"Killer" amendments in Congress

For more than three decades, social choice theorists and legislative schola rs have studied how legislative outcomes in Congress can be manipulated thr ough strategic amendments and voting. I address the central limitation of t his research, a virtual absence of systematic empirical work, by examining 76 "killer" amendments considered during the 103d and 104th congresses. I t race the effects of th se amendments on their related bills using archival sources, test for strategic voting using NOMINATE as the baseline measure o f legislator preferences across a range of issues, and explore with OLS reg ression why some killer amendments are more strategically! important than o thers. The findings indicate that successful killer amendments and identifi able strategic voting ale extremely rare. In none of the cases examined cou ld the defeat of a bill be attributed to adoption of an alleged killer amen dment.