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Our speaker will be Nicholas Napolio (UC-Riverside)

The title of Nico’s talk and abstract appear below:

Legislator Preferences for the Separation of Powers

This paper investigates whether members of Congress have a preference for enforcing the separation of powers. I measure legislator preferences for constraining the executive branch using complete voting records of every member of Congress from the 93rd-118th Congress (1973-2024) as well as hand-coded and machine classified information on which votes explicitly implicate executive power. I find that 33% of members of Congress serving between 1973-2024 had a preference for executive constraint, 8% had a preference for expanding executive power, and the remaining 59% had no preference either way. In addition, the proportion of legislators with preferences for executive constraint has been steadily decreasing since the 1970s from a high of 52% to a low of 25%, while the proportion of legislators with no discernible preference over executive power has grown from a low of 34% to a high of 70%. Finally, simulations show that separation of powers concerns only changed the outcome of around 50 votes from 1973-2024.

After the talk, we will have a formal discussant: Pamela McCann (USC Price)

Lunch will be provided and set out about 20-30 minutes before the talk begins.