Democratic Institutions
Descriptive Representation in an Era of Polarization
Anna Weissman
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies of descriptive representation find that voters more positively evaluate representatives who share their ascriptive characteristics. I argue that this pattern can be upended when voters develop more positive affect towards outgroups. In the United States, Democrats have increasingly expressed more positive views towards marginalized groups, while Republicans’ attitudes about these groups have not shifted. Under such conditions, my argument predicts that the effect of representatives’ race and gender on constituent evaluations should vary more by constituents’ partisanship than by their own ascriptive characteristics. Applying a difference-in-differences design to 2008-2020 CCES data, I find that Democrats of all backgrounds now approve more highly of Congressmembers from historically marginalized groups, whereas Republicans’ approval is unrelated to Member identity. Democrats also give women and minority representatives leeway to diverge ideologically. These findings demonstrate that polarizing attitudes about race and gender can disrupt classic patterns in how constituents evaluate representatives.
Cleaning up Los Angeles: The construction and non-resolution of a sanitation infrastructure crisis
Ana Muniz
Urban Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Focusing specifically on sanitation services in Los Angeles (LA) City, I examine (1) how various stakeholders socially construct and mobilise around breakdowns in public infrastructure and (2) how technology is used, both practically and politically, to address breakdowns. Through an archival analysis of six years of LA City Council documents and proceedings, supplemented by interviews with four key informants, I demonstrate how, in 2014 Los Angeles, media and political actors constructed a perceived crisis in trash services. In responding to claims of inadequate and biassed services, City sanitation officials blamed technological glitches and deceptive data. To address the crisis, the sanitation department developed a database to track neighbourhood cleanliness and strategically deploy sanitation workers to the areas most in need. Despite local politicians’ and sanitation officials’ presentation of technological innovation as a panacea, the database had little effect and was deactivated after three years. The failure of the database is attributed to two dynamics: first, inverted development wherein LASAN prematurely developed and deployed digital technology before a strong analogue foundation had been established to make the technology functional and efficient; and second, LASAN utilised the cleanliness indexing database as a form of mediatised stopgap technology. Although the database ultimately proved to be of little practical use, LASAN’s public relations strategy around the database effectively intervened in a political crisis and reinforced the agency’s power.
Article II and the Federal Reserve
Aditya Bamzai & Aaron Nielson
Cornell Law Review, August 2024, Pages 843-910
Abstract:
The Supreme Court has twice held since 2020 that statutory restrictions on the President’s removal power violate Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Because such removal restrictions create a measure of policy independence from the President, these cases have prompted discussion about the future of independent agencies generally, with special attention to the Federal Reserve in particular. The Federal Reserve is the most powerful central bank on earth and, arguably, the most important independent agency in the United States. A presidential removal power over Federal Reserve officials calls into question the independence of monetary policy. Drawing on overlooked documents and congressional debates, this Article offers a comprehensive assessment of the Federal Reserve’s constitutionality under Article II. We conclude that under the Court’s modern precedent, which requires Congress to clearly state when it wishes to restrict removal, the President likely already enjoys a great deal of statutory authority to remove the Federal Reserve’s leaders. Beyond that, in light of the Federal Reserve’s current structure and functions, the President might have constitutional authority to do so. To the extent the Federal Reserve exercises inherently “executive power” -- such as initiating enforcement actions, issuing fines, and promulgating consumer-protection rules -- precedent suggests that Congress cannot prevent the President from freely removing the Federal Reserve Chair, members of the Board of Governors, and perhaps other senior officials. But Congress could render the Federal Reserve’s monetary independence constitutional. That is because the President’s power to fire the Federal Reserve’s leaders does not stem from its primary mission: monetary policy. Congress can use private bank operations to influence monetary policy, which is why the First and Second Banks of the United States were understood to be lawful even though the President could not unilaterally remove all their officers. Thus, Congress should be able to vest monetary policy in a central bank that operates independently from the President. At present, however, Congress has also tasked the Federal Reserve with sovereign functions that fall squarely under the heading of “executive power” in a manner that implicates the Court’s modern Article II precedent. We therefore conclude that if Congress wishes to preserve the Federal Reserve’s monetary independence, it should remove those regulatory functions that are inherently executive from the Federal Reserve’s ambit.
Legislature Size and Party Unity: Evidence from Historical U.S. State Legislatures
Jaclyn Kaslovsky & Michael Olson
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The size of a legislature is one of its most fundamental features, yet there is little consensus on how large legislatures should be. Further, many modern-day reformers are dissatisfied with the current size of American legislatures. We explore the effect of legislature size on party unity, which is important for policy outcomes and is plausibly shaped through both individual and collective incentives affected by legislature size. To test this relationship, we use original roll call data from the Illinois House of Representatives in the mid-nineteenth century, which dramatically changed size twice in this period. Using Indiana as a control, we show that larger chambers are associated with lower party unity, and that this change is likely due to intra-legislature dynamics rather than legislator-constituent relationships. We demonstrate that our results extend to more-modern periods by using additional data from Vermont and New Jersey.
The Fragility of the Local News Trust Advantage: Evidence from Republican Attacks on Local News
Allison Archer & Erik Peterson
PS: Political Science & Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Today, few political news outlets receive universally favorable evaluations from the American public. In retaining broad public approval, local media remain a notable exception that is important to understand. We consider the durability of local news trust to criticism from politicians, focusing on Republican elites because they generally are more willing to attack the media than Democrats. In a survey experiment, we find that exposure to a Republican politician’s attack on a local newspaper dramatically reduces the public’s trust in and intent to use local news. This attack is particularly effective among Republicans, although it also leads Democrats and Independents to negatively shift their views of the local newspaper. Among those exposed to elite criticism of local news, overall trust and partisan divides between Republicans and Democrats resemble those for national media. This shows that the credibility of local news depends on the absence of elite criticism rather than resilience to it.
Credible Claims: The Effect of Committee Positioning on Congressional Credit Claiming
Peter McLaughlin & Nathan Barron
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Members of Congress routinely seek to improve their institutional position to increase their influence over policy outcomes. Prominent among those policy outcomes is the distribution of federal spending projects, where members can simultaneously secure local particularistic spending and its consequential electoral benefits. While institutional position facilitates the receipt of these policy goods, it is less clear whether representatives’ position facilitates the receipt of the associated electoral benefits. We test whether a representative’s signaling of policy influence through references to committee positioning increases the effectiveness of credit claiming for particularistic spending. Using a survey experiment, we measure how respondents change their approval and effectiveness ratings for a member of Congress when presented with different versions of real-world credit claiming press releases. Overall, we find that signaling influence vis-à-vis committee positioning has an undetectable effect on the effectiveness of credit claiming. This research highlights an important challenge faced by members of Congress in publicizing their roles in favorable policy actions.
Public opinion and the news: Polls and journalists’ perceptions of issue importance
Hans Hassell & Christopher Wlezien
Research & Politics, January 2025
Abstract:
Most work on the media and the public starts from the premise that coverage influences opinion and behavior. We report results of a field experiment attempting to identify whether the reverse is true. Specifically, we examine the effects of providing public opinion information to journalists on their perceptions of the newsworthiness of different topics. We randomly assigned journalists to receive results of a survey of Americans about the importance of different political issues, and followed up with a survey of those journalists (from a different source) asking about the newsworthiness of stories about those issues. The results provide some support for the hypothesis that public opinion influences journalists’ perceptions of topical newsworthiness, particularly on low salience issues, and also allow us to rule out large opinion effects on journalists’ perceptions of the newsworthiness of certain issues. The effects appear to be more pronounced for those journalists with less experience in the communities in which they currently work. Overall, we see the research as both offering insight into the nature of the effects that public opinion has on news coverage and helping guide future research, which we consider in the concluding section.