BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT

Before we examine the Tea Party Caucus membership in more detail, here is a brief review of the broader movement's history. The Tea Party movement came into the public eye in the aftermath of the passage of the 2009 stimulus package as an amorphous, grassroots, bottom-up, antigovernment (and, more specifically, “anti-Washington”) crusade. The movement began as a series of small rallies and local organizations protesting government spending, and was eventually coordinated by several national umbrella organizations, such as the Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Nation. With the aid of the libertarian advocacy organization FreedomWorks, headed by former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey, the movement became a force in election activism and mobilization. Although Tea Party supporters and organizers trumpeted the nonpartisan nature of the movement from the start, the movement also stressed its goals of “purging” the Republican Party of members deemed not conservative enough—primarily focusing on the 2010 midterm elections (New York Times 2011; Zernike Reference Zernike2010a, Reference Zernike2010b).

Throughout its short existence, the Tea Party movement has vilified President Obama and congressional Democrats, protesting their economic, environmental, and health care agendas. In its endeavor to block Democratic efforts and “cleanse” the Republican Party, the Tea Party drafted and supported GOP primary challengers for numerous national and state offices. These efforts to boost the number of conservative candidates in the general election often led to clashes with candidates backed by the Republican establishment. At the same time, some GOP members currently serving in Congress joined the Tea Party Caucus to identify with the movement and take advantage of the energy generated by the Tea Party supporters (New York Times 2011).

The movement is often characterized as united by fiscal conservatism and a belief that “out of control” Washington spending has strayed far from the Founders' constitutional principles. The Tea Party has also been identified as a “blank screen” on which supporters project their many frustrations with politics and the direction of the country. The racial, socioeconomic, and gender homogeneity of the movement—Tea Party supporters tend to be older, wealthier white males (Zernike and Thee-Brenan Reference Zernike and Thee-Brenan2010)—has led to its identification with numerous socially conservative views. Questions surrounding the true convictions of the movement (if they exist) has led to speculation as to whether members of the Tea Party Caucus can or will tackle some of their more ambitious and controversial agendas, such as the reduction or elimination of Medicare and Social Security benefits and the abolishment of the US Department of Education (Zernike Reference Zernike2010c). To better gauge the future direction of the caucus, we need to understand why legislators join its ranks.

EXPLAINING CAUCUS MEMBERSHIP

The literature on caucus membership provides several different explanations for why members of Congress join legislative caucuses. Members join different types of caucuses for different reasons. In Congressional Caucuses in National Policy Making (Reference Hammond1998), Hammond provides a useful typology of congressional caucuses. She divides caucuses into the following categories:

• • party

• • personal interest

• • national constituency

• • regional

• • state or district

• • industry

Regional, state or district, and industry caucuses tend to focus on district constituency issues. These may be issues that are common to a region (such as the Sunbelt or Rustbelt regions). State or district caucuses tend to focus on issues that are particular to certain types of states or districts, such as farming areas, rural areas, or urban areas. Industry caucuses focus on issues that are specific to particularly commercial endeavors; members often join these caucuses to protect or foster the business prospects of particular segments of their geographic districts. As Hammond (Reference Hammond1998) notes, these segments often may be small but economically significant.

National constituency caucuses attract members interested in policy issues that have substantial national constituencies, ranging from veterans' affairs to women's issues, and they tend to draw members from both political parties. Personal-interest caucuses deal with broad national issues that often relate to the activities of a number of legislative committees. Hammond (Reference Hammond1998) argues that membership in these caucuses is driven by the personal political orientation and interests of the individual legislators rather than the characteristics of their constituencies. The same can be said for party caucuses; what matters are the policy interests and ideological orientations of the members, not the demographic characteristics or the economic circumstances of their constituencies.

In the context of this typology, the Tea Party Caucus is most appropriately characterized as a party caucus. First, the Tea Party Caucus has, to date, drawn no members from the Democratic Party, and, of the various types of caucuses, only the party caucus is consistently limited to a single party. We know of no formal institutional restrictions against Democratic representatives joining the Tea Party Caucus, but none have. Because no Democrats have joined, the few Democrats who might consider joining the caucus now face prohibitively high political costs. Second, the Tea Party movement is widely perceived to be ideologically oriented, and it is just this sort of ideological orientation that we would expect in a party caucus during a period of polarized parties. One explanation for members' decisions to join the caucus is that members with more conservative policy objectives sought an organized outlet to further the policies associated with their ideologically oriented agenda: the agenda often associated with the Tea Party movement includes lower taxes, smaller government, and greater respect for (and protection of) individual liberties.Footnote ¹ For these members, the caucus serves both advertising purposes and, potentially, credit claiming purposes, depending on the future policy productivity associated with the caucus.Footnote ²

If this characterization of the caucus is accurate we would expect that the likelihood of membership in the Tea Party Caucus is positively associated with the level of conservatism manifest in members' recent roll-call voting behavior. This conservative policy activity might result from members' own political orientations, members' representation of their constituencies—particularly their primary and personal constituencies (see Fenno Reference Fenno1978)—or some combination of these factors. Recent research on the representative relationship between House members and their constituencies also suggests that ideological extremism (relative to the orientation of the geographic constituency) is relatively common (Bafumi and Herron Reference Bafumi and Herron2010) and that the penalties for ideological extremism are far less severe than partisan extremism (Carson, Lebo, and Young Reference Carson, Lebo and Young2010).

Aside from members' ideological orientations, what other factors might lead them to join (or not join) the Tea Party Caucus? The literature also includes different perspectives on the factors that lead members to participate in caucus activities more generally. One strain of the literature suggests that caucus membership is inversely related to seniority. According to Hammond, “The more senior a member, the less likely he or she is to be a caucus member” (Reference Hammond1998, 66). Conversely, more recent work suggests that caucus participation is actually more prevalent among senior members. Recent research by Victor and Ringe (Reference Victor and Ringe2009) that uses network analysis to evaluate the relative participation rates of members of Congress in caucus activity finds that:

Although the literature does not always provide consistent expectations, based on the results from the most prominent recent research, we should expect Tea Party Caucus members to be relatively more senior, relatively more likely to serve in leadership posts, and less likely to hail from marginal districts. As there are many congressional caucuses, it is certainly possible that the membership of any particular caucus—especially a new caucus—will not be significantly different than the rank-and-file membership on these dimensions. At the very least, we must control for these factors in our analyses.

Although the Tea Party Caucus appears to fit most obviously in the party caucus category, we cannot ignore the possibility that the influence of the broader geographic constituency might also have an impact on a member's decision to join (or not) the Tea Party Caucus.Footnote ³ The two key constituency characteristics are racial or ethnic context and economic context. In both cases, the existing literature suggests contrasting hypotheses. If membership in the Tea Party Caucus is, in part, driven by the racial or ethnic conservatism of a member's constituency, then we might reasonably expect to find, first, that Tea Party Caucus members tend to serve relatively less heterogeneous districts (and thus do not need to be responsive to racial/ethnic minorities) or second, that Tea Party Caucus members serve relatively more heterogeneous districts (and thus have more racially/ethnically conservative white populations because of perceived racial threat).

Likewise, we might reasonably expect Tea Party Caucus membership to be directly related to economic conditions in a member's district. The inverse relationship between economic circumstances and the likelihood of membership in the Tea Party Caucus is more obvious (and straightforward): In economically stressed districts (particularly during the economic recession contemporaneous with the development of the Tea Party movement) it could be reasoned that anger toward the government and public officials in Washington is likely to develop; and individuals in such districts are more likely to develop more extreme, atypical views. Furthermore, these views are reflected in the policymaking actions and orientations of their representatives.

In contrast, it can also be hypothesized that economically distressed constituencies would be far more open to and supportive of economic policies that contrast with the views of the Tea Party movement, such as extended unemployment benefits and stimulus packages. In this scenario, districts with relatively better economic conditions are more likely to produce members of the Tea Party Caucus because the constituencies of those districts are less likely to view benefit programs as aiding them.

DATA AND METHODS

Our sample includes all House Republicans from the 111th Congress. Our dependent variable is coded “1” for the 52 Republican members of the 111th House who explicitly opted to become part of the Tea Party Caucus at its launching in July of 2010 and “0” otherwise.Footnote ⁴ To gauge the level of conservatism of each Republican member of the 111th Congress, we used the DW-Nominate and W-Nominate scores developed by Poole and Rosenthal (Reference Poole and Rosenthal1991, Reference Poole and Rosenthal2001), as well as ideology scores calculated by the National Taxpayers' Union (NTU) and the American Conservative Union (ACU). Of all the measures, the 2011 NTU scores, which consist of every vote concerning taxes, spending, and debt during the 111th Congress, most closely associate with the Tea Party's ideological orientation. As the Tea Party movement is primarily concerned with fiscal issues, using measures that also incorporate votes on other issues, such as social and cultural policy, foreign affairs, and national defense, would bias downward the extent to which Tea Party Caucus members are different from mainstream Republicans. Thus, the NTU scores, as pure measures of fiscal conservatism, are most appropriate to test our hypothesis.

Seniority was operationalized using the year a member entered Congress,Footnote ⁵ and positions in the Republican House leadership and major committee chairmanships were included in the model. We also included the district unemployment rate and the district poverty rate for each district.

Because of the binary nature of the dependent variable, we estimate a set of logit models. We report standard errors clustered by state. Note that the use of robust standard errors has no significant effect on the results. Note also that we find no evidence of significant multicollinearity.Footnote ⁶