Motivating Questions

Frederick Muhlenberg, first Speaker of the House of Representatives

We’re proposing to measure and rank the relative influence of each Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, to develop so-called “Power Rankings” for this critical position near the top of the United States government’s power structure. As I started collecting data, I hit one of the key questions that we need to answer if we’re to come up with any sort of credible measurement: How do we define the influence of the Speaker of the House? Clearly, such influence must be defined in terms of outcomes the Speaker has an effect on, both direct and indirect. A quick list I came up with:

• Bills passing the House: Assuming that the Speaker supports all of the majority party’s causes, calculating the ratio of passed bills to proposed bills would help us infer how much control the Speaker has over her own party, which is probably the primary measure of a House Speaker’s power
• Bills passing the House and Senate: This ratio could give us a hint as to whether the Speaker’s power transfers over to the other side of the Capitol. If the House is passing bills, but the Senate rejects them, then the Speaker of the House probably doesn’t have much influence over Congress as a whole, especially if the Senate has the same majority party as the House.
• Bills signed into law by an opposing President: Again, this shows the extent of the Speaker’s power, by seeing how far he can get a bill through the lawmaking process. If a President of a different party signs into law a bill proposed by the House majority party, then either: (a) it’s a good but probably unpopular law; (b) the President is afraid of the public backlash if he vetoes the law; or (c) the President knows the veto will be overridden. In the first case, the Speaker is able to convince his party members that, despite the political cost, the law must be passed. In the latter two cases, the Speaker is able to muster enough support from Congress and the public to influence the President’s actions.
• Vetoes overridden: See (c) above. Basically, if 2/3 of the House can be convinced to override a veto, then the Speaker of the House must have control over her party’s representatives.
• Causes personally supported by SotH proposed as bills: This measures the speaker’s influence beyond the party’s mainstream platform.

I think these variables are a good start, even if they are imperfect (e.g., the Majority Leader may share much of the responsibility for whipping the majority party into shape, and I don’t how much they take orders from the House Speaker). They are quantitative rather than qualitative; the data is fairly easy to find; they can be measured in total instead of having to examine the Speaker’s influence on each bill individually; and they fit the common view we have of how the Speaker of the House’s power is manifested — i.e., the bills that are actually passed and make it to the President’s desk.

One thing we’ll have to look for when deciding if these are appropriate variables or not is whether there is any variance within them; otherwise, they won’t really tell us anything. And there are other, less easy to find ways to measure such influence: backroom deals, quid pro quos, and all that other political insider stuff that doesn’t quite make it to Wikipedia’s page on bills passed in the 110th Congress.

Over the next few days, we’ll be thinking about the meaning of influence in this context, how we want to measure it, and how far we’re willing to go with the research in this short amount of time. In fact, I think this will be a recurring theme of this blog: How do we decide upon and measure the variables that we think will help us answer our question?