In this section I draw on the existing literature to develop a theoretical explanation for why members on the ideological fringes are seen as less effective legislators and face diminished policy fortunes. Canonical work on legislative behavior in Congress posits that members have a mix of goals—reelection, policy changes, and influence in the chamber—and suggests several distinct strategies for them to achieve those goals (Fenno, 1978; Mayhew, 1974). Some members build a personal vote and avoid premature departure from a legislature
by emphasizing position-taking. For example, those who depend to a greater extent on the support of strong partisans to win elections are incented to engage in higher levels of partisan conflict, including more extreme voting records and the use of more vitriolic rhetoric (Canes- Wrone, Brady and Cogan, 2002; Harbridge and Malhotra, 2011). Indeed, recent work on Congress shows that ideological legislators place less emphasis on policymaking; in examining press releases, Grimmer (2013) finds that more ideologically extreme legislators tend to focus a considerable amount of their energy on position-taking, touting their views on divisive policy issues.
Other reelection-motivated legislators cultivate a base of support by claiming credit for policy changes, highlighting their efforts at securing—or promising to secure—appropriations for their constituents (Grimmer, Westwood and Messing, 2013). These legislators situate themselves deep in the policymaking weeds, building coalitions, striking deals and guiding their bills through the chamber to ensure porcine-laden bills make it back to their con- stituents. The implications of these two strategies for legislative effectiveness and influence in the chamber diverge, however; whereas appeals based on credit-claiming convey the im- pression of being able to get things done, thereby contributing to perceptions of effectiveness, the same cannot be said for those legislators who emphasize position-taking, for it is difficult to make the case that polarizing a policy debate or inducing gridlock constitute a valorized form of legislative effectiveness. From this logic that legislators adopt different strategies to cultivate a personal vote, I test the following hypothesis:
H1: as a legislator’s distance to the chamber median increases, his or her legislative effectiveness decreases.
The preceding discussion of individual legislators’ incentives gives rise to a collective dilemma. In the absence of any mechanism to rein in excesses, individual members can impose untold damage to the party brand through individual optimizing; legislators who primarily make use of position-taking will articulate one extreme position after another, promulgating a perception that the party is out of touch with key voting blocs, and legislators
who primarily make use of credit-claims will be tempted to propose a continuous stream of projects for their constituents to the point of fiscal profligacy. The party leadership represents one such mechanism to maintain discipline. As partisan models of legislative organization make clear, the party leadership wants to remain in the majority and doing so requires protecting the collective good of the party’s brand, which is based in no small part on the legislative record of Congress. By cartelizing the legislative agenda, invoking both positive and negative agenda power, senior partners in the cartel—particularly floor leaders and committee chairs—can build a favorable corpus of accomplishments to buoy the electoral fortunes of its members when they face voters (Cox and McCubbins, 2005).
The provenance of any such policy accomplishments must emanate from jurisdiction- specific standing committees, the assignments of which are controlled by the party leader- ship. While cartel theory hypothesizes that committees serve as tools of the majority party, their decisions can also adversely affect non-committee members. One way to minimize any such negative externalities from occurring is for party leaders to vigilantly police committee activity to ensure that their efforts benefit party members. A more practical alternative, however, is to simply keep fringe members of the chamber from chairing important commit- tees;3 these members would be more likely to support extreme bills harmful to the party
brand, which in turn would require larger payoffs to moderate members so as to prevent defections. By contrast, when more moderate members of the party hold key agenda-setting posts, the party can be reasonably confident that committees will prevent the passage of policies that harm the majority’s brand and encourage the passage of policies that benefit its brand. With this in mind, the party leadership should be more likely to empower relative moderates, who will advance a credible partisan agenda that is electorally useful to most of its members.
3Along with their control over positions on sought-after committees and their ability to block undesirable
bills from reaching the floor, senior partners can also dissuade members from undercutting the party’s brand through targeted spending. For example, Carroll and Kim (2010) find that the majority party uses pork barrel spending to ensure members support the party on procedural votes. In a similar vein, Jenkins and Monroe (2012) argue another means in which the majority party sustains the cartel is through campaign contributions from leaders’ political action committees.
Evidence abounds that legislatures operate along the lines described by the cartel model. In the U.S. Congress, for example, defiant members who oppose the leadership on important votes find themselves no longer sitting on prized committees (Rohde, 1991). More closely related to the North Carolina context, state legislators who try to advance bills likely to reflect poorly on the party’s brand, such as legislation outlawing Islamic sharia law in state courts—not known to be an especially pressing public policy problem in North Carolina— have little hope of seeing their bills emerge from committee (Zucchino, 2013).
If it is the case that senior partners use their institutional authority to shape the legislative environment, and if ideologically extreme legislators are more likely to attempt to pass bills that would reflect poorly on their party’s brand, one might also expect them to be less likely to hold high-ranking positions on important committees where they would be able to exercise agenda-setting powers. This leads to a second hypothesis:
H2: as a legislator’s distance to the chamber median increases, the probability that he or she chair (or co-chair) a powerful committee decreases.
The remainder of this article tests these hypotheses. Before turning to the data, the following section offers a brief description of the North Carolina General Assembly.