Roll Calls, Voting Coalitions, and Possible Agenda Control in the U.S. House of Representatives: 1869–2024

How well can roll calls detect the causal impact of majority party agenda setting in the House of Representatives? Estimating the counterfactual required to assess the effects of majority party agenda setting is complicated by time-varying differences in the political environment and the fact that measures commonly used to control for compositional changes are themselves endogenous to the congressional agenda. To isolate the effect of agenda changes due to changes in majority status from compositional changes in the members who are serving, I evaluate how the congressional agenda affects coalitions of members serving in consecutive Congresses. Using fixed effects to account for time-varying differences between consecutive Congresses and looking at the effect on members who serve in both Congresses helps isolate the effects of the changing agenda using several measures with clear theoretical predictions. Characterizing the overall pattern as well as the variation over time and by various issues both highlights the challenge of consistently estimating the effects of agenda control while also demonstrating that patterns consistent with agenda control are relatively recent phenomena. The time-varying evidence of patterns consistent with partisan agenda control raises important questions about how to interpret seemingly similar levels of elite polarization across time and how different processes may be responsible for similar levels of polarized voting.