Each year Congress considers proposals to repeal laws passed by prior Congresses. Jordan Ragusa and Nathaniel Birkhead, in Congress in Reverse, make a good case that votes on these repeal efforts are fundamentally different from votes on other measures. They note that “from a political standpoint, repeals can exacerbate the path-dependent nature of legislation and must overcome the various interest groups that have an interest in maintaining the status quo. And from an institutional perspective, attempts to repeal elements of a party’s brand often heighten conflict” (pp. 12–13). Ragusa and Birkhead also detail a method for identifying repeal efforts and then use the data they produce based on that method to study various aspects of repeal efforts.

Congress in Reverse will have an impact because it provides the necessary building blocks for a new research agenda. The authors draw on previous research to identify theoretical reasons to expect repeal efforts to differ from other bills that the legislature considers. For example, they build on Pierson (Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment, 1994) and others by noting that it is harder to repeal laws because, once the law is in place, it can create or strengthen interests who will fight to maintain the law. Laws can create constituencies that in turn fight to protect those laws.

Similarly, the authors build on the work of Lee (Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the US Senate, 2009) and others who argue that the impact of the party brand in elections has consequences for party action in the legislature. Legislation matters both because voters want to see that politicians get things done and because it can be a means for them to communicate to voters about the party’s position on issues of the day (pp. 16–17). Repeal efforts are a strong way that a party can differentiate its own position from that of the opposition, because an effort to repeal a law passed by the opposition indicates a clear difference between the parties on that issue.

Most of these arguments are not new. Instead, Ragusa’s and Birkhead’s theoretical contribution is to show that these existing arguments provide incentives for legislatures to treat repeal efforts differently from how they treat other legislation. In other words, they explain how existing arguments can help explain a previously understudied phenomenon. This is an important contribution because if repeals were not different from other bills, there would be no reason to study them separately.

However, their most important contribution is in the area of measurement. It is difficult to distinguish repeal bills from other legislation. Ragusa and Birkhead devote chapter 2 to detailing how they identify repeal bills. The authors make a strong case for drawing on secondary sources that reflect expertise on lawmaking in Congress. These include contemporaneous sources (e.g., newspapers, political science journal, and reports from Congressional Quarterly) and retrospective sources (e.g., prominent encyclopedias and major books on lawmaking over time). The authors also extensively discuss the validity of the database they create. By creating and validating the database, they have laid the foundation for numerous studies to follow: with a systematic way to identify repeal efforts, there is now a way to study them.

Among other things, I expect future studies to follow up on the hypotheses that the authors identify and test in the book. For example, the authors test whether repeal efforts are motivated by policy or by partisan brand considerations. In the end they see some support for policy considerations, but they conclude that “repeals are best understood as long-term contests between parties over the status quo in pursuit of electoral supremacy” (p. 146). Although their conclusion is reasonable, I do not think the results are as definitive as they claim because, as the authors note, disentangling policy preferences from partisan motivations is difficult at best (see their discussion on p. 104).

The authors’ own analysis shows the difficulty in distinguishing partisan from policy motivations. They find that “homogeneous majorities that ascend to power after a long period out of power are more likely to succeed in their repeal efforts than are heterogenous and entrenched majorities” (p. 98). The authors conclude that this finding shows that repeals are driven by partisan motivations. However, this is not that clear because the finding has two dimensions. The first dimension is ideological: Is the majority party ideologically homogeneous or heterogeneous? This is plausibly related to policy preferences, and so it is not clear why this is evidence that partisan motivations are driving these repeal efforts.

The second dimension is whether the party has recently become the majority party or has held that position for some time. This again could be related to policy considerations. The longer a party is in the minority, the more that existing policies are likely to be out of step with its preferences. Policy-driven politicians will want to bring these policies closer to their own preference, which could easily lead them to try to repeal bills that they did not like. Therefore, a party that recently ascends to power after a long period in the minority might do more to repeal bills not because of partisan considerations but purely because of policy considerations. To be clear, the authors may very well be right. I think there are good reasons to believe that partisan motivations—beyond policy considerations—motivate repeal efforts. I expect that future scholars will continue to build on the foundation created by Ragusa and Birkhead to more definitively answer that question.

Future research will also use this data to test some of the arguments that the authors raise but do not test. Most prominently, they make a strong case that repeals are difficult, because once the law is passed it often creates a constituency that has interests in maintaining that law. If this is true, we would expect entrenched interests to help explain when and why repeals occur. Although the authors do not directly test this argument, some of their results suggest that interest groups are an important factor in repeal efforts. For example, they find that most successful repeals happen within 10 years of the law being passed (p. 47). This pattern is consistent with the possibility that the longer a policy is on the books, the more support it receives from groups in society, which then fight to maintain that law. One way to test this argument is to differentiate repeal efforts based on whether there are organized interests attached to them. Some laws, like the Affordable Care Act, might create groups with a vested interest in retaining the law, whereas other laws, like the National Maximum Speed Law, seem less likely to do so. Future research should more directly study the role of interest groups.

Ragusa and Birkhead establish the theoretical importance of studying repeal efforts and provide the tools for quantitatively studying those efforts. These two contributions ensure that Congress in Reverse will be an important and impactful book for scholars seeking to understand the lawmaking process.