The Substance of Representation makes a foray into an area that, regrettably, has been too long ignored. The simplicity of that lead sentence could not have been imagined 40 years ago when the best and brightest congressional scholars were seriously examining not only the legislative process, but also the products of the legislative process. The latter of these topics shortly thereafter went missing. This important new book from John Lapinski corrects that lapse and, hopefully, will usher in a new area of scholarship that examines the products of Congress and not just its processes.
The substance of representation—both the topic and the book—is at the intersection of Congressional studies, American political development, and policy studies. None of the subfields has made a serious or recent effort at trying to incorporate it into the larger context of policy making or political development. Such an oversight, according to Lapinski, is not just unfortunate, but more likely, damaging to each.
Lapinski reintroduces the substance of policy back into these subfields by coding all roll-call votes and public statues from 1877 to 2009 into four primary “first tier” categories (sovereignty, organization/scope, international relations, and domestic affairs) and four secondary “first tier” categories (District of Columbia, housekeeping, quasi-private bills, and public quasi-private bills). Each of the primary first tier categories has three or four “blueprint” subcategories. Each of these subcategories is further divided into 2 to 13 tier three subcategories.
The substantive chapters examine how issues affect polarization broadly (Chapter 3) and through a number of case studies (Chapter 4), as well as the influence of issue substance on legislative accomplishments (Chapter 5) and an overall explanation of lawmaking (Chapter 6). In each chapter, Lapinski, through detailed large-N quantitative analysis, demonstrates how a model that lumps all issue areas together misses something only revealed when the substance of the legislation is considered. Despite the common contention that most issues collapse onto the popular liberal-conservative ideological dimension, an intra-policy analysis reveals considerable variety. Domestic issues are nearly always polarized while the other categories show the common divergence from Reconstruction to World War II followed by growing divergence afterward, though polarization’s low point varies among the issues.
By examining the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892, the Espionage Act of 1917, Hawaii and Alaska Statehood in the 1950s, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Lapinski shows how congressional scholars would have missed the importance of intra-policy variety had they assumed that these important issues followed the conventional wisdom. He concludes, “[a]t best, we can only partially understand lawmaking by treating the policy process as being similar across policy types” (p. 102).
The legislative accomplishment and lawmaking chapters go hand-in-hand. In the former, Lapinski introduces a second massive data set that estimates the importance of enactments from 1877 to 2009 by examining a number of sources—what he calls “raters.” These estimates are then ranked into a list of the top 500 and 3500 enactments over the same time period. Congressional productivity can then be analyzed to reveal what characteristics propel and which impede legislative enactments within the four primary categories. By examining polarization and a slew of control variables (start of presidential term, divided government, war, Vietnam War, time, House majority party advantage) in a negative binomial regression model, Lapinski finds that these variables affect sovereignty measures differently than they do the other categories. Not only does polarization increase sovereignty enactments, but some of the other control variables seem to have no effect. The other models show more consistency in the control variables’ results and that polarization impedes enactments.
In the conclusion Lapinski argues that his book should be only the beginning of the exploration of the substance of legislation and its effect on the legislative process and policy development. He has done congressional scholars a useful service by pointing us in a new worthy topic of study – or, perhaps more accurately, reintroduces us to a worthy topic of study. Furthermore, by being transparent with his data collection and coding efforts and by sharing them with the community, he is engaging in the best practices of social science.
I suspect that few scholars would disagree with the overall thrust of Lapinski’s argument. Clearly, a more fine-tuned analysis that takes into consideration the differences among policy areas will reveal a more complete picture of polarization and its relationship to legislative productivity. In this regard, Lapinski succeeds. In the book’s final paragraph, he admits his final aim. He simply wants congressional scholars and American political development scholars to see that the “policy issue substance seems to offer a path to faithful work that can help both fields make much-needed gains in our understanding of the policy process as well as provide key insights into long-standing but only partially answered core questions asked by each subfield” (p. 160).
My only quibble with the book is that Lapinski is not as careful in integrating the literatures that he is trying to unite as he is in developing his measures and tests. I suspect that he would admit as much; in fact, he almost does: “My ideas for improving congressional studies are all about introducing better measures of political preferences and legislative productivity” (p. 159). While he is certainly justified in focusing his attention on these issues, a more thoughtful integration of the existing studies that have incorporated policy areas into the analysis would have pushed policy back into the Congress subfield more quickly.
I can appreciate that he does not want to get into the minutiae of the polarization debate, but his implicit assertion that the polarization topic begins and ends with Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal’s (2006) good book, Polarized America, mischaracterizes the subfield. Barbara Sinclair, Steve Smith, and Frances Lee have greatly contributed to this literature in the exact way that he advocates, and yet they go unmentioned. Lee, in particular, explicitly considered the substance of policy in her polarization analysis and yet her important book is not in the bibliography.
Without first getting the lay of the land from Howard Rosenthal, Keith Poole, Keith Krehbiel, Mat McCubbins, Gary Cox, Dave Rohde, and John Aldrich, Lapinski’s study would not have been possible. These scholars have analyzed the broad contours of congressional lawmaking. None of them would suggest that the big picture is as focused as it needs to be. But without first getting it set, it would be impossible for a finer tuned focus to provide the necessary nuance to clarify the big picutre. To get the most from his study, Lapinski should have built in a more rigorous way upon those that came before. One additional example on this dimension showcases my concern. Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones introduced a massive coding scheme for legislation that involves 19 major topic codes and 225 subtopic codes. This coding scheme has been employed around the world. Rather than engaging the work that Baumgartner and Jones have already provided political science, Lapinski asserts that their codes are time dependent and, thus, unsuitable for his purposes. He does not provide any evidence or even an argument for why his assertion is valid. Baumgartner and Jones argue that the beauty of their coding categories is that they are not time dependent and there is no reason that Lapinski offers to contradict that widely held opinion. Furthermore, Lapinski’s own coding scheme could not easily be implemented in countries other than the United States, something that Baumgartner and Jones’s has already accomplished. Given the centrality of his coding scheme to his entire enterprise, Lapinski needed to engage more explicitly the work of those who came before him in order to contextualize and understand the contributions he is trying to make, especially given that he sees his data set as a major contribution of his entire enterprise.
These criticisms do not detract from the purpose of Lapinski’s book. They only suggest that the execution was not as complete as it could have been; but then, what opening word of a new—or reintroduced—topic ever is?
