bills sponsored and/or cosponsored can be traced to individual members, allowing analysis of how much the ideological positions contained in national party platforms trickle down or are mirrored by individual members and their personal ideologies.93 Moreover, as representations of ideological positions, sponsored and cosponsored bills have an advantage over other forms of legislative data such as roll call votes in that they are much more extensive. Numerous bills do not make it to the roll call stage, many are introduced but only a few are reported out to the floor by committees, and still others are killed through a variety of procedural maneuvers that may require unrecorded voice, not roll call, votes.94
For the three significant periods of family political development as identified through platform analysis in the previous section—Progressive (1899–1920), postwar (1946–1954), and late century (1989–2004)—2,004 family bills were identified and coded.95 In all three periods, legislators introduced disproportionately more economics-centered Hearth bills than Soul ones, with this disparity being most apparent in the post–World War II era.
In the postwar period, almost all family bills (96.7 percent) had an economic Hearth focus, much more than the 86.4 percent or the 60.9 percent of family bills in the Progressive and late twentieth-century periods, respectively. A large proportion of family bills following World War II were concerned with the welfare of dependents of returning and fallen veterans and proposed expanded housing, educational, social security, insurance, and pension benefits for them. Postwar legislators also used an economics-focused Hearth approach in family bills to liberalize immigration and citizenship, provide for the admission and naturalization of war brides and families of war veterans, and, when addressing the growing phenomenon of women in the workforce, provide tax and social security changes to accommodate them and their families.
In contrast to the economics-dominated postwar period, in both the Progressive and late twentieth-century periods, congressional members also sponsored sizable proportions of bills that focused on family values (the Soul approach). In the Progressive Era, members sponsored several Soul-focused family bills in the 61st, 62nd, and 63rd Congresses (1909 to 1914; 39 percent, 20 percent, and 16 percent of all bills examined, respectively). Many of these bills were directed at preserving the sanctity, values, and morality of the white family structure, for instance, by condemning and criminalizing white slave traffic and intermarriage.96 By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, however, legislators began to introduce larger proportions of bills that had a Hearth focus: on average, seventeen Hearth-focused family bills were introduced for each Congress from 1899 to 1909, and this number rose to approximately thirty per Congress during the second Progressive decade, from 1910 to 1920. Members of Congress used the Hearth economic approach in veterans’ pension bills—to provide relief to their widows, children, and dependents—also invoking family economics to call for regulation of marriage/divorce, care of abandoned children, provision of public lands/homesteads to families, and child support, many of which were not mentioned in party platforms at the time.
The late twentieth-century period stands apart in its unprecedented proportion of Soul family values bills, particularly during the 104th (1994–1995) and 105th (1996–1997) Congresses, even though economics-focused bills continued to otherwise prevail. During the Contract with America Congresses (104th and 105th Congresses), for the first time, legislators sponsored more Soul family bills, even exceeding the proportion of Hearth bills, a phenomenon that remained unmatched in any of the other congresses investigated.97
Moreover, in this more recent period, many more legislators clustered their support through cosponsorship around valuational Soul bills, evidencing the increased political salience of family values following the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Of the 1,009 family bills examined in the period from 1989 to 2004, almost identical proportions of Hearth and Soul bills were cosponsored.98 However, in the period following the 104th Congress, Soul bills began to attract more cosponsors (32.2 cosponsors per Soul bill) than Hearth ones (22.9 cosponsors).99
Thus, the late twentieth-century period is distinctive to family political development not only in terms of the increased proportion of Soul bills (despite the ongoing higher proportion of Hearth bills) but also because many more legislators began to attach their names, in larger numbers, to Soul family values bills rather than to Hearth ones. This development was put into play, beginning with the 104th Contract with America Congress in 1995 (Figure 10).
In terms of patterns of partisanship, the Progressive and late twentieth-century periods resemble each other in contrast to the postwar era. In these two periods, party affiliation of the legislator (as Democratic [coded as 0] or Republican [coded as 1]) was strongly correlated with the kinds of family bills he or she introduced (as Hearth [1] or Soul [0] (see Table 2).
Party attachment to kind of family bill also demonstrates a clear reversal in party family ideologies through the twentieth century. Whereas more Republicans sponsored Hearth bills in the Progressive Era, by the late twentieth-century period, more Republicans introduced bills with a Soul focus.100 In the Progressive Era, the majority of Soul family bills (57.4 percent) introduced was sponsored by Democrats, while the majority of Hearth family bills (69.7 percent) was introduced by Republicans.101 By the late twentieth century, however, Republicans introduced the vast majority of Soul bills (80.5 percent), and Democrats introduced many more Hearth ones (68.7 percent).
Figure 10. Mean number of cosponsors, Hearth and Soul bills, 1989–2004.
The increasing polarization in Hearth and Soul family ideologies is clearly evidenced in cosponsorship patterns as well. An average 17.1 percent of the congressional Republican delegation cosponsored a Soul family values bill in the late twentieth century compared to only 3.29 percent of the Democratic delegation.102 In contrast, an average 12.8 percent of the congressional Democratic delegation cosponsored a Hearth family economics bill in contrast to 4.3 percent of the Republican contingent. For Republicans in Congress, cosponsorship percentage and Soul family bills bore a statistically significant relationship (at the .05 level) starting from the 104th Congress (1995–1996) through to the last Congress examined (the 108th [2003–2004]).103 This was so for Democrats starting in the 105th Congress, when the size (percentage) of Democrats cosponsoring a bill and its Hearth ideology became statistically significant (at the .05 level). At this time, partisanship and the kind of family bill introduced (its ideology) thus became much more strongly correlated than ever before.
Table 2. Correlation Between Ideology of Family Bill and Party Membership of Sponsor
a Correlation is significant at the .01 level, two-tailed.
In sum, whether in the kinds of family bills sponsored or the extent and content of bills cosponsored, since the 104th Congress, party affiliation has significantly divided Congress members in their family-related legislative behavior. Republican victory in the election of 1994 was followed by a dramatic overall increase in the proportion of Soul family values bills introduced in Congress; this coincided with the sharp rise in the percentage of the Republican delegation that began to cosponsor Soul bills. Among Democrats, while the relationship between cosponsorship percentage and bills’ family ideology was not significant in the 104th Congress, since then—starting from the 105th Congress—this relationship has become statistically significant, with significantly greater proportions of Democrats sponsoring Hearth family economics bills. Legislative behavior on family-related bills thus came to be strongly correlated with family ideology for both parties following the Republican takeover of the House in the mid-1990s.
