Party and Promotions After the Republican Revolution

We take advantage of a rare shift in institutional rules to provide unambiguous evidence of causal effects of party influence in Congress. After the 1994 Republican Revolution, the new majority party in the US House adopted rules that centralized committee assignments within the party leadership. We build a research design around this event to study how committee promotion affects party support. Using both regression and matching, a series of placebo tests, a sensitivity analysis, and an analysis of the doseresponse relationship between the value of the promotion and party support, we find that post-Revolution Republicans who were promoted to more prestigious committees supported the party more than did unpromoted members with statistically indistinguishable preferences and past behavior. These effects are unique to post-Revolution Republicans, robust to substantial relaxation of the key identifying assumption, and specific to the set of votes on which party seems to matter most. ∗Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, 2137 Derby Hall, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 Phone: 614-247-7017, Email: [email protected] †PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, 2140 Derby Hall, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 Phone: 720-934-3083, Email: [email protected]