vote on the floor of the House. Legislative effectiveness, then, must be considered at other stages of the legislative process, such as whether bills or resolutions get reported out of committee or pass the House.
Using a limited version of the Congressional Bills Project dataset (Adler and Wilkerson 2012), I construct for my dependent variable an additive index that indicates how far a bill or resolution advances in the legislative process. The index ranges from 0 to 3, with items receiving a point for each successful step in the legislative process: being reported out of committee, passing the House, and becoming law93. I limit the dataset to only those bills that were included on the CHC’s legislative agenda from 1977 to 2016, rather than all bills introduced in the time period, to ensure that all estimated effects are with regard to the ability of the CHC to push its desired legislation through the legislative
93Every item in the Congressional Bills Project dataset has already been introduced in the House, so giving items a point for introduction is unnecessary.
process rather than all legislation, as this would severely bias the results94. This method is similar to how Volden and Wiseman (2014) calculate their Legislative Effectiveness Score for individual legislators, giving more weight to legislation that becomes law than legislation that dies in committee. Where I differ from Volden and Wiseman is that I do not use this information to calculate an LES for the CHC as a whole or each of its individual members, and then test which factors push the LES higher or lower—of primary interest here is what factors affect the probability that a piece of legislation will be successful at these different stages of the legislative process.
My main independent variable is also an additive index, measuring the degree of Hispanic Caucus support for a particular legislative item. This index ranges from 0 to 3, with items receiving a point for each of the following: being sponsored by a CHC member and cosponsored by a majority of the Caucus (see Chapter 4), being the subject of a CHC press release, and whether a Caucus member gave a speech in support of the bill when it was introduced in the House. I expect that items with higher levels of Caucus support will be more likely to advance further in the legislative process even when controlling for other factors that typically affect legislative effectiveness. These factors include the party affiliation of a bill’s sponsor and which party is in the majority in the House (Volden and Wiseman 2014; Cox and Terry 2008; Miquel and Snyder, Jr. 2006; Anderson et al. 2003), as well as the gender of a bill’s sponsor, the percent of Latinx
94The CHC agenda is typically significantly much smaller than the universe of bills introduced in the House in a given session of Congress, meaning there would be an overabundance of zeros in the dataset if I included all bills introduced in the House over the last forty years.
legislators in the House, and the position of an item’s sponsor of the committee to which the item is referred.
Because the dependent variable is ordinal, I use ordered logistic regression to test the effect of Caucus support on how far items advance in the legislative process. I run several models that test this relationship under various conditions. First, I estimate the effect for all years in the dataset, 1977 to 2016. I then separate the bills into four separate eras that reflect shifts in party control of the House: Era 1 (Democratic control, 1977- 1994), Era 2 (Republican control, 1995-2006), Era 3 (Democratic control, 2007-2010), and Era 4 (Republican control, 2011-2016). These eras also have the benefit of capturing different levels of polarization in the House, with polarization becoming more
pronounced in the later eras. With regard to Era 1 and Era 2—the periods of Democratic control—the eras also capture a shift in leadership styles from the vote-focused styles of Tip O’Neill (D-MA), Jim Wright (D-TX), and Tom Foley (D-WA) in Era 1 to the coalition-minded Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in Era 2.
Results
Over the last forty years, the CHC has placed 365 unique bills and resolutions on its agenda. Each of these pieces of legislation has received varying levels of support from the Caucus. 228 of the 365 pieces of legislation scored a 1 on the CHC support measure, meaning those items were the subject of a CHC press release, a floor speech at the item’s introduction, or were sponsored by a majority of the CHC’s membership. 61 of the items scored a 2, indicating stronger support by the CHC. Only four pieces of legislation scored a 3, indicating the highest level of CHC support. These items were the subject of a CHC
press release, a floor speech by a CHC member upon the item’s introduction in the House, and were cosponsored by a majority of the CHC’s membership. There is also significant variation in how far each of these pieces of legislation advanced through the legislative process. By virtue of being included in the Congressional Bills Project dataset, each of these items cleared the first step of being introduced in the House. The next step in the process, at least in the legislative effectiveness index created here, concerns whether the items get reported out of the committees in the House to which they were referred. Only 58, or 15.89%, of the legislative items supported by the CHC in the last forty years were successfully reported out of their respective committee of referral. 87 legislative items, or 23.84 %, managed to pass the House. Only 32 of the legislative items on the CHC agenda in the last forty years—8.77% of the total and 36.78% of those items that passed in the House—survived all the way through the legislative process to pass the Senate, be signed by the president, and thus be enacted into law. Notably, none of the legislation that scored a 3 on the CHC support index, i.e. legislation that received the most intense CHC support, became law. In fact, 40.63% of the CHC agenda items that became law did not receive any CHC support beyond inclusion on the agenda while another 43.75% only scored 1 on the support index. The remaining five items on the CHC agenda that became law scored a 2 on the support index.95 This small percentage of
95All of these items were bills. Three were symbolic measures that renamed a post office in California (H.R. 4053 in the 109th Congress), awarded a congressional gold medal to the 65th Infantry Regiment of the
US Army, known as the Borinqueneers (H.R. 1726 in the 113th Congress), and authorized the construction
of a monument commemorating American forces that liberated Guam in World War II in the Pacific National Historical Park in Guam (H.R. 1944 in the 103rd Congress). The other two bills were substantive:
H.R. 4312 in the 102nd Congress, a CHC priority mentioned multiple times in archival documents, extended
bilingual election requirements in the Voting Rights Act; and H.R. 1281 in the 113th Congress reauthorized
CHC priorities becoming law might indicate, to some, that the Caucus is not very
effective at pushing its desired legislation through the legislative process. However, when considered alongside the fact that only about 16% of the thousands of bills introduced in each session of Congress on average are reported out of committee (Krutz 2005, 315), the CHC actually appears to be slightly more effective than Congress as a whole.
What factors make some bills or resolutions more or less likely to survive through the legislative process, though? Why is it that some legislation is able to pass the House and the Senate before being signed by the president while some legislation languishes in committees or is defeated in roll call votes on the floor of the House? Looking at Table 5.1 below, the degree of the CHC’s support for a specific piece of legislation has a significant effect on how far legislation gets in the legislative process. This effect, though, goes in the opposite direction of what I expect—increased CHC support for a piece of legislation decreases the chances of that legislation scoring a 3 on the success index and becoming law. As noted earlier, not one of the four bills that received the highest level of CHC support became law. Higher levels of CHC support for legislation, i.e. the CHC engages in multiple activities that signals its support for the legislation in question, actually makes it harder for legislation to get out of committee, pass the House, and ultimately become law. Thus, the CHC does not appear to be all that effective at ushering Latinx interests through the House. The steady increase in the proportion of Latinxs serving in the House between 1977 and 2016 also does not seem to matter, as the interaction term between the percent of Latinxs in the House and the CHC support measure is insignificant.
Table 5.1 Effect of Level of CHC Support on Legislative Success96 All Eras 1977-2016 CHC Support -1.231* Index (0.630) % Latinx * 0.065 CHC Support (0.104) Republican -0.533* President (0.274) Republican 0.009** Sponsor (0.004) No. of 0.001 Cosponsors (0.002) Chair of 2.308*** Referral Cmte (0.414) Member of 0.566** Referral Cmte (0.288) Cut 1 0.930 (0.729) Cut 2 1.884** (0.738) Cut 3 3.279*** (0.773) N 365 Pseudo R2 0.1636 Log likelihood -265.112
Standard errors in parentheses * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01
Having a Republican president also decreases the chances of items on the CHC agenda making it very far in the House. Having the legislation’s primary sponsor being a
96The control for gender is not shown here, due to statistical insignificance in all specifications of the model.
Republican, though, does not decrease the chances of the legislation. The effect of a Republican sponsor is positive and significant, though the coefficient is so small as to be indistinguishable from zero, indicating a negligible substantive effect. In accordance with theories on the power of committees in Congress acting as gatekeepers that significantly affect what bills survive beyond committees, having a sponsor who is either the chair of the committee of referral or a member of the committee of referral both have significant and positive effects on whether a bill advances through the legislative process. In more recent sessions of Congress, this power of committees is perhaps indistinguishable from the power of party leaders in the House; in this model, though, committees appear to be more powerful than party leaders. Thus, it is possible that even though explicit support for legislation by the CHC might harm a bill or resolution’s prospects of passing the House and becoming law, individual members of the Caucus may make up for this by exerting their influence on committees—whether as chairs or rank and file members—to push the legislation to the House floor.
Changes in Party Control
When I analyze discrete eras in congressional history separately, important differences emerge. In Era 1, a lengthy period of Democratic control of the House from the 95th to 103rd Congresses (1977-1994), the level of CHC support is not a significant predictor of legislation going further in the legislative process. Even if the effect of CHC support were significant, the coefficient is negatively signed, indicating again that stronger CHC support for a bill or resolution would actually harm that item’s chances of being reported out of committee, passing the House, or becoming law. In fact, in Era 1
there is only one significant predictor of success for bills or resolutions: whether the bill’s sponsor is a member of the committee of referral. Having the sponsor of a bill or
resolution as a member of the committee of referral has a strong positive effect on how much success is enjoyed by that legislation (and its sponsor). Again, there is the chance here that individual CHC members may make up for the lack of collective CHC influence on the outcomes of the legislative process by virtue of their positions on committees, but only if the legislation in question is referred to those committees with CHC members.
These results are also not unexpected, given the more moderate nature of the Democratic Caucus, relatively low partisan polarization in the House, and the styles of the Speakers from this era. The CHC’s positions on key legislation, while certainly in line with the rest of today’s Democrats, were notably more liberal than those of their
Democratic colleagues throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. This divergence is epitomized by legislation such as the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (see Chapter 4), a conservative immigration reform measure sponsored and voted for by many Democrats in the House. The styles of Speakers Tip O’Neill, Jim Wright, and Tom Foley also did not help the CHC in this era. Each of these Speakers was primarily focused on making sure they had the necessary votes to pass legislation, including votes from the more moderate and conservative wing of the party (Rohde 1991). This concern with whipping votes translated to a willingness among these Speakers to ignore the voice of the CHC, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, because the CHC did not comprise a sufficiently large number of potential votes that their exclusion would jeopardize Democratic priorities in the House. Thus, even with less polarization between the two
parties, the CHC was often on the outside looking in, in no small part because of the dearth of Latinxs serving in Congress.
Era 2 spans the 104th through 109th Congresses, from 1995 to 2009. This era began with the Republican Party taking back control of the House, accompanied by Rep. Newt Gingrich’s (R-GA) ascension to the position of Speaker of the House. Especially notable in this time period is the successful move by Gingrich and the Republican Party to ban legislative service organizations (LSOs). According to members of the CHC and the CBC, as well as other critics, Gingrich and other Republicans intended the ban as a way of weakening racial minorities precisely when African Americans, Latinxs, and women were gaining power and influence in the House. In the words of Rep. Jose Sérrano, the CHC “got a little too uppity” when fighting with Republicans over
immigration issues (Cooper 1994). The ban was implemented early in the 104th Congress, severely limiting the resources available to the CHC and other congressional caucuses. The CHC did reorganize later in the 104th Congress as a congressional member
organization (CMO), though this reorganization left the CHC with fewer dedicated staffers than before and without its own office space on the Hill.
Given these developments, it is not all that surprising that the CHC’s support for legislation has a significant negative effect on how far that legislation goes in the House. The Republican Party under Gingrich was diametrically opposed to the CHC on core