Austin Bussing’s research while affiliated with Webster University/San Antonio and other places

For years, Republicans in Congress promised to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. The results of the 2016 elections put them in position to take action on the seminal domestic policy achievement of outgoing President Barack Obama. Repeal efforts faced many obstacles, including angry constituents crowding town hall style meetings with Republican members. Many members faced a stark choice between voting with their constituents or voting with their party. We use data on the number of town halls held by members to analyze whether members who heard from upset constituents were more likely to oppose the repeal effort. Next, we utilize data on House primaries and the 2018 general election to test whether the member’s position on repeal had any effects on the member’s electoral success. We find clear evidence that member’s voting behavior on the health care repeal had electoral effects in the 2018 general election.

Legislative oversight allows Congress to investigate potential wrongdoing by executive branch actors. We present a model in which an incumbent exercises oversight and chooses to take corrective action against the executive before going up for reelection. We show that partisan types who prefer to take corrective action regardless of the probability of wrongdoing will always conduct oversight, but sincere types who only want to correct legitimate wrongdoing will exercise restraint to avoid appearing too partisan and losing reelection. The model also shows that oversight is increasing in the probability that the incumbent is partisan and the probability that the challenger is sincere. Finally, we present two case studies, the Elián González custody case and the attack on the Benghazi embassy, to illustrate our theory.

In legislatures such as the U.S. House of Representatives, where the majority party controls the agenda, the frequency of observed partisan disagreement is partially a function of strategic agenda-setting choices made by that party. Do majority party leaders use their agenda control to privilege bills that accentuate disagreements with the minority party? In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework focused on the costs and benefits associated with floor consideration of partisan legislation. We test hypotheses derived from our theory on a dataset of 15,611 bills considered in House committees during the 104th–114th Congresses (1995–2016). We find that minority party opposition in committee is associated with a decreased likelihood of floor consideration, suggesting that the majority party does not use agenda setting to indiscriminately favor partisan legislation. Our findings focus attention on the costs of partisan agenda setting, and contextualize the partisan disagreement we ultimately observe on the House floor.

Communities with high levels of social capital enjoy an array of positive economic and community development outcomes. We assess the role of several key community characteristics, including the strength of government institutions, in explaining local social capital variation. The analysis draws on data from United States counties and includes regression modelling and a Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition to explore differences in social capital across an area’s metropolitan status and region. The data show social capital determinants vary by place both due to the endowment levels of these determinants and the productive value of their coefficients. For example, the coefficient productive values of government capacity explain some differences in social capital levels across metropolitan status (but not across region). Concurrently, variations in government capacity endowment levels help explain some differences in social capital levels across region (but not across metropolitan status).

Most bills that pass the House of Representatives do so under suspension of the rules. Despite the procedure’s prevalence, however, we know little about its systematic use. Although the supermajoritarian threshold for passage of bills under suspension typically precludes the majority party from using these bills for partisan policy, I argue that leadership control over the procedure still allows for the pursuit of party goals. Speakers split the suspension agenda between noncontroversial but substantively important legislation and parochial bills that serve credit‐claiming goals of individual members. While the minority party is not entirely shut out of the process, I argue that Speakers have been strategic in appeasing minority party demands for inclusion. Using data on bills considered under suspension from 1973 to 2015, I demonstrate that the distribution of suspension bills systematically favors electorally vulnerable majority party incumbents, and largely excludes their minority party counterparts.