1. Schickler and Rich (1997) argue that the small number of uncompensated seniority violations through the mid-20th century indicates and provides evidence that party leaders did not dole out such punishments with an iron fist. Although Cox and McCubbins (1997) concede that there were few violations in that time period, they maintain that observing few seniority violations in that time period is consistent with the low cohesiveness of the majority party throughout the 20th century. Further, they maintain that only a party-oriented theory can explain both the low levels of seniority violations in the 1950–70 period and the resurgence of violations in the postreform era.
2. Party Discipline and Measures of Partisanship
3. Rerunning the model with a Normal(0, 1000) prior for seniority or Uniform(–5, 5) for all coefficients makes no substantive difference in the outcome of the model.
4. Rerunning the model with Uniform(–5, 5) priors makes no substantive difference in the outcome of the model. Further, the data can overwhelm a skeptical prior on the effect of seniority, specifically, a normal prior on seniority with a mean of 1 and variance of 1.
5. The new Democratic majority has maintained these rules.