Impeachment in the United States: Mapping the Political Landscape in the House of Representatives

Our main objective is to explain why and under what conditions legislators (co)sponsor impeachment resolutions against the president of the United States and, for comparative purposes, against high-level federal executive officers, and federal judges. We examine the impact of political, institutional, and economic variables, suggested by presidency and impeachment scholarship, on the behavior of 2,044 legislators who were members of the House of Representatives between 1973 and 2019. To test these hypotheses, we use two-level logistic regressions and an original dataset of all impeachment resolutions filed in the House during that period. Our primary findings are that impeachment resolutions against the president and high-level executive branch officials are driven by individual-level variables such as representatives’ ideological extremity and partisanship, whereas impeachment resolutions targeting the federal judiciary are chiefly influenced by ideological extremity. Our analysis also shows that the occurrence of major presidential scandals incentivizes representatives to target the chief executive. Surprisingly, we find no evidence for divided government, presidential approval, and macro-economic factors. Our results suggest that representatives use impeachment resolutions mainly for position taking.