Lauren Bell, Ph.D.
lbell@rmc.edu
Full Professor
Randolph-Macon College
Year of PhD: 1999
Phone: 8047527268
Address: 304 HENRY ST
City: ASHLAND, Virginia - 23005
Country: United States
About Me:
Dr. Lauren C. Bell is the inaugural James L. Miller Professor of Political Science at Randolph-Macon College, in Ashland, Virginia. In addition, she currently serves as the college's Associate Provost and Dean of Academic Affairs. Dr. Bell holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of Wooster (Ohio) and Masters of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at The University of Oklahoma. She is a former American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow (1997-98) on the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary and a former United States Supreme Court fellow (2006-07) at the United States Sentencing Commission in Washington, DC. In Fall 2015, Dr. Bell was a short-term visiting scholar on the Faculty of Law at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan.Dr. Bell is the author of Filibustering in the U.S. Senate (Cambria Press, 2011), Warring Factions: Interest Groups, Money, and the New Politics of Senate Confirmation (The Ohio State University Press, 2002) and The U.S. Congress, A Simulation for Students (Cengage, 2nd ed. 2022) as well as co-author of Slingshot: The Defeat of Eric Cantor (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2015) and Perspectives on Political Communication: A Case Approach (Allyn & Bacon, 2008), and co-editor of Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics (Palgrave McMillan, 2024).Dr. Bell joined the faculty at Randolph-Macon in Fall 1999 and served as Associate Dean of the College from Fall 2007 until Spring 2014 and as Dean of Academic Affairs from Fall 2014 until Spring 2022. She is a three-time winner of the College’s Thomas Branch Award for Excellence in Teaching (2002, 2004, 2019), and in 2017 was recognized as one of ten national Outstanding First-Year Advocates by the National Resource Center on the First Year Experience and Students in Transition. In 2023, Dr. Bell was awarded the Samuel Nelson Gray Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor Randolph-Macon College bestows upon its faculty members.
Research Interests
Legislative Politics
Judicial Politics
Judicial Appointments
Senate Filibusters
Court-Legislative Interactions
Legislative Procedure
Countries of Interest
United States
Japan
Publications:
Journal Articles:
In response to security threats in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. Capitol was made less accessible to the public through a series of security upgrades, including an expansion of the Capitol Police force, new visitor registration programs, and the construction and implementation of physical barriers in and around the Capitol building itself. However, increased safety for members and staff has had consequences for the important symbolic representation that the Capitol building itself provides. As Parkinson (2009, 10) notes: “Capital cities are, by design, by usage or both, symbols of national institutions, values, myths, and norms – they contain such symbols and they are, in their own right, such symbols.” In this essay, we argue that by repeatedly prioritizing public displays of security over public access, Congress has inadvertently contributed to the alienation Americans feel from their government, with implications for January 6 and beyond.
Prior research has established that crime victims’ and defendants’ demographic traits affect the sentence that criminal defendants receive. In addition, previous studies have found that judges’ and juries’ biases affect the outcomes in criminal cases. Yet, despite significant scholarly attention to the effect of race and gender on criminal sentencing, no previous study has explored whether prosecutors’ demographic traits influence the outcome of criminal cases. This is surprising, given that prosecutors are responsible for determining what crimes defendants are charged with and whether to pursue the death penalty in eligible cases. Here, we utilize data on federal death penalty-eligible cases and the prosecutors who tried those cases to explore whether federal prosecutors’ demographic traits have an effect on whether the death penalty is imposed. We find that both race and gender have statistically significant effects on whether a defendant receives the death penalty, even when case-specific effects including victim and defendant characteristics are controlled for.
The U.S. Supreme Court has for decades served as an unlikely venue for the performance of music. Between 1988 and 2020, more than 125 musicians, including some of the country's most prominent performers, appeared for intimate audiences in the Supreme Court's East Conference Room. The concerts were officially “off the record,” but details survive in records kept by the U.S. Supreme Court, papers of former justices and friends of the court involved in the creation of the programs, and in interviews with individuals who supported and participated in the events. This article reconstructs the history of this long running but little-known music series and contextualizes it within the court's culture and broader themes of access and power.
In legislative institutions, time is a precious and scarce commodity. The ability of leaders to set the agenda and enact their preferred policies depends in large part on having sufficient time to accomplish their goals. As a result, disruptions to the agenda and delays in processing legislation can have a significant impact on the ability of legislative majorities to realize success. Nowhere is this more evident than in the United States, particularly in the U.S. Senate, where the action of a single senator can derail a proposal preferred by a sizable majority. Yet, despite conventional wisdom to suggest that obstruction is largely an American phenomenon, the U.S. is not the only location where members of the national legislature use obstructive tactics in an effort to thwart the majority’s preferred outcomes. Few previous studies have systematically examined parliamentary obstruction in non-U.S. settings, despite evidence that dilatory behavior occurs in a number of parliaments around the world. In this paper, I report on the results of two surveys of members of the Association of Secretaries General of Parliaments--one conducted by Joseph Buecker in 1988 and the other that I conducted in 2016--that inquired into the use and control of obstruction in parliaments around the world. The results demonstrate that obstruction occurs in a variety of types of national legislatures and across different political systems. Where obstruction does not occur, it is frequently because the legislature has adopted explicit rules that prevent it and punish legislators that attempt to delay. The results further indicate that obstructive behavior is more universal than the conventional wisdom suggests.
Despite a historic lack of success, members of Congress,motivated by the desire to express policy preferences and to represent the views of their constituents, continue to introduce bills to reduce or eliminate the power of the federal judiciary.
This paper contributes to the growing empirical literature on filibusters by examining the factors that are associated with individual-level filibustering behavior. We focus particularly on the behavior of senators in the latter part of their careers, using impending retirement as analytical leverage to determine whether decisions to engage or not in dilatory parliamentary practices are driven more by narrowly drawn considerations of instrumental utility or by compliance with institutional norms of deference and cooperation. Using data from 1975 to 1993 and employing multivariate models that allow us to control for other relevant factors, we find only limited support for a narrowly rational model of Senate “followership.” In the course of our enquiry, we clarify the notion of legislative norms, integrate our study with recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the evolution of cooperative behavior and consider how leadership can be exercised in environments largely bereft of formal leadership resources.
Legislators have long recognized that delaying tactics are powerful tools for preventing the passage of laws they deem unsatisfactory. Because the U.S. Congress has several deadlines built into its session, when committee chairmen or individual members delay the scheduling of hearings, markups, or executive business meetings, it can have a devastating effect on pending legislation. The tactic of delay is now being used by the Senate Judiciary Committee and individual senators to stall confirmation of the President's judicial nominations. Since 1996, the average length of time between an individual's nomination to serve as a federal judge and the time that he or she is confirmed has increased dramatically. At the same time, some nominations still proceed very quickly through the confirmation process. This article explores the question of why some nominees are subjected to lengthy delays, while others move through the Senate confirmation process in a matter of days. Specifically, it explores the impact of divided government, institutional strength of the President, and the majority party in the Senate, the position to which an individual has been nominated, and a number of nominee-specific variables to assess the impact that these have on the length of time a nominee will wait for confirmation.
Books Written:
Giving learners hands-on experience with the inner workings of Congress, Bell's THE U.S. CONGRESS: A SIMULATION FOR STUDENTS, Second Edition simulates many of the major processes at work on Capitol Hill. Following an overview of Congress as an institution and the legislative processes used by its chambers, a step-by-step guide helps students "become" a member of the House of Representatives. Students draft legislation, work with their committees to process legislation, engage in floor debate and represent their work to constituents at home -- all while gaining an appreciation for the role Congress plays in the U.S. political system. Easily adapted to instructors' needs, ready-to-use assignments work well in a variety of class formats.
Incumbents don't lose. So how did nationally prominent House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lose a primary battle to college professor David Brat, an unknown political rookie? In Slingshot: The Defeat of Eric Cantor, authors Lauren Cohen Bell, David Elliot Meyer and Ronald Keith Gaddie take advantage of exceptional behind-the-scenes access to the Brat campaign to explain the challenger’s victory. They examine the essential need for elected officials to maintain strong support in their home districts and just how Cantor’s focus on climbing the party ranks in Washington contributed to his loss. They also show how local “rules of the game” —particularly voter mobilization in this case—affect elections, and they explore the continuing impact of the Tea Party and its role in the factionalism of current Southern politics.
This book remedies the near-complete lack of individual senator-level data available to scholars. Moreover, the dataset that Bell compiles represents a much more comprehensive list of Senate filibusters than any that has previously been compiled. Data are available for the entirety of the period from 1790 to 2008. The text provides a fully current (through the end of the 110th Congress) list of Senate filibusters from the first recorded instance in 1790. This new list undergirds a comprehensive historical analysis of filibusters and a full exploration of both micro-level (individual senator) determinants of filibustering and macro-level (institutional) factors that affect filibustering and its consequences. Beyond compiling and sharing the raw data on who filibusters what, Bell demonstrates that senators' filibustering behavior is frequently an extension of senators' legislative behavior more generally. The book makes it clear that filibustering is simply one strategy among many that senators employ as they try to advance their sometimes competing goals of representing their constituents, serving their political parties, and crafting good legislation. Building on work by Franklin L. Burdette (1940), Richard S. Beth (1994), and Gregory Wawro and Eric Schickler (2006). Filibustering in the US Senate offers a readable, accessible analysis that clarifies the meaning of important terms and offers practical insights into the uses-and abuses-of Senate legislative procedures. The timeliness of Filibustering in the US Senate, its interesting subject matter, and the accessible nature of the analysis will appeal to general and professional readers of political studies, as well as to practitioners in government.
Warring Factions focuses on the United States Senate's confirmation process, the constitutional process the Senate uses to approve or reject the president's choices to fill federal government positions. It is a book about history, the evolution, and, argubly, the decline of the process. Most significantly, it is a book that demonstrates the extent to which interest groups and money have transformed the Senate's confirmation process into a virtual circus. Based on in-depth research, including two dozen original interviews with United States senators, former senators and Senate staff members and interest group leaders, this volume demonstrates that today's confirmation process is nothing more than an extension of the Senate's legislative work. Changes to internal Senate norms in the 1960s and 1970s, coupled with changes to the external political environment, have allowed interest groups to dominate the Senate confirmation process.
Other:
Eliminating the supermajority cloture requirement, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he will do in order to confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court, will further harm the Senate as an institution and reduce its capacity to function as an essential part of our government.
The death late last week of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has further complicated the 2016 presidential race and threatened to bring even more gridlock to Washington DC with Republican Senate leaders pledging not to confirm any nominee sent to them by President Obama to replace Scalia. Lauren Bell looks at the battle that Obama administration now faces in getting a nominee confirmed, but also argues that a protracted nomination fight might end up working against the Republican Party in an election year.