Branching Government
Legislator Pivotality and Voter Accountability
Sarah Anderson et al.
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Pivotal legislators’ positions are critical to legislative outcomes, but does this heightened importance in policymaking translate into heightened electoral accountability or voter knowledge? Arguments about clarity of responsibility suggest that pivotal legislators, who are decisive in determining legislative outcomes, may be held to higher standards, while perspectives rooted in electoral incentives for position taking suggest they may not. Two survey experiments show that voters do not respond more strongly to pivotal legislators’ votes on policy. Moreover, observational data analysis rejects the expectation that constituents have more knowledge about the votes of pivotal moderate legislators compared to non-pivotal moderate legislators. These results suggest that pivotal legislators face similar, if not lower, accountability for their votes. Combined with the policy-concessions pivotal legislators can secure, these patterns point to the benefits that accrue to pivotal legislators from institutional rules that give them key veto power over policy.
Presidential Administration and Perceived Accountability
Brian Feinstein
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, May 2024
Abstract:
Prominent jurists and scholars believe that strengthening the President’s control over administrative agencies heightens those agencies’ accountability to the American people. The Supreme Court upends administrative structures based in substantial part on this purported connection. Despite the importance of “the people” as presidential administration’s asserted beneficiaries, however, ordinary Americans’ attitudes concerning this claim are unknown. This Article offers the first evidence of Americans’ views on whether presidential control enhances agencies’ accountability to them. It presents a set of original experiments involving over five thousand participants. Participants read one of fifteen policy vignettes, each of which varies regarding the extent of the President’s authority over the agency. They then rate their perception of the agency’s accountability to people like them. These experiments reveal that people presented with a vignette involving presidential appointment of agency decision-makers, the President’s ability to remove them at-will, or White House review of proposed regulations -- three touchstone features of presidential administration -- are no more likely to perceive the agency as accountable than are participants that read vignettes describing politically insulated agencies. Whereas legal elites claim that presidential control makes agencies more accountable to the people, the people do not agree. In a politically divided country, people do not experience presidential power over agencies as fostering accountability. These findings challenge the judicial project of tethering agencies to the President for the supposed benefit of the American people.
Why do majoritarian systems benefit the right? Income groups and vote choice across different electoral systems
Robert Liñeira & Pedro Riera
Political Science Research and Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research note investigates how the voting behavior of middle-income citizens explains why right-wing parties tend to govern under majoritarian electoral rule. The growing literature that investigates the ideological effects of electoral systems has mostly focused on institutional explanations. However, whether the electoral rules overrepresent parties with some specific ideologies is also a matter of behavior. Building on Iversen and Soskice (2006), we test two arguments. First, middle-income groups are more likely to vote for the right under majoritarian rules because they fear the redistributive consequences of a victory of the left in these contexts. Second, middle-income earners particularly concerned with tax rates are particularly prone to vote differently across electoral systems. Combining survey evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the New Zealand Election Study, we show that the voting behavior of middle-income citizens is indeed responsible for the predominance of the right under majoritarian systems.
Are Firms Gerrymandered?
Joaquín Artés et al.
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We provide the first evidence that firms, not just voters, are gerrymandered. We compare allocations of firms in enacted redistricting plans to counterfactual distributions constructed using simulation methods. We find that firms are over-allocated to districts held by the mapmakers’ party when partisans control the redistricting process; maps drawn by courts and independent commissions allocate firms more proportionately. Our results hold when we account for the gerrymandering of seats: fixing the number of seats the mapmakers’ party wins, they obtain more firms than expected in their districts. Our research reveals that partisan mapmakers target more than just voters, shedding new light on the link between corporate and political power in the United States and opening new pathways for studying how mapmakers actually draw district boundaries.
The effect of female leadership on contracting from Capitol Hill to Main Street
Jonathan Brogaard, Nataliya Gerasimova & Maximilian Rohrer
Journal of Financial Economics, May 2024
Abstract:
This paper provides novel evidence that female politicians increase the proportion of US government procurement contracts allocated to women-owned firms. For identification, we use a regression discontinuity design on a sample of mixed-gender elections in the US House of Representatives. The effect grows over a female representative's tenure and concentrates in female representatives who are on powerful congressional committees. Changes in the pool of and behavior by government contractors cannot explain the result. The more gender-balanced representation in government contracting is not associated with economic costs.
Consolidation and Political Influence in the Auto Retail Industry
Sarah Moshary & Cailin Slattery
University of California Working Paper, May 2024
Abstract:
Does competition constrain corporate political influence? Because consolidation should lead firms to internalize a larger share of lobbying benefits, it may therefore lead to higher levels of lobbying. We study this question in the auto retail industry, using new data on state-level lobbying and mergers. Our empirical approach compares mergers that occur within and across political markets. The results confirm that consolidation helps the industry resolve the collective action problem in lobbying: mergers in product markets that cross state borders have no effect on lobbying, while mergers between two firms that share a political market are followed by a dramatic increase in lobbying. We then look at the enactment rate of legislation that auto dealers favor, and find that it increases after the mergers, implying an elasticity of bill enactment with respect to lobbying of 0.13. Using these estimates, we perform a back-of-the-envelope exercise to estimate the value of political coordination in the auto retail industry.
Influence-seeking in the Federal Bureaucracy: Do Groups Lobby or Monitor Policymakers?
Alex Acs
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, January 2024, Pages 27-52
Abstract:
Influence-seeking by outside groups is widespread in the federal bureaucracy, as evidenced by public expenditure data. But less is known about the strategies that underlie these expenditures. The literature on influence-seeking points to two possibilities. Groups can lobby policymakers to persuade them to take a specific action, or groups can monitor policymakers, as in "fire alarm" oversight, and report any unwanted action to Congress and other interested overseers. I exploit the fact that these two strategies have different implications for which policymakers will be targeted. Groups have an incentive to lobby their allies and persuadable would-be allies, and an incentive to monitor their adversaries. Using data on influence-seeking expenditures, I find that conservative groups disproportionately target their adversaries, which is consistent with monitoring, and that liberal groups disproportionately target their allies, which is consistent with lobbying. I discuss the implications for our understanding of democratic accountability in bureaucratic policymaking.
Measuring the Impact of Appointee Vacancies on U.S. Federal Agency Performance
Mark Richardson, Chris Piper & David Lewis
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper we evaluate the relationship between vacancies in Senate confirmed positions (PAS) and U.S. federal agency performance. We explore this relationship using an innovative new perceptual measure of agency performance. This measure is derived from the evaluation of federal executives who work closely with the agencies they assess. The measure is comparable across agencies and avoids many of the limitations of existing measures. We find a robust correlation between vacancies in Senate-confirmed positions and lower evaluations of agency performance, even when accounting for differences in the way Republican and Democratic federal executives perceive performance. We conclude with a discussion of how dysfunction in the U.S. appointment process is influencing federal government performance on key tasks and the implications of our findings for the creation and use of performance measures in a world of partisan differences.
The Deaths of Ideas in Congress
Jeremy Gelman
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on lawmaking generally examines why lawmakers enact certain policy ideas. However, most ideas in the United States Congress never become law. Eventually, members stop introducing them altogether. This process, where policies are proposed, not acted on, and no longer advocated for is, by far, the most common legislative outcome. The literature pays it little attention. Yet, how ideas die is important in understanding why some measures stop being realistic alternatives, the importance of policy entrepreneurship, and how policy windows affect the supply of ideas. This paper analyzes why congressional ideas die. I argue and find that the proposals designed to be enacted, especially by legislators with more issue expertise and agenda-setting powers, are less likely to persist across terms. I also show that ideas disappear more often when their sponsors leave Congress, but do not find a similar pattern for when policy windows close and lawmaking conditions worsen.
Congressional town halls
Andrew Clarke & Daniel Markovits
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Members of the US Congress held over 25,000 town hall meetings over the last eight years, and yet we know very little about the role that these events play in American politics. In this article, we present new data on congressional town hall meetings held in the 114th to 117th Congresses (2015–2022) to explore why politicians hold such meetings. In short, we do not find consistent evidence that electoral vulnerability drives legislators to their districts. Nor do we find support for claims of a zero-sum tradeoff between lawmaking and district representation. However, members of the president's opposition party clearly and consistently host more town hall meetings, suggesting that party messaging may be at the heart of this often-overlooked congressional behavior.