Abstract
While there is no shortage of studies examining important aspects of US congressional floor activities (e.g. use of special rules, unanimous consent agreements, etc.), there is a surprising dearth of scholarship that broadly examines the floor as a plenary body. (Notable exceptions include Smith (1989) and Mucciaroni and Quirk (2006)). In fact, the floor – here defined as the body in its collectivedecision-making capacity – receives a marginal role in most influential theories of congressional organization and behaviour due largely to the conventional wisdom that it is of limited consequence to policy production in the modern Congress. In other words, it is widely held that most of the heavy legislative lifting is done behind the scenes, and the floor is reduced to being ‘Congress on public exhibition’.
Nonetheless, the floor is of normative importance to congressional life, even if it frequently falls short of practical significance. After all, in an optimal legislature, well-informed representatives meet in plenary to engineer legislative decisions that reflect the civil exchange of ideas. Yet, few observers of Congress would argue that the floors today – where scripted, disjointed speeches are more often than not recited to empty chambers – have achieved something akin to this ideal state. Andrew Taylor’s The Floor in Congressional Life offers a look at how the House and Senate floors arrived at their place in the present-day legislative milieu, and examines the extent to which the floors reflect basic principles of quality proceedings. This truly exceptional new book is surely the most comprehensive and broadly historical effort of its kind to date, and a valuable addition to the congressional literature.
The book proceeds in two analytical parts, each offering important stand-alone contributions. The first part investigates how the House and Senate arrived at such markedly different floors considering their virtually identical origins. In exploring this question, Taylor examines changes in rules and practices throughout congressional history that he deems to have had important implications for the chamber floors in terms of the floors’ autonomy in determining legislative outcomes (termed the ‘floor power’ dimension) and individual members’ ability to influence floor proceedings (termed the ‘floor rights’ dimension). Changes that enhance floor power and rights are considered to promote the vitality of the floor, a phenomenon Taylor refers to as the ‘naturalization’ of the floor – this term stemming from the idea that the floor in its natural state is both autonomous and egalitarian.
The rules changes included in Taylor’s analysis are both appropriate and comprehensive, although it is at times unclear whether the net effect of some changes actually strengthened or weakened floor power and/or rights. For instance, rules changes that expanded minority rights are generally treated in this analysis as having a naturalizing (i.e. normatively positive) effect on the floor. However, if we take minority rights to a logical extreme, a chamber that operates under a unanimity requirement for policy change allows a single legislator to become a dictatorial gatekeeper. Such a scenario seems decidedly restrictiveto the floor. Along these lines, several students of the contemporary Senate have suggested that high cloture thresholds have a deleterious effect on Senate floor proceedings (e.g. Binder and Smith, 1997). These comments aside, characterizing changes in rules and practices according to these dimensions is no simple task, and Taylor is to be commended for the job done here.
Taylor provides an impressive array of both qualitative and quantitative evidence that suggests the most pivotal, and path-setting, restrictions in floor power and rights came about in the 19th century as a result of increased workload and chamber size. Since increases in these factors were more pronounced in the House than in the Senate, this, according to Taylor, serves to explain the divergence in House–Senate floor procedures and practices that resulted in the Senate having a distinctly more ‘natural’ body. He further argues that partisan dynamics played a more central role in shaping the floors in the 20th century, once the parties had polarized and procedural controls were more solidly placed in the hands of majority parties (especially in the House). By this time, however, the trajectory of the floors had already been set, and so the rules changes of the 20th century were of less consequence to the fates of the chamber floors.
This portion of Taylor’s analysis makes an important contribution to the growing literature on institutional change, in finding that critical changes to floor institutions were primarily a function of exogenous forces (in particular, workload and chamber size) as opposed to member preferences. Moreover, Taylor’s bicameral approach to studying institutional change is both rare and refreshing. This portion of the analysis also offers important insights into the essence of congressional parties. In particular, Taylor finds that parties are important to institutional change to the extent that they have the procedural means and partisan demand (i.e. internal cohesion of policy and procedural preferences) to effectuate change (à la Rohde, 1991). Still, it is somewhat ambiguous the extent to which workload and chamber size contributed to the divergence in floor paths, since the absence of the previous question motion in the Senate plays a (the most?) prominent role in this bifurcation, and its removal from the Senate rulebook in 1806 appears to be the result of mere house-cleaning. This point does not, nor should, detract from the importance of Taylor’s central findings, though.
The second part of Taylor’s study examines the popular notions that: (i) the Senate’s floor proceedings are superior to the House’s, and (ii) proceedings in both chambers have deteriorated over time. He introduces several creative proxy measures of desirable principles of floor proceedings, and proceeds to examine the above suppositions by conducting both macro-level (i.e. Congress-level) and micro-level (i.e. issue-specific) analyses. While the results are short of conclusive, Taylor finds reasonably strong support for the notion that floor proceedings are of higher quality in the Senate than the House. However, with the exception of one issue area (trade policy), there is little evidence to corroborate the claim that floor proceedings in both chambers have declined over time. Taylor concludes this part of the analysis by suggesting a series of thought-provoking reforms intended to move the chamber floors toward a more optimal state.
This portion of Taylor’s analysis is both innovative and immensely enjoyable to read. He deserves commendation for pursuing a comprehensive and systematic analysis of floor proceedings over congressional history – a difficult undertaking, to be sure. While there may be some debate over the operationalization of the principles identified by Taylor, the results of this analysis provide valuable information regarding temporal and inter-cameral variation in key areas of floor proceedings. Moreover, Taylor’s recommendations for institutional reforms are quite ingenious.
In sum, The Floor in Congressional Life is a must-read for any student of the US Congress. Taylor showcases an expert mixed-methodological approach to testing theoretically rich hypotheses. This book promises to be a staple in legislative studies for years to come. Moreover, Taylor’s eminently accessible writing style makes it a superb addition to undergraduate and graduate classrooms alike.