of the majority party to defect on any given legislation on the floor.
Also, majority party leaders
will employ more restrictive procedures when their party holds a slim majority because these
leaders want to maximize the probability that the floor passes their legislative agenda in its
purest form possible (Binder 1997; Dion 1997).
If majority party leaders employ a higher percentage of restrictive rules on bills as that
party’s share of seats decreases, then we will not observe as many floor fights between floor
managers and members of the minority party. Under slim majorities, majority party leaders want
to consolidate their control over legislative outcomes, since they do not have the votes to lose. In
turn, this means that majority party leaders will use more blunt devices to control these
outcomes, like restrictive rules and passing bills under the Suspension of the Rules procedure.
Such measures limit the number of permissible amendments and hinder debate on bills. These
procedures are used in lieu of directing floor managers’ to “fight fire with fire” (Weingast 1992).
Therefore, I test whether:
Hypothesis Eight: M
AJORITY
S
IZE
D
IFFERENCE
. A floor manager is less likely to amend a
bill when the majority party’s share of seats decreases.
Multiple Referral
We know that multiply referred bills can induce multiple committees to cooperate with
one another (King 1997) and introduce multiple veto points in the legislative process (Rieselbach
1994). Bills which make it through these multiple veto points become the product of carefully
crafted compromises between these committees. The Rules Committee is more likely to place
restrictive rules on multiply referred bills because those bills deal with controversial topics, and
protects compromises from unraveling on the floor (Smith 1989; Young and Cooper 1993).
8 In making this statement, I make two assumptions: 1) no members of the minority party will
defect to the majority party; and 2) the minority party is highly cohesive.
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Convention