Party discipline in the contemporary Congress: Rewarding loyalty in theory and in practice

Party leaders in the House of Representatives allocate scarce resources and opportunities to their rank-and-file members. Leaders determine whose bills, amendments, and resolutions to consider on the House floor, whose requests for committee transfers to honor, and whose campaigns to assist. In these domains, do they exert party discipline by rewarding loyalty and punishing defection? Scholars have identified party influence in members' roll call votes, finding that members cast votes contrary to their own preferences in support of their party. Through statistical analyses of leaders' decisions from 1987-2002 and qualitative interviews, this dissertation establishes that leaders exert discipline by rewarding behavior and illustrates the mechanisms by which they achieve loyalty.; Leaders pursue policy control and electoral advantage when they allocate benefits. The relative priority of these goals depends on the electoral and institutional context of a particular Congress. Leaders pursuing policy control rewarded members' past loyalty in policy and procedural voting in order to provide incentives for future loyalty. The leaders pursuing a partisan legislative program, particularly in congresses where narrow margins made almost every vote important, were most likely to exert discipline in the legislative and committee domains. Newly-elected leaders assigning committee positions also exerted discipline. Majority Republican leaders violated seniority---at the expense of less loyal members---in the selection of committee chairs in a few prominent cases.; In interviews, leaders indicated that electoral vulnerability was a factor in their decisions in each of the three domains. Vulnerable members indeed received the most financial assistance, regardless of their party loyalty. However, leaders also found opportunities for discipline in the electoral domain: an analysis confined to safe incumbents shows that Republican leaders contributed more resources to loyal than disloyal members, and Republican rank-and-file members were more likely to contribute to loyalists. In the legislative and committee domains, leaders prioritized electoral concerns only when they had an unusually large number of vulnerable incumbents. After 1994, leaders rewarded large party contributors with committee positions and legislative preference.; Leaders' allocation of benefits affects members' legislative careers, electoral success, and abilities to represent constituents. Party discipline provides members with incentives to toe the party line and shapes the content and success of the legislative agenda. Showing some of the mechanisms of discipline thus deepens our understanding of party influence and partisan polarization.