I make three major theoretical moves in this project. I begin by treating the administration and Congress as two parts of a single U.S. legislative system rather than as adversaries competing in a zero-sum game. Congress and the administration share power, and they share control of the legislative agenda. Presidential obstruction is as important a feature of the U.S. legislative system as presidential activism. Second, I emphasize the role of congressional committees as agenda setters. Committees are treated as censors--they report only a small, biased subset of all the bills they are assigned. Consequently, analyses based on floor outcomes alone will produce biased statistical estimates. Finally, I focus on the administration as an organization rather than on the president as an individual. Many players besides the president affect the fate of the administration's legislative program, and one key group of players I focus on is the Cabinet secretaries. These three departures lay the foundation for a new approach to the study of presidential success in Congress. I model Congress as a two-stage process in which committees decide whether a bill will be reported and the floor decides whether a reported bill will pass or fail. I estimate this model using a two-stage Maximum Likelihood Estimator that corrects for the selection bias introduced by the committee censoring process. Data are taken from the Education and Labor Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives for the 95th and 101st Congress. This project generates several important findings. First, selection bias is shown to introduce a large degree of bias in analyses of roll call votes. The results of roll call analyses cannot be trusted. Second, the administration is found to be an important player in committee deliberations. Administration support makes a bill much more likely to be reported by the Education and Labor committee. Third, the effect of the administration on committee outcomes is related to the president's political capital. The administration is more likely to succeed in committee when the president's party controls Congress and when the president's popularity is high.Ph.D.Political ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104298/1/9513355.pdfDescription of 9513355.pdf : Restricted to UM users only
