Election lecture series like last time he is professor of politics at Catholic University and associate fellow at the institute for policy research and catholic studies at a you. I confirmed a few minutes ago that i thought may have been likely. He has two brooks books hot off the press in the last two months. From Cambridge University press his book legislative hardball, the House Freedom caucus in the power of threat making in congress and then a few months before that, leadership elections in the us house of representatives which look like this because it is this. And i think this one copies in the back maybe . No copies on that. He was supposed to speak with his colleague doug harris who could not be here today unfortunately but we will leave him to speak on his behalf. Congratulations for the banner year and publication. Welcome. [ applause ] thanks for the opportunity to speak to the capitol hill historic society. Can everyone hear me . Excellent. Its great to be back here with the capital Historical Society. Im a big fan of the Historical Society and im honored to be here today to talk about this new book that doug harris and i published, choosing a leader, leadership elections in the house of representatives. We dont have copy for sale but there is information if you would like to learn more about the book or get a copy of your own. I spoke previously on this subject as was mentioned last fall. I will cover some of the same ground but also cover some Additional Information from the book and new material that i did not discuss. Time permitting i want to talk about the most recent furiously contested election in the house of representatives which is the race for speaker of the house of representatives and the battle in the democratic party. What i want to do first is talk about what we are doing and why we think its important. We know intuitively that Party Leaders are important. We also have a wealth of social Science Research that tells us leaders are important in congress. They help set the legislative agenda, help craft legislation, help members get elected or reelected, and we know that theres a number of significant bills that have become law in American History in which Party Leaders played a key role in either the content of that legislation getting legislation through the legislative process whether its the Carter Energy bill under then speaker oneill or the contract with america and later welfare reform under speaker Newt Gingrich or the Affordable Care act which was passed in part with the guidance of nancy pelosi or the tax reform bill passed under speaker ryan in the previous congress. These are just speakers. There are other leaders who play important roles in the legislative process and acting policy. Whats interesting and one of the things that motivated myself and doug was that we know that leaders are important but we dont actually know a lot about the process which, or the politics by which leaders are select did in congress. So the question that motivated our project was how do lawmakers decide who to choose for a leader . Some leadership positions are ones in which only one person runs or the person who is running is considered be heir apparent so there is no context contest but there are a number of contests where two or more people are running for the same position. The question is who wins and who chooses which candidate and why . And as a consequence who ends up becoming a leader in congress with the potential for tremendous influence . We say there are two kinds of contention will of wisdom. The first is that they are ideological so lawmakers decide who to vote for based on whether the candidate is more conservative or liberal. If they are conservative they want more conservative candidates and vice versa. You hear this quite frequently in descriptions of races for leadership. The other common explanation for these elections is that there is no common explanation. Its just random really based on each individual race in the idiosyncratic factors involved whether its friendships or individual deals or personality. Its impossible to generalize about these races. Doug and i take a different approach. We argue that yes ideology can matter and yes there are certainly individual factors that play a role in these races but we argue there are consistent factors that pop up over and over again in leadership elections in congress. They can help explain both choices in these races. We have really two sets of hypotheses in our book. The first is that professional connections help explain this. By that i mean does a lawmaker know someone running for office through either a shared committee or a shared state delegation . In that case they will certainly know the candidate well but also be familiar with how they operate as a lawmaker and the potential that they have for being a leader. Under those circumstances folks in the same state or the same committee as the candidate are more likely to support that candidate. The other hypothesis is that lawmakers think about their goals and how candidates can help them meet that goal. Political scientists taught scientist argues that there are three goals important infrequent which is reelection, policymaking, and influence in the legislature. We argue that lawmakers and evaluate which one is more likely to achieve reelection policy and influence goals. Those are determined by a number of things depending on who the candidates are, the kind of campaigns they are waging, a Junior Member or senior member, etc. A Junior Member or senior member, etc. Theres a problem with studying leadership elections which is probably why not many people have done it. Its done by secret ballot. You dont know how a lawmaker voted in a leadership election unlike a roll call vote so how can you determine what influence the lawmakers vote if you dont know how they actually voted . The answer that we offer is to look at internal sheets. In a typical race of someone is running for a leadership position they and lawmakers part of the Campaign Team will go to their colleagues and say how are you going to vote . Will you vote for me . Will you vote for the other person or people . And they keep track of that information. We use that as a proxy for how lawmakers actually vote in these elections. Doug and i went to or gathered data from 20 different congressional archive collections around the country and gathered counts on a dozen different leadership races since 1965. We use the data to estimate how lawmakers voted in these elections. We also gathered other materials as well. Colleague letters, letters of support and telegrams, strategy memos to help understand not only how lawmakers may have voted but the context in which the election took place and Campaign Strategies and tech ticks of the candidate. We dedicate a whole chapter to the election process. How it works, how a campaign tries to get votes, etc. When we suggested this as a source of data some folks said how do you know those are accurate . In particular how do you know if lawmakers are telling the truth . What you hear a lot about is that lawmakers lie. They say absolutely ill vote for you and then dont and the other candidate says ive for you and they may or may not. If thats the case, all of these votes are secret right . So theres no way to know if they are lying or not. These commitments you make are unenforceable. We argue that the claim that people lie is greatly exaggerated and theres a few reasons why we think that is the case although its true. You see from this excerpt some folks who did not vote for them i thought that they did or would are liars and would even call them as much. Why do we think this is overstated . For one thing the final tallies that we count are close to the number of votes that they get. We see 5 over count and they were over count the number of votes that they get by about five by about 5 . Thats not very big. There are bigger errors when lawmakers try to count other candidates and there could be various reasons but in terms of their own votes its fairly accurate. Theres also an important norm of keeping your word. This we argue extents not just two things in which your word and commitment can be confirmed, and also in which it cannot be confirmed. One recently to this is the case is because they go to someone who doesnt want to vote for them, that doesnt necessarily mean they will say no because they dont want to hurt the persons feelings so they will say things like well you would be a great candidate. I hope you win. Good luck. Im right behind you. All that means nothing. Is a polite way of saying no. Good candidates follow up with that. I didnt hear whether that was a yes or no. You look him right in the eyes and say will you vote for me or not . There was one candidate for a leadership election who did meticulous counting and then went to someone running the campaign and said no you, i going to vote for me . And the congressman said what do you think . He said no, i want to hear. Getting Firm Commitments is key because lawmakers know that they would rather give an ambiguous answer whether to vote or not finally we did manage to collect some sheets of more than one candidate in the same race so we can look for votes counted as voting or committing to vote as one person. What we found is very few lawmakers to that. Very few are favors or miscounted and counted as a yes vote on more than one candidate worksheet. We look at 14 leadership elections from 19652013 and we look at the house of representatives majority and minority leader, majority whip and minority whip. We divide them into categories based on categories developed by robert peabody, another scientist who studied this phenomenon in congress, and we look at open competition races so its an open seat there is no heir apparent, no one who occupies the position. Second we look at our challenges to the heir apparent which is a person is expected that, but other people run as well then we look at revolt when someone is an incumbent running again someone decides to run against person. We find strong statistical evidence for our hypotheses about the roles of professional connections and goals. This is taken from the book, this is a table that summarizes results. I wont go through all of these in detail. Im not going to throw statistics up here on powerpoint. If youre interested theres more in the book but what i want to do in the time i have remaining is talk about a few of these races that were politically consequential or the dynamics made them especially noteworthy and colorful and fun to look at. Writing this book was fun for us, looking at some of these races and reading about the politics that go on when running for a leadership position. The first race want to talk about is the 1964 election for minority leader in the house of representatives. The republicans in minority and charlie from indiana is challenged by a congressman named gerald ford. A few things to say about these candidates and what was happening in the run up to this election. He was a selfdescribed get fighter. And aggressive partisan, pushing democrats and winning votes. He was a very assertive leader. He also rubbed people the wrong way perhaps because of his style of leadership in 1964 elections are particularly bad ones. They lose seats in the house and president ial elections. A lot of republicans and this is a common theme. Depending on the circumstances in a leader fellow partisans say we have to find someone to blame. Weve got to change leadership or something of that sort. What happens is some reformers demand a meeting of the party to talk about ways to change things. Maybe distribute power more widely. Its not really a reformist and pretty lukewarm so the younger members in particular decide i think we are going to have to get a new leader. And Charles Caddell the founder of the commissioner of the nfl, and they say you know what . You should challenge and. This is an important thing we talk about in the book, the role of recruitment. Its not everyone decides were going to run or not sometimes we need other leaders to encourage you to run. The floor decides to do it and start an assertive campaign to try to oust him. The things they say about the race. Ford was younger, he was conference chair and had defeated the conference chair and the person he beat warmed he and others to be aware of ford. He emphasized spreading more power in the party. He was a former allamerican foot ballplayer and ran a well organized campaign. One of the things they did is look for outsiders who may endorse him, Interest Groups or Barry Goldwater the president ial nominee, and encourage them to stay neutral. Try to mitigate the advantages that he would have as an incumbent. His campaign was less organized. He said youve got to do more than talk to some folks. If got to run an organized campaign. A key group are the moderates, members of what is called the wednesday group. They presumably would vote against halleck but have to be careful because a lot of republicans dont like them because they are moderate. You had to be cautious about cultivating their support. The less developments in the race, ford looked like he was going to win so he went on a vacation with his family. Not a good idea. Halleck managed to support a whip count to see who was a less firm supporter of ford and started lobbying them. The other folks said youve got to get back from your trip right now because we are going to lose this race if you dont come here and start calling members. He russes back, does more lobbying, manages to shore up his support and win 7367. Relatively close but highly consequential. When Richard NixonsVice President resigned. One could make it compelling case that minority leader election led to the presidency of gerald ford. Those who had narrowly won reelection was more concerned about where the party was going and more likely to support ford as well as younger members as well. The second historical case that i wanted to talk about, this is the 1976 race for majority leader in the Democratic Caucus. I could talk about this race all day. Those who are familiar with the race know how political and controversial and exciting it was. What happened was carl albert announced he would retire and the majority leaders heir apparent your parents says want to be speaker. The question is who will take over for oneill as the majority leader in the Democratic Caucus . For candidates ultimately in this race is more right off the bat, located. John mcfall is the whip in the heir apparent. Burton the democrat from california, Richard Boling from missouri and jim right from texas. Personalities played a big role so i wanted to see a little bit about candidates backgrounds and personalities. Mcfall is the heir apparent. He was the whip but did not campaign to vigorously. He had oneill same i will support you on the first ballot but wasnt working to the same extent as other candidate to get the position. Most figure mcfall will probably get elected. Its a series of balance and rounds. Whoever has the fewest vote is out and then you have remaining votes for the remaining candidates. The dynamic is what votes can you get not just on the first ballot but the second or third . Mcfall is not as likely to make it past the first round of voting burton is a presumptive favorite. Is a fiery liberal, a reformist, a master legislator and is responsible for a lot of legislative accomplishments in congress often behindthe scenes. Is from california which has a large delegation so he can at least get some of mcfalls votes. Is also a controversial figure. Hes fiery and can be erratic. There are at least a dozen democrats and personally or other kinds of activity or behavior. Theres a number of democrats who are worried about burton as the majority leader in the Democratic Caucus. Bowling is a protigi of sam rayburn. Geismar, also a reformist and can be arrogant a lot of democrats got turned off by his manner. He runs explicitly to defeat burton. Is lets interested in said he said and being majority leader than making sure burton is not. Jim right from the Public Works Committee was seen by many as too conservative to have a chance. He was from texas, a southerner, had a mixed voting record on things like civil rights, and he entered late which possibly meant a lot of democrats had already committed to the other candidates. Behindthescenes theres evidence that oneill was unhappy with those first three choices and had been part of a group of members recruiting wright to run for this position. Another example of how it can be important. A number of issues pop up. Definitely ideology where you have wright on the left and wright on the right and burton on the left. The southern wing of the party is shrinking moving to the left. Region is an issue. You have large delegations, seniority is an issue and urban districts because wright being from the Public Works Committee had been able to give favors to folks from large city delegations. If you developments i will mention. First was wright s entry who came in late. So would that make a difference . And could he actually be . Beach burton . A lot thought he was the next candidate after mcfall. The second was where oneill is going to vote. He kept his cards close to his vest. He said im going to support mcfall in the first ballot. There were rumors he could not stand burton but other than that it wasnt clear where his vote can be and could be decisive. There are a number of anecdotes from this race so one that i like is when Richard Boling wants to brag about how wright is going to lose so he talks to a staffer and says wright has no chance and explains why. Hes too conservative on civil rights, oil and gas, and the staffer goes to the campaign and tells him all of that so they readjust their campaign accordingly emphasizing civil rights for example. If you are going to run for this kind of elections got to be careful what information you are going to share. In the end, final election. First round of voting is not a surprising outcome. Burton comes in first by a decisive ma