Testing the Institutional Dynamics of Legislative Organizations : Linking the House of Representives, the Senate, and the President

Studies of legislative politics have long debated to explain how rules, procedures, and political parties functions in the House from the distributional (committee-oriented), informational (the floor-oriented), and party government perspectives. That a bill becomes a law however depends on not only the internal functioning of a chamber, but also the patterns of interaction among lawmaking institutions. This article analyzes how these lawmaking institutions interact and reconcile the difference of their preferences in legislative procedure. Specifically, this article examines the nature of inter- institutional influences among the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President in the United States over last five decades, focusing on the relationship between the spread of internal ideological distribution in a chamber as a proxy for organizational change and the president`s reaction to the bill. A Vector autoregressive (VAR) modeling strategy imposes weaker fewer restrictions on model specification and estimations than typical structural equation models while offering better treatment of endogeneity problem. Empirical results show that organizational change in a chamber influence the way the House and Senate reconcile their preference differences, and further the way president react to the bill. The president is more inclined to exercise his veto power as a legislative organization is more confrontational in the lawmaking procedures.