Holding power
Political Knowledge and Policy Representation in the States
William Jaeger, Jeffrey Lyons & Jennifer Wolak
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political knowledge is central to the success of representative democracy. However, public policy has been shown to follow public opinion even despite low levels of political information in the electorate. Does this mean that political knowledge is irrelevant to policy representation? We consider whether knowledgeable electorates are better able to achieve representative policy outcomes. Using the heterogeneity in the responsiveness of government across the states, we consider how state political knowledge moderates the connection between citizen ideology and the policy outcomes of state government. Using national surveys and multilevel logit with post-stratification, we develop measures of collective political knowledge in the states. We test whether knowledgeable electorates are more likely to secure representative political outcomes than less politically informed constituencies. We find that as state political knowledge increases, so does the correspondence between the preferences of the public and the ideological tenor of state policy outcomes.
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Polarization and Policy: The Politics of Public-Sector Pensions
Sarah Anzia & Terry Moe
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
For decades, America's state and local governments have promised their workers increasingly generous pensions but failed to fully fund them, producing a fiscal problem of staggering proportions. In this article, we examine the politics of public pensions. While mainstream theoretical ideas in the American politics literature would suggest the pension issue should be polarized, with Democrats pushing for generous pensions over Republican resistance, we develop an argument — rooted in more traditional theoretical work by Schattschneider, Lowi, Wilson, and others — implying that both parties should be expected to support generous pensions during normal times and that only after the onset of the Great Recession, which expanded the scope of conflict, should the parties begin to diverge. Using a new data set of state legislators' votes on hundreds of pension bills passed between 1999 and 2011, we carry out an empirical analysis that supports these expectations.
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Gendered Perceptions and Reelection Incentives in the U.S. House of Representatives
Nicholas Pyeatt & Alixandra Yanus
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Summer 2016, Pages 295-315
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that the public systematically misperceives the ideology of female politicians. We posit that these misperceptions affect the ideal roll call ideology of female incumbents. Specifically, we contend that women receive greater benefits from more ideologically extreme roll call voting than comparable men. We test this theory by using data on the House of Representatives from 1972 to 2008. We find that even after accounting for district characteristics, female members are never penalized — at least in terms of facing a quality challenger — by ideological extremity. But extremity may increase male incumbents’ likelihood of facing such challengers.
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Political Party Affiliation of the President, Majority in Congress, and Sin Stock Returns
Sanjiv Sabherwal, Salil Sarkar & Mohammad Riaz Uddin
Financial Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
We find that in contrast to the stock market, which performs better during Democratic presidencies, “sin” stocks — publicly traded producers of tobacco, alcohol, and gaming — perform better during Republican presidencies and even more so when the Republican presidency is accompanied by a Republican majority in at least one chamber of Congress. We examine whether sin firms use contributions to establish connections with politicians and find that sin firms contribute more to Republican candidates and that these contributions are greater when Republicans are in power. We also find a positive relation between political contributions and future returns. The relation is stronger for contributions to Republicans.
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The Effects of Congressional Staff Networks in the U.S. House of Representatives
Jacob Montgomery & Brendan Nyhan
Washington University in St. Louis Working Paper, June 2016
Abstract:
Standard accounts of legislative behavior typically neglect the activities of professional staff, who are treated as extensions of the elected officials they serve. However, staff appear to have substantial independent effects on observed levels of legislator productivity and policy preferences. In this paper, we use a novel dataset of comprehensive longitudinal employment records from the U.S. House of Representatives to estimate the effects of Congressional staff on legislative behavior. Specifically, results from a series of heteroskedastic Bayesian spatial autoregressive models indicate that members of Congress who exchange important staff members across congresses are more similar in their legislative effectiveness and voting patterns than we would otherwise expect. These findings suggest that scholars should reconsider the role of staff in the legislative process.
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Dynamic Collective Choice with Endogenous Status Quo
Wioletta Dziuda & Antoine Loeper
Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We analyze a bargaining situation in which preferences evolve over time and the previous agreement becomes the next status quo. The endogeneity of the status quo exacerbates the players’ conflict of interest: Players disagree more often than under exogenous status quo. This leads to inefficiencies and status quo inertia. Under certain conditions, the negotiations can come to a complete gridlock: Players never reach an agreement. Gridlock can occur between players with arbitrarily similar preferences, provided they are sufficiently patient. In legislative settings, our model predicts polarization and explains why legislators may fail to react promptly to economic shocks.
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Roberto Stefan Foa & Yascha Mounk
Journal of Democracy, July 2016, Pages 5-17
Abstract:
The citizens of wealthy, established democracies are less satisfied with their governments than they have been at any time since opinion polling began. Most scholars have interpreted this as a sign of dissatisfaction with particular governments rather than with the political system as a whole. Drawing on recent public opinion data, we suggest that this optimistic interpretation is no longer plausible. Across a wide sample of countries in North America and Western Europe, citizens of mature democracies have become markedly less satisfied with their form of government and surprisingly open to nondemocratic alternatives. A serious democratic disconnect has emerged. If it widens even further, it may begin to challenge the stability of seemingly consolidated democracies.
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EU enlargement and satisfaction with democracy: A peculiar case of immiserizing growth
Barbara Dluhosch, Daniel Horgos & Klaus Zimmermann
Constitutional Political Economy, September 2016, Pages 273-298
Abstract:
Studies on EU enlargement mostly focus on its welfare-economic and much less so on its public-choice dimension. Yet, the latter may be as important as the former when it comes to sustain integration. This paper aims at filling the gap by exploring theoretically and empirically how enlargement of multi-level systems like the EU affects satisfaction with democracy. In order to assess the effects of a widening in membership, we present a novel approach that draws on the probability of being outvoted. We find that, given the institutional arrangement, enlargement tends to depress satisfaction with democracy. Our theoretical results are backed by panel-data evidence for six European economies displaying a significant decline in satisfaction with democracy with growth in EU-membership.
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The Constrained Governor: Exploring Gubernatorial Decision Making on Senate Appointments
Christopher Cooper, Gibbs Knotts & Jordan Ragusa
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the vast majority of American states, governors have unrestricted authority to fill Senate vacancies, and in an average decade, one-third of all Americans have been represented by an appointed senator. Despite the importance of Senate appointments both theoretically and substantively, no published study has investigated the dynamics of gubernatorial selection. In this paper, we compile an original data set of Senate appointees as well as the list of the candidates the governor considered but did not select. We model the governor’s selection and discover that despite having no formal constraints on their appointment power, governors behave as constrained actors. In particular, we find that governors eschew the potential appointees who are closest to their policy views and instead appoint the candidate who is closest to the ideological position of the voters in their state. This effect is particularly pronounced when the governor is eligible for reelection within two years. These findings have both theoretical and normative implications for understanding Senate appointments, gubernatorial decision making, and the implicit power of the electorate.
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Tyler Hughes
Party Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The majority party dominates legislative outputs and throughputs in rule-driven institutions, but these agenda-setting powers may not extend to other facets of the policy process. This article assesses the minority party’s ability to influence majority party issue attention in the US House of Representatives by analyzing one-minute speeches given on the House floor. This new measure of partisan issue attention highlights how the parties focus on the same policy issues in the same relative proportions, rather than crafting divergent issue agendas. Time series analysis indicates gaps between the parties’ level of attention to particular issues result in corresponding changes to majority party attention, which suggests the minority party can influence majority party issue attention by placing more emphasis on specific policy issues.
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Ben Wasike
Government Information Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study used five standard Department of Justice FoIA parameters to analyze and compare FoIA performance between the Obama and Bush administrations in terms of: efficiency, disposition, type of exemptions, redress and staff workload. Results indicate that while efficiency is higher under Obama, agencies are releasing information only in part. While appeals were processed faster under Bush, petitioners have had more success under Obama. Additionally, FoIA staff workload has dramatically reduced under Obama. One notable finding was that contrary to popular media outcry, neither administration evoked national security and law enforcement exemptions as much as has been widely claimed. Legacy and commonality were also findings indicating that certain trends transcend the incumbent. Implications to government transparency and pertinent issues are discussed within.
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Hong Min Park & Steven Smith
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The balance between majority rule and minority rights is a central issue in the design and operation of democratic institutions and remains a contested issue in debates of policy-making processes. Remarkably, public attitudes about this balance are not subjected to scholarly investigation. In this article, we report the findings of the first survey experiment in which the American public's attitudes about majority rule and minority rights in legislative bodies are explored. We find robust support for both majority rule and minority rights, discover that only a few Americans distinguish between the US House of Representatives and Senate in the application of these principles, and demonstrate that views of majority rule and minority rights can be moved once we introduce respondents to the partisan implications of procedural rules. Moreover, with conflicting theoretical expectations about the effect of political sophistication on attitudes about majority rule and minority rights, we find that higher levels of political sophistication are associated with stronger partisan effects on attitudes about the balance between majority rule and minority rights in Congress.
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Constitutional Qualms or Politics as Usual? The Factors Shaping Public Support for Unilateral Action
Dino Christenson & Douglas Kriner
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The formal institutional constraints that Congress and the courts impose on presidential unilateral action are feeble. As a result, recent scholarship suggests that public opinion may be the strongest check against executive overreach. However, little is known about how the public assesses unilateral action. Through a series of five survey experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys, we examine the extent to which Americans evaluate unilateral action based on constitutional, partisan, and policy concerns. We find that Americans do not instinctively reject unilateral action as a threat to our system of checks and balances, but instead evaluate unilateral action in terms of whether it accords or conflicts with their partisan and policy preference priors. Our results suggest that the public constraint on presidential unilateral action is far from automatic. Rather, the strength and scope of this check are variable products of political contestation in the public sphere.
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Donations and dependence: Individual contributor strategies in House elections
Jennifer Heerwig
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the importance of individual contributors to financing federal candidates, past work has largely neglected this crucial financial constituency in favor of research on corporate and trade political action committees (PACs). By contrast, in this study I offer the first analysis of aggregate contributions from the population of individual contributors to House candidates. Using an original big dataset constructed from over fifteen million Federal Election Commission (FEC) disclosure records, I identify individual contributors (rather than contributions) and trace the variation in their strategies across types of House candidates. I distinguish between frequent donors, who are theorized to have more contact with members of Congress, versus infrequent donors in these elections. I find evidence that the character of aggregate donations from repeat donors is more access-oriented even while controlling for other salient candidate characteristics. Funds from infrequent donors, in contrast, appear more ideologically motivated. By also examining the percentage of funds that House candidates receive from repeat donors, I show that the fundraising coalitions of candidates may reproduce reliance on more access-oriented, repeat donors despite the influx of dollars from infrequent donors. I suggest that my findings provide a persuasive case for re-evaluating the diversity of roles individual contributors play in the campaign finance system, and for systematically analyzing variation in contributor strategies.
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Interbranch cooperation and the shadow of the future
Travis Baker & Thomas Schwartz
Constitutional Political Economy, September 2016, Pages 319-331
Abstract:
Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) experiments confirm and extend Axelrod’s (The evolution of cooperation. Basic Books, New York, 1984) Shadow of the Future hypothesis: subjects cooperate in infinitely repeated PD, but they also cooperate until near the end in finitely repeated PD. So the extended hypothesis is that cooperation depends on the probability of continued play. Observational tests of this hypothesis, or even applications, have been rare at best. Here we not only apply but test it for interbranch cooperation under separated-powers constitutions, specifically those of the American states, using the end of governors’ final terms as end points and the rate of overridden vetoes as the extreme case of a breakdown in interbranch cooperation. Controlling for a variety of factors, including divided government, we find support for the hypothesis, whose explanation of interbranch interaction fills a gap left open by Madison’s Federalist 51: how republican government can control itself when what is needed is “energy” more than safeguards.
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Sending mixed signals: The role of gender and partisanship in evaluations of political leaders
Nicholas Pyeatt & Alixandra Yanus
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, forthcoming
Abstract:
Partisanship and gender are powerful heuristic cues used by citizens to understand their elected officials’ ideology. When these cues send complementary signals – a Democratic woman or a Republican man – we expect they will aid citizens in evaluating their leaders’ political ideology. However, when partisanship and gender send conflicting signals, we expect citizens will be more likely to misperceive their leaders’ beliefs. We test this proposition using ideological evaluations of incumbent US senators collected in the 2010 and 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies. The findings support our hypotheses, illustrating voters’ reliance on both partisan and gender cues. Our results suggest potential consequences for not only Republican women, but also Democratic men.
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Informational Lobbying and Agenda Distortion
Christopher Cotton & Arnaud Déllis
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article challenges the prevailing view that pure informational lobbying (in the absence of political contributions and evidence distortion or withholding) leads to better informed policymaking. In the absence of lobbying, the policymaker (PM) may prioritize more promising issues. Recognizing this, interest groups involved with other issues have a greater incentive to lobby in order to change the issues that the PM learns about and prioritizes. We show how informational lobbying can be detrimental, in the sense that it can lead to less informed PMs and worse policy. This is because informational lobbying can lead to the prioritization of less important issues with active lobbies, and can crowd out information collection by the PM on issues with more likely beneficial reforms. The analysis fully characterizes the set of detrimental lobbying equilibria under two alternative types of issue asymmetry.
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Competing for Attention: Lobbying Time-Constrained Politicians
Christopher Cotton
Journal of Public Economic Theory, August 2016, Pages 642–665
Abstract:
We develop a model of lobbying in which a time and resource constrained policymaker first chooses which policy proposals to learn about, before choosing which to implement. The policymaker reviews the proposals of the interest groups who provide the highest contributions. We study how policy outcomes and contributions depend on policymaker constraints and the design of the “Contest for Attention.” Among other results, awarding attention to the highest contributors generally guarantees the first best policy outcome. It can also lead to the highest possible contributions, suggesting that a policymaker may not need to sacrifice policy in order to maximize contributions. Our results also give insight into other settings where agents compete for a decision maker's attention.
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Presidential Influence in an Era of Congressional Dominance
Jon Rogowski
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on presidential power focuses almost exclusively on the modern era, while earlier presidents are said to have held office while congressional dominance was at its peak. In this article, I argue that nineteenth-century presidents wielded greater influence than commonly recognized due to their position as head of the executive branch. Using an original dataset on the county-level distribution of U.S. post offices from 1876 to 1896, I find consistent evidence that counties represented by a president’s copartisans in the U.S. House received substantially more post offices than other counties, and that these advantages were especially large under divided government and in electorally important states. These results are robust across model specifications and when examining the Senate. The findings challenge key components of the congressional dominance and modern presidency theses, and have important implications for scholarship on interbranch relations, bureaucratic politics, and American political development.
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Mayors, Accomplishments, and Advancement
Eric Heberlig et al.
Urban Affairs Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines the effects of accomplishments on the career paths of big-city mayors. Using data from 104 cities with populations over 160,000 from 1992 to 2012, this study examines the extent to which performance in economics, crime, and recruiting mega-events affects mayors’ decisions to seek reelection or other offices, or retire. Results indicate those mayors of cities with population growth, a decrease in the crime rate, and that host certain mega-events (presidential nominating conventions) are more likely to seek another office than other mayors. A decrease in the crime rate seems to help mayors win reelection while none of the other accomplishments appear to improve their chances of winning campaigns for other offices.