Two years ago, despite being the “minority” party, Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives had a profound impact on the legislative process due to their informal power-sharing agreement with Republican Speaker Joe Straus. Reflective of the high degree of influence over the legislative agenda delegated by Straus to the Democrats, the party’s roll rate (the proportion of times a majority of Democrats were on the losing side of a roll call vote) for all non-lopsided votes cast in the House was a mere 10% in 2009. This was less than that of the “majority” Republicans, whose roll rate was 32% (that is, on nearly one-third of all votes cast in 2009, a majority of the Republican delegation was on the losing side).
Fast forward to 2011, and, after 120 days, the situation is very distinct. To date, the Democratic roll rate for all non-lopsided votes is 63%, while the Republican roll rate is 6%. Thus far, a majority of the Democratic Party delegation has been on the losing side of nearly two-thirds of all non-lopsided votes cast in Austin. In contrast, the Republican Party delegation has been rolled only infrequently. The figure below shows that at the individual legislator level, the mean Republican win rate (the percentage of votes in which the representative cast a vote where he/she was on the winning side) is 89%, ranging from 75% (David Simpson) to 97% (Rob Eissler), with only five Republicans (Ken Paxton, Simpson, Randy Weber, James White and Bill Zedler) possessing a win rate below 80%.
In contrast, the mean Democratic Party win rate so far this year is 37%, ranging from a low of 31% (Yvonne Davis) to a high of 51% (Joe Pickett). It is particularly instructive to contrast the shift in the win rates of some of the delegation’s more liberal members from 2009 to 2011: Lon Burnam (88% to 32%), Garnet Coleman (88% to 36%), Jessica Farrar (87% to 32%) and Trey Martinez-Fischer (90% to 33%).
In addition, voting behavior in the House has become more and more partisan as the session has progressed, with the level of ideological homogeneity with the Republican delegation growing substantially. Downloadable figures for the representatives’ respective locations on the liberal-conservative dimension along which most voting takes place in the Texas House are available, as well as a 95% credible interval (CI) for this point estimate (figures for the Republican and Democratic delegations alone are also available). The dimension ranges here from the liberal extreme of -1.04 to the conservative extreme of 0.52. Only when a representative’s CI does not overlap with that of another representative can we say with any real certainty that their respective locations on the liberal-conservative dimension are credibly distinct.
Two points stand out in this figure. The first is the strong and salient ideological chasm that exists between the Republican and Democratic parties. The least conservative Republican (Aaron Peña) is still substantially more conservative than the most conservative Democrat (Joe Pickett).
The second point of interest is the growing ideological homogeneity within the Republican Party delegation. In the two preceding entries on the representatives’ ideological location on the liberal-conservative dimension at 60 days and 90 days, Republican representatives were placed into intra-party ideological groupings (moderate, centrist and conservative wings) based on whether or not their liberal-conservative score was significantly more liberal or conservative than at least 20% of their fellow Republicans. At the 90-day mark, 17 representatives fell into the conservative wing, 14 in the moderate wing, and 69 in the centrist bloc. At the 120-day mark all but one representative (moderate Aaron Peña) is located in the centrist bloc. Furthermore, even the second-most moderate Republican (John Davis) has a voting record that is not significantly distinct from that of a total of 90 of his colleagues (i.e., only 9 of the 99 other Republicans can be considered more conservative than Davis), and altogether only two other Republicans (Dee Margo and Allan Ritter) can be classified as substantially more moderate than five or more of their Republican brethren. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, only four representatives have voting profiles that we can consider to be notably more conservative than five or more of their fellow Republicans (Ken Paxton-16, Randy Weber-15, Bill Zedler-14 and Sid Miller-7).
In sum, this analysis reveals a Republican Party delegation for which it is increasingly difficult to differentiate (based on their roll call vote behavior) between moderates, centrists and conservatives. For all intents and purposes, every member of the Republican delegation (with the potential exception of Aaron Peña) is more or less equally conservative.
Mark P. Jones is the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy’s Fellow in Political Science as well as the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Rice University.