Halls of power
Strategic behavior by federal agencies in the allocation of public resources
Stuart Kasdin & Luona Lin
Public Choice, September 2015, Pages 309-329
Abstract:
How do government agencies allocate program resources? Some authors presume that agencies seek to maximize program objectives; others suggest agencies favor the districts important to the president’s election. In addition, agencies may distribute larger program resources to those districts whose congressional representatives are best positioned to help the agency. We examined how federal government agencies responded both to the 2006 election, when control of Congress shifted from the Republican to the Democratic Party, and to the 2010 election, when the House switched from Democratic to Republican control. We used a difference-in-difference analysis to evaluate the impact of each election on the agencies’ allocations of contracts. Agencies generally responded to the elections by allocating more contract resources to districts represented by the winning party. However, federal agencies reacted differently to changing political environments, depending on the characteristics of the agency. For example, after the 2006 election, those agencies with programs favored by Republican members of Congress allocated more resources to Democratic districts. These “Republican agencies” presumably are the most vulnerable to the risk of losing future appropriations. “Democratic agencies” (and “neutral agencies”), facing no significant threats to their appropriations, did not respond to the election as strongly. Finally, more vulnerable districts received the most support, especially by the “Republican agencies.” We reaffirmed these results by using the 2010 congressional elections, in which the political orientations of the districts favored with more contract distributions was reversed.
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Gender and vote revelation strategy in the United States Congress
Lindsey Cormack
Journal of Gender Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Legislators approach each election as if they might lose. Electoral insecurity coupled with gender stereotypes held by voters and lawmakers alike may lead female legislators to communicate more voting decisions to voters as a signal of their policy-driven efforts. Using an original data-set of over 40,000 official e-newsletters and Real Simple Syndication feeds sent by members of Congress, I show that women reveal more roll call votes to constituents than their male counterparts. Significant differences exist between male and female incumbents in the frequency of vote revelation despite the fact that male and female legislators use these communication techniques to reach constituents at the same rates and call attention to similar bills. These differences persist after accounting for the effects of party, seniority, district fit, and other potential confounds. Women highlight their ability to fulfill the roles expected of lawmakers by explicitly signaling involvement in lawmaking activities more frequently than men. In a second test, I analyze the types of bills legislators reveal votes on and find no differences between men and women.
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Moving on Up? The Gendered Ambitions of State-Level Appointed Officials
Kaitlin Sidorsky
Political Research Quarterly, December 2015, Pages 802-815
Abstract:
Many scholars have offered explanations as to why women are underrepresented at all levels of government. Conventional wisdom states that fewer women are in public office due to lower ambition, and that the presence of gendered perceptions among women considering elected office contributes to women’s disinterest in the political arena. Using original survey data, this article expands the theory of gendered perceptions to current state-level appointed officeholders to explain their levels of interest in pursuing higher public office. The results indicate that gendered perceptions affect the progressive ambitions of appointees; like studies of ambition in elected officials, this study of appointed officials finds that women are generally less ambitious, and unlike studies of ambition in elected officials, this study of appointed officials finds that women with higher self-assessments are less ambitious rather than more.
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Representing Their Former District: Do Members Do It and Do They Admit It?
Krista Loose
MIT Working Paper, August 2015
Abstract:
Scholars have long thought members prioritize the goal of re-election by accommodating district preferences. But other goals-such as achieving congressional power and seniority or crafting good public policy-may also drive members. Few have investigated how the tension between these goals plays out in actual legislative behavior. I capitalize on exogenous changes in the composition of districts to empirically evaluate how members respond when their district changes. Specifically, do members' engagement with military issues change when their district gains or loses a base? Using a wealth of data on legislative behavior as well as on military base location and staffing, I show members generally do not change their behavior, even in the wake of relatively sizable changes. Moreover, using emails sent by members to their constituents before and after the 2012 redistricting period, I demonstrate that members who gain a base in their district substantively increase the amount they discuss military issues despite the fact that they do not change their behavior in Congress. This camouflaging of actual activities in Congress may help explain the high rates of re-election for incumbents even as the quality of representation falls.
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The Declining Dominance of Lawyers in U.S. Federal Politics
Nick Robinson
Harvard Working Paper, November 2015
Abstract:
While the ubiquity of lawyers in U.S. electoral politics has frequently been noted, there has been almost no research on how their prevalence has changed over time, why these changes might have occurred, or the consequences of any such shift. This working paper helps fill this gap by using a unique data set that extends over two hundred years to chart the occupational background of members of the U.S. Congress. It finds that lawyers’ dominance in Congress is in slow, but steady, retreat. In the mid-19th century almost 80% of members of Congress were lawyers. By the 1960s this had dropped to a bit under 60%, and by 2015 it was slightly under 40%. The working paper also details variation of the prevalence of lawyers in Congress on the basis of geographic region, gender, race, and political party. It puts forward a set of arguments about why lawyers have traditionally had such success in U.S. federal electoral politics, including the politicization of the US justice system and the comparative advantage lawyers have over other occupations in terms of access to resources and career flexibility. It then claims that lawyers’ electoral decline may be the result of changes within the legal profession, as well as the emergence of a competing full-time professionalized political class, comprised of political aides and members of civil society, who have made politics a career. It ends by briefly exploring some of the potential ramifications of this decline on the legal profession.
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George Krause & Anne Joseph O'Connell
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Presidents become increasingly effective at managing the bureaucracy because of the information and expertise that they acquire from on-the-job experience. In their appointment choices, this theory predicts that presidents become better at reducing information asymmetries incurred from the bureaucracy (Agent Selection Learning), improve the vertical balance of leadership agent traits between top supervisory positions and subordinates directly beneath them (Agent Monitoring Learning), and place a greater relative premium on loyalty in response to horizontal policy conflict between the White House and the Senate (Common Agency Learning). This logic obtains empirical support from the analysis of bureaucratic agent traits for Senate-confirmed presidential appointees serving in leadership positions covering 39 U.S. federal government agencies from 1977 to 2009. Presidents’ appointment strategies reflect their increasing effectiveness at managing the bureaucracy, thus complementing their increasing reliance on administrative mechanisms to achieve policy objectives as their tenure in office rises.
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Political budget cycles in U.S. municipalities
Adam Bee & Shawn Moulton
Economics of Governance, November 2015, Pages 379-403
Abstract:
This paper tests for political budget cycles among U.S. municipalities. According to the political budget cycle hypothesis, in election years government officials engage in opportunistic fiscal policy manipulation for electoral gains. We test that hypothesis using data on taxes, spending, and employment for a panel of 268 U.S. cities over the period 1970–2004. While our estimates provide no evidence of altered total expenditures or taxes in election years, we do find a 0.7 % increase in total municipal employment, including increases in police, education, and sanitation employment.
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Political Centralization and Government Accountability
Federico Boffa, Amedeo Piolatto & Giacomo Ponzetto
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper explains why decentralization can undermine accountability and answers three questions: what determines if power should be centralized or decentralized when regions are heterogeneous? How many levels of government should there be? How should state borders be drawn? We develop a model of political agency in which voters differ in their ability to monitor rent-seeking politicians. We find that rent extraction is a decreasing and convex function of the share of informed voters, because voter information improves monitoring but also reduces the appeal of holding office. As a result, information heterogeneity pushes toward centralization to reduce rent extraction. Taste heterogeneity pulls instead toward decentralization to match local preferences. Our model thus implies that optimal borders should cluster by tastes but ensure diversity of information. We also find economies of scope in accountability that explain why multiplying government tiers harms efficiency. A single government in charge of many policies has better incentives than many special-purpose governments splitting its budget and responsibilities. Hence, a federal system is desirable only if information varies enough across regions.
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Veto Rhetoric and Legislative Riders
Hans Hassell & Samuel Kernell
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Riders to appropriations bills have long been a favorite congressional instrument for forcing presidents to accept unwanted policies. To resist unwanted riders, presidents have increasingly resorted to veto threats. Are such threats credible, and do they influence legislation? To answer these questions, we analyze the legislative histories of hundreds of threatened and unthreatened riders from 1985 through 2008. We find that threats are effective in bringing the final legislation closer to the president's preferences. Threats achieve their success, in large part, by interrupting the textbook legislative process in the Senate — spawning filibusters, prompting leaders to punt bills to conference, and encouraging the use of other “unorthodox” procedures. Unlike conventional models that regard veto threats as minimally effective, the findings presented here depict veto rhetoric as integral to identifying critical riders separating the legislative parties that must be resolved in order to avoid gridlock and pass annual appropriations legislation.
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Separation of powers and the tax level in the U.S. states
Leandro De Magalhães & Lucas Ferrero
Southern Economic Journal, October 2015, Pages 598–619
Abstract:
We estimate a nonlinear and discontinuous relationship between the tax level and the degree of alignment between the legislature and the governor, measured as the number of seats in the legislature that belong to the governor's party. In the states with the line-item veto, the tax level jumps at the point where the government switches from divided to unified. With a regression discontinuity design, we show that this jump can be interpreted as a causal effect. We propose a simple model to account for this nonlinear relationship. The sequential nature of the budget bargaining game, that is, the legislature proposes and the governor cuts with the line-item veto, implies that the tax level is determined by the overlap between the supporters of the governor and the supporters of the legislative majority. Changes in the size of the overlap determine the tax level.
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David Broockman & Daniel Butler
Journal of Experimental Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A large literature argues that the committee assignment process plays an important role in shaping legislative politics because some committees provide legislators with substantial benefits. However, evaluating the degree to which legislators benefit from winning their preferred assignments has been challenging with existing data. This paper sheds light on the benefits legislators accrue from winning their preferred committee assignments by exploiting rules in Arkansas’ state legislature, where legislators select their own committee assignments in a randomized order. The natural experiment indicates that legislators reap at most limited rewards from winning their preferred assignments. These results potentially raise questions about the robustness of widely held assumptions in literatures on party discipline and legislative organization.
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Group Threat and Policy Change: The Spatial Dynamics of Prohibition Politics, 1890–1919
Kenneth Andrews & Charles Seguin
American Journal of Sociology, September 2015, Pages 475-510
Abstract:
The authors argue that group threat is a key driver of the adoption of new and controversial policies. Conceptualizing threat in spatial terms, they argue that group threat is activated through the joint occurrence of (1) proximity to threatening groups and (2) the population density of threatened groups. By analyzing the adoption of county and state “dry laws” banning alcohol from 1890 to 1919, they first show that prohibition victories were driven by the relative strength of supportive constituencies such as native whites and rural residents, vis-à-vis opponents such as Irish, Italian, or German immigrants or Catholics. Second, they show that threat contributed to prohibition victories: counties bordering large immigrant or urban populations, which did not themselves contain similar populations, were more likely to adopt dry laws. Threat arises primarily from interactions between spatially proximate units at the local level, and therefore higher-level policy change is not reducible to the variables driving local policy.
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Clint Swift & Kathryn VanderMolen
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
As members of democratic institutions, state legislators must frequently collaborate with each other to achieve their varied goals. Given the increased attention to questions of polarization and gridlock, scholars should be particularly interested in understanding legislator decisions to collaborate across party lines. This article is primarily concerned with how institutional arrangements — specifically term limits — structure legislators’ decisions to cosponsor bills with partisan opponents. Using data on bill cosponsorship from 41 states (82 chambers), we demonstrate that term limits reduce bipartisan cosponsorship even when controlling for average legislative tenure. We argue that term limits accomplish this by altering the incentives that legislators face. In addition, we demonstrate that the effect of term limits depends on the level of legislative professionalization. When professionalization is high, the negative effect of term limits on bipartisan cosponsorship is particularly pronounced.
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Organizational Capacity, Regulatory Review, and the Limits of Political Control
Alexander Bolton, Rachel Augustine Potter & Sharece Thrower
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies of administrative politics focus primarily on political control and ignore organizational capacity. We argue that political and organizational factors, as well as the interaction between the two, are necessary for explaining executive policymaking. To test this theory, we consider the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), an agency often perceived to be the president’s political instrument. Using a new dataset of over 22,000 regulations reviewed by OIRA, we demonstrate that political factors influence review lengths, but organizational factors also exhibit a significant role. We find that reviews are longer when OIRA is understaffed and over-worked. Significantly, we demonstrate that low organizational capacity inhibits the president’s ability to expedite priority rules. Overall, this study highlights the organizational limits of political control.
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David Laband, Richard Seals & Eric Wilbrandt
Economics of Governance, November 2015, Pages 353-378
Abstract:
In this paper, we attempt to provide an economic explanation for the adoption of bill co-sponsorship by the US House of Representatives in 1967. We demonstrate empirically that key features of legislative production prior to 1967 (when House members’ support for a bill was indicated by introduction of duplicate bills) and post-1967 (when political support for a bill is indicated by co-sponsorship) are strikingly similar. Specifically, the raw number of supporters of a bill, whether indicated by duplicate bills or by co-sponsorship, is not nearly as critical to advancement of that bill through the House of Representatives as is the political power of the individual who introduces it and those who support it. The relative sizes of these effects are highly consistent over time. In effect, this finding means that the underlying factors of importance in the House’s legislative production function did not change significantly when bill co-sponsorship was adopted. This suggests that the change in operating procedure may have been driven by an intra-chamber struggle to control the legislative outcomes. We present empirical evidence that is highly consistent with this hypothesis — adoption of bill co-sponsorship in 1967 coincides exactly with the post-World War II peak in a concentration ratio of legislation passed in the US House of Representatives. Prior to the 90th Congress, there was a more-or-less steady increase in concentration of legislation passed by the five busiest committees that peaked at over 0.4 in the 90th Congress and then declined precipitously to under 0.15 by the 93rd Congress.
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Banks, Politics, and Political Parties: From Partisan Banking to Open Access in Early Massachusetts
Qian Lu & John Wallis
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
The United States was the first nation to allow open access to the corporate form to its citizens. The state of Massachusetts was not only one of the first states to provide its members with legally sanctioned tools to create organizations and enable open access but, on a per capita basis, had many more banks and other corporations than other states as early as the 1820s. Nonetheless, Massachusetts did not open access easily. This paper documents that until 1812, bank charters were only available to members of the Federalist Party in Massachusetts. When the Democratic-Republicans gained control of the state legislature and governor’s mansion in 1811-12, they chartered two new Democratic-Republican banks and threatened to eliminate most of the Federalist bank. The paper documents the close association of politicians and bankers. Before 1811, close to three-quarters of all the bankers we can identify had been or would eventually become a state legislator. The evolving relationships between politics and banking, the eventual opening of banking, and the wealth of bankers are tracked into the 1850s.
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Top-Down Federalism: State Policy Responses to National Government Discussions
Pamela Clouser McCann, Charles Shipan & Craig Volden
Publius, Fall 2015, Pages 495-525
Abstract:
The national government can influence state-level policymaking by adopting laws that specifically direct the states to take certain actions or by providing financial incentives. But can national institutions also influence state-level policy change by drawing attention to an issue and by providing information about it, even when these activities do not produce new national laws? In other words, do policy ideas diffuse from the national government to the states? In this article, we examine whether hearings and the introduction of bills in Congress about antismoking restrictions influenced state-level adoptions between 1975 and 2000. Our findings reveal that national policy activities stimulated state policy adoptions, but only for states with professionalized legislatures and strong policy advocates.
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Intergovernmental transfers and re-election concerned politicians
Ross Hickey
Economics of Governance, November 2015, Pages 331-351
Abstract:
This paper provides a non-partisan rationale for intergovernmental transfers: transfers are generated by electoral dynamics and term limits. We formally study re-election concerned politicians in a federal setting with term limits. The theory presented highlights an important aspect of federalism, that voters participate in elections for office holders at multiple levels of government. We augment a standard model of political career concerns to allow for multilevel governance, and to provide a central office holder with the ability to make transfers to a local politician. We find that when elections are staggered, an equilibrium exists with positive transfers. These transfers are made to sabotage political challengers. These transfers are non-partisan and are an artifact of the electoral dynamics as generated by the electoral calendar and politicians’ career concerns. We test the implications of the theory using data on transfer receipts of U.S. governors, confirming the importance of election timing and term limits as determinants of transfers.
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Mi Rosie Jahng & Jeremy Littau
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the effect of social cues and interactivity in social media on journalists’ credibility based on literature of journalists’ credibility, social information processing theory (SIPT), and social presence theory. Results from a mixed-design experiment showed participants rated highly interactive journalists to be more credible than those who are less interactive in social media. Findings are discussed in terms of theoretical implications for journalists’ credibility in social media and practical applications for journalists seeking to utilize social media to engage with their audiences.