While many scholars have focused on the production of legislation, we explore life after enactment. Contrary to the prevailing view that federal programs are indissoluble, we show that programmatic restructurings and terminations are commonplace. In addition, we observe significant changes in programmatic appropriations. We suggest that a sitting congress is most likely to transform, kill, or cut programs inherited from an enacting congress when its partisan composition differs substantially. To test this claim, we examine the postenactment histories of every federal domestic program established between 1971 and 2003, using a new dataset that distinguishes program death from restructuring. Consistent with our predictions, we find that changes in the partisan composition of congresses have a strong influence on program durability and size. We thus dispel the notion that federal programs are everlasting while providing a plausible coalition-based account for their evolution.
This is from a newly published paper by Christopher Berry, Barry Burden, and William Howell (gated; ungated). The italics are mine. The data come from all federal domestic programs enacted between 1971 and 2003 (2,059 programs).
So how much do elections matter? When the majority party who enacted the program loses 10% of its seats across both chambers, the probability that a program is killed doubles. Similarly, if this majority party gains 10%, the probability of program death drops by 80%. The same shifts in the size of the enacting majority party produce either a .10% decline or .60% increase in program spending.
Berry, Burden, and Howell also consider other ways of measuring changing in political power—isolating changes in the House and Senate, counting the number of institutions (House, Senate, president) controlled by the enacting majority, factoring in the ideological composition of Congress, etc.
Since Berry and colleagues simulate the effects of a 10% shift in seats, it’s instructive to do this little back-of-the-envelope calculation. Currently, the Democrats control 59 seats in the Senate and 254 seats in the House, for a total of 313. One current prediction for 2010 has the Republicans gaining 7 seats in the Senate and 27 in the House—for a loss to the Democrats of…about 10%.
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One interesting thing about 2010 is that the Dems could lose 10% of their seats and _not_ lose control of either house. I wonder how often that has happened? More generally, I’m a little surprised that seat changes could have a linear effect on policy independent of passing big thresholds, the most serious of which would be the loss of control of a house of congress, especially in a place like the US where the majority party gets to chair all of the committees.
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