The Discipline of Seniority?
Sébastien Piednoir writes:
The aim of this second blog post is for me to report back on the first steps of my investigation about the impact of the seniority system in the Senate on the level of party discipline in this same chamber. In order to get “fresh information” and hoping to make my topic somehow clearer, I conducted two interviews of congressional staffers from the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Unfortunately, far from giving me a clear insight on my topic, the conversations I had with those “critical actors” actually added a new dimension to the puzzle; I learned that there was a gap between the actors intimate knowledge of the Senate and the conclusions that could be drawn from both the facts and the research of many scholars.
The first staffer I interviewed was Trey Reffet, a legislative assistant in Senator Reid’s Office. I asked him about party discipline in the Senate and the way the majority leader sought to strengthen it. He told me that, on the basis of his experience, party unity was strong in the upper body and that the party leadership had two types of lever at his disposal to enforce it. The main one is positive incentives – the carrot -, that is rewarding a loyal member by good relationships with the other members of the caucus, co-sponsorships of his bills, time on the legislative calendar and, he said, good committee assignments. The other type of means is negative incentives – the stick – and it is approximately the exact opposite of the positive incentives, a reluctance to introduce the member’s bills to the floor and once again the use of certain flexibility in the seniority system to deny valuable committee seats or chairmanships to disloyal members.
The second staffer I interviewed, Ryan Mulvenon, is a policy advisor for the Majority Leader and, in many respects, his views on my topic were similar to the ones of Trey. I asked him if the seniority rule was a very important feature of the organization of the upper chamber. He told me that it was. I then asked him if party unity was strong in the senate. He said that it most often was but that it depended on the kind of issue at stake. Issues with a national impact are characterized with strong party discipline (budget, outside forces, health care), while issue with a more local dimension do not divide the floor between both sides of the aisle but are characterized with constituency loyalty (farm bill, transportation, water resources). I then asked him what was the relationship between those two hallmarks of congressional organization – party discipline and seniority rule – and that is where I got a little confused. He told me that seniority rule did not undermine party discipline, as there were other efficient means to enforce it and the threat of an exception to seniority rule was always present. To support the second argument, he gave two examples: Olympia Snowe retired in 2013 because she, according to him, knew that the chairmanship of the Finance Committee would be denied to her; Joe Lieberman lost all his committee assignments after he decided to support John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. However, listening to Mulvenon, I was unclear whether he considered that the threat of flexibility in the seniority system actually increased party discipline or just meant that seniority rule had no impact. In any case, I had to ask a lot of questions to finally tackle my topic, and he did not spontaneously link party discipline and seniority rule.
Maybe those two interviews should have led me to stop studying a relationship that for some did not exist and to find another subject. However, mostly because an investigative researcher does not prematurely quit, I decided to go beyond the views of Trey and Ryan. I discovered that the intimate knowledge of the actors did not really fit the facts and the conclusions of numerous scholars. Indeed, for the 113th Congress, I found no instances of chairmanships or ranking minority memberships being denied to the most senior member of the committee for political reasons. For example, if John McCain is not ranking minority member of the armed services committee, it is only because he was termed out of this position. The Republican caucus doesn’t allow its members to occupy such positions for more than 6 years, but it surely allows mavericks to hold such offices under those restrictions. Moreover, both the common sense and the conclusions of many scholars back up the idea that a strong enforcement of the seniority rule undermines the ability of the majority leader to enforce party discipline. The eventual causal relationship is obvious, and it has been demonstrated for the House of Representatives.[1] If one added to that the lack of scholarly consensus on the question, this was enough for me to go on with my investigation.[2]
The intimate knowledge of the critical actors asserts that seniority rule, as it is, does not undermine party discipline because it allows for a good amount of flexibility and that the threat of this flexibility being used by the party leader is always present. “The gun is behind the door” and this is efficient enough. However, this idea does not seem to be supported by the facts and the research on the subject. The relationship I posited is thus still likely to be real even though invisible to the eyes of the actors. The answer lies in the comparison between the evolution of party discipline and the variations in the enforcement of the seniority rule; it lies on the facts more than in the views or the intentions of the actors. It is on this reality that I will try to shed some light through my research.
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[1] Sarah Brandes Crook and John R. Hibbing. “Congressional Reform and Party Discipline: The Effects of Changes in the Seniority System on Party Loyalty in the US House of Representatives”, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), pp. 207-226.
[2] David E Broockman and Daniel M. Butler. “How Do Committee Assignments Facilitate Majority Party Power? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in the Arkansas State Legislature”, not yet published, 2012. The two researchers disagree with Brandes Crook and Hibbing (1985) and claim that there is no relationship between party control of committee assignments and party loyalty.
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