Redressing grievances
Cardinals or Clerics? Congressional Committees and the Distribution of Pork
Christopher Berry & Anthony Fowler
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Journalistic and academic accounts of Congress suggest that important committee positions allow members to procure more federal funds for their constituents, but existing evidence on this topic is limited in scope and has failed to distinguish the effects of committee membership from selection onto committees. We bring together decades of data on federal outlays and congressional committee and subcommittee assignments to provide a comprehensive analysis of committee positions and distributive politics across all policy domains. Using a within-member research design, we find that seats on key committees produce little additional spending. The chairs of the Appropriations subcommittees — the so called “cardinals” of Congress — are an exception to the rule. These leadership positions do generate more funding for constituents, but only from programs under the jurisdiction of their subcommittee. Our results paint a new picture of distributive politics and call for a reexamination of its canonical theories.
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Congressional Seniority and Pork: A Pig Fat Myth?
Anthony Fowler & Andrew Hall
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Representatives in American legislatures win reelection at astounding rates, even when they fail to represent the median voter in their districts closely. One popular explanation for this puzzle is that incumbents deliver non-ideological benefits to the district through “pork-barrel politics,” i.e., the distribution of federal spending. We put this explanation to the test by measuring the causal link between senior representation and pork. In short, we find no such link (sausage or otherwise). Employing both differences-in-differences and regression discontinuity designs, we find that a senior member of Congress, on average, brings no more pork to her district than the counterfactual freshman representing the same district at the same time. As a result, voters have no pork-based incentive to reelect their experienced incumbents, and pork-barrel politics cannot explain the incumbency advantage.
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Drawing Your Senator from a Jar: Term Length and Legislative Behavior
Rocío Titiunik
Political Science Research and Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies the effects of term duration on legislative behavior using field experiments that occur in the Arkansas, Illinois, and Texas Senates in the United States. After mandatory changes in senate district boundaries, state senators are randomly assigned to serve either two-year or four-year terms, providing a rare opportunity to study legislative behavior experimentally. Despite important differences across states, when considered together, the results show that senators serving two years abstain more often, introduce fewer bills, and do not seem to be more responsive to their constituents than senators serving four years. In addition, senators serving shorter terms raise and spend significantly more money, although in those states where funds can be raised continuously during the legislative term, the differences arise only when the election is imminent.
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Pat Akey
Review of Financial Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates the value of firm political connections using a regression discontinuity design in a sample of close, off-cycle U.S. congressional elections. I compare firms donating to winning candidates and firms donating to losing candidates and find that postelection abnormal equity returns are 3% higher for firms donating to winning candidates. Connections to politicians serving on powerful congressional committees, such as appropriations and taxation, are especially valuable and impact contributing firms sales. Firms' campaign contributions are correlated with other political activities such as lobbying and hiring former government employees, suggesting that firms take coordinated actions to build political networks.
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Interest Group Influence in Policy Diffusion Networks
Kristin Garrett & Joshua Jansa
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars have suggested that interest groups affect the diffusion of innovations across states by creating a network of information between the states that aids in the spread of policy ideas. Still, the unique role that interest groups play in policy diffusion networks is not fully understood, in large part because the current methodology for studying diffusion cannot parse out interest group influence. We address this problem by analyzing the actual text of legislation, moving away from binary adoption to a more nuanced measure of policy similarity. This allows us to distinguish whether states emulate other states or interest group model legislation. We use text similarity scores in a social network analysis to explore whether early-adopting states or interest groups are more central to the network. We apply this analytical framework to two policies — abortion insurance coverage restrictions and self-defense statutes. Based on this analysis, we find that a fundamentally different picture of policy diffusion networks begins to emerge — one where interest group model legislation plays a central role in the diffusion of innovations.
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Acting Right? Privatization, Encompassing Interests, and the Left
Timothy Hicks
Political Science Research and Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
I present a theoretical account of the politics of privatization that predicts left-wing support for the policy is conditional on the proportionality of the electoral system. In contrast to accounts that see privatization as an inherently right-wing policy, I argue that, like trade policy, it has the feature of creating distributed benefits and concentrated costs. Less proportional electoral systems create incentives for the Left to be responsive to those who face the concentrated costs, and thus for them to oppose privatization more strongly. More proportional systems reduce these incentives and increase the extent to which distributed benefits are internalized by elected representatives. Hypotheses are derived from this theory at both the individual and macro-policy level, and then tested separately. Quantitative evidence on public opinion from the 1990s and privatization revenues from Western European countries over the period 1980–2005 supports the argument.
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A model of public opinion management
Andrea Patacconi & Nick Vikander
Journal of Public Economics, August 2015, Pages 73–83
Abstract:
Policymakers often motivate their decisions using information collected by government agencies. While more information can help hold the government to account, it may also give policymakers an incentive to meddle with the work of bureaucrats. This paper develops a model of biased information gathering to examine how different disclosure rules and the degree of independence of government agencies affect citizen welfare. Disclosure rules and agency independence interact in subtle ways. We find that secrecy is never optimal and yet insulating the agency from political pressure, so that its information is always unbiased, may also not be socially optimal. A biased information-gathering process can benefit the government by helping it to shape public opinion. But it can also benefit the public, by curbing the government’s tendency to implement its ex ante favored policy, thus mitigating the agency conflict between policymakers and the public.
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Handicaps to improve reputation
Amihai Glazer
Journal of Theoretical Politics, July 2015, Pages 485-496
Abstract:
An agent may be able to address a task at different times, with the state of nature more favorable to the task in some periods than in others. Success on a task will therefore more greatly improve the agent’s reputation if he is constrained in choosing when to address the task than if he enjoys flexibility in timing. These considerations can explain why presidents emphasize achievements in their first 100 days in office, and why performance of the economy in only some periods of a president’s term affect elections.
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Frederick Boehmke & Charles Shipan
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Once legislators delegate policymaking responsibility to executive agencies, they have the ability to oversee and potentially influence the actions of these agencies. In this article, we examine, first, whether the actions of agencies reflect the preferences of legislators, and second, whether legislative professionalism enhances the ability of legislatures to influence executive agencies and obtain more preferred outcomes. We study these effects in the context of annual nursing home inspections performed by state administrators and make two predictions. First, as Democratic legislators will, on average, prefer a more activist role for government and for government agencies, we should see agencies issue more citations for violations of regulations when state legislatures are Democratic and fewer when they are Republican. Second, as more professionalized legislatures are better able to monitor the agency inspectors’ actions and inspection outcomes, this effect should be intensified for legislatures with greater professionalism. We find support for both arguments: agencies faced with more Democrats in the legislature will be more activist, and this effect is strengthened for more professional legislatures.
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Staggered Terms for the US Senate: Origins and Irony
Daniel Wirls
Legislative Studies Quarterly, August 2015, Pages 471–497
Abstract:
This article provides the first detailed study of the origins of staggered Senate terms, which typically have been interpreted as part of the framers’ intent to create an insulated, stable, and conservative Senate. I draw upon three sources of evidence — the meaning and application of “rotation” in revolutionary America, the deliberations and decisions at the Constitutional Convention, and the arguments during Ratification — to show that the origins of and intentions behind staggered terms offer little support for the dominant interpretation. Instead, staggered terms, a mechanism to promote “rotation” or turnover of membership, were added to the Constitution as a compromise to offset, not augment, the Senate's longer terms by exposing a legislative chamber with long individual tenure to more frequent electoral influence and change.
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Interest Groups, Democracy, and Policy Volatility
Jac Heckelman & Bonnie Wilson
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Democratic polities appear to produce more stable policy than do autocracies. In this paper, we explore a potential source of the policy stability observed in democracies: special-interest groups. We find that interest groups are associated with greater stability in some measures of policy and that groups mediate the stabilizing impact of democracy on policy. We also find that the impact of interest groups on policy volatility depends on the degree of polarization in a society.
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Invisible (and Visible) Lobbying: The Case of State Regulatory Policymaking
Susan Webb Yackee
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most lobbying is invisible, meaning that interest groups routinely contact government officials “off the public record.” While such lobbying is ubiquitous, whether and how it may affect public policy decision-making remains largely unknown. I theorize that lobbying that employs both invisible and visible tactics is the most influential. I study the development of 38 health-related regulatory policies in Wisconsin to assess this argument. I employ government records, survey data from more than 350 individuals, and interviews with 15 state policymakers. I find that invisible and visible lobbying — when performed in combination — are associated with greater regulatory policy change. From a normative perspective, these results are both reassuring and troubling. On one hand, the results suggest that invisible lobbying, on its own, rarely drives state regulatory policy shifts. Yet, on the other hand, those interested parties with the resources necessary to lobby across multiple modes are more likely to see policy change.
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George Krause & Ian Palmer Cook
Political Science Research and Methods, May 2015, Pages 243-264
Abstract:
Can American presidents use their budget proposal authority to achieve their own partisan policy priorities? This is an important, yet challenging, question to answer since formal executive authority is ambiguous, and budgetary powers are shared in the US separation of powers system. Indeed, the question remains open since prior empirical designs conflate external constraints (arising from political and policy conditions) with those that reflect executive partisan policy priorities. This study advances a novel stochastic decomposition of executive budget proposals in order to analyze the extent to which presidents can shape the legislative funding of US federal agencies consistent with their own partisan policy priorities. Statistical evidence reveals that presidents exert partisan-based budgetary influence over appropriations that cannot be ascertained from previous empirical studies that rely on either the observed gap between presidential requests and congressional appropriations or standard instrumental variable estimation methods. The statistical evidence also indicates that presidents are marginally more effective at converting their partisan policy priorities into budgetary outcomes under divided party government. Contrary to theoretical predictions generated from bilateral veto bargaining models, presidents are also shown to exert effective partisan budgetary influence even when their budget requests exceed congressional appropriations.
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Representative Bureaucracy and the Willingness to Coproduce: An Experimental Study
Norma Riccucci, Gregg Van Ryzin & Huafang Li
Public Administration Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Relying on the theory of representative bureaucracy — specifically, the notion of symbolic representation — this article examines whether varying the number of female public officials overseeing a local recycling program influences citizens’ (especially women's) willingness to cooperate with the government by recycling, thus coproducing important policy outcomes. Using a survey experiment in which the first names of public officials are manipulated, the authors find a clear pattern of increasing willingness on the part of women to coproduce when female names are more represented in the agency responsible for recycling, particularly with respect to the more difficult task of composting food waste. Overall, men in the experiment were less willing to coproduce across all measures and less responsive to the gender balance of names. These findings have important implications for the theory of representative bureaucracy and for efforts to promote the coproduction of public services.
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Jeffrey Harden & Christopher Clark
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
American politics scholars have long distinguished between legislature-level “collective” and legislator-level “dyadic” representation. However, most research on these concepts focuses on elite-level outcomes (e.g., policy output or roll-call behavior), and whether one or both forms leads to the representation of citizen interests. Less is known about the demand side of the relationship — whether constituents prefer collective or dyadic representation. Yet the citizen perspective is critical to both scholarly and normative discussions of representation. Through a novel survey experiment administered to national samples of Americans, we examine citizen preferences for collective and dyadic representation with respect to two important social identities: race and political partisanship. We posit that citizens prefer collective over dyadic representation because collective representation provides better representation of constituents’ interests via substantive and symbolic benefits. We show results that support this expectation, and then conclude by discussing the implications for scholarly and normative understandings of representation in American politics.
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Failures: Diffusion, Learning, and Policy Abandonment
Craig Volden
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies of the diffusion of policies tend to focus on innovations that successfully spread across governments. Implicit in such diffusion is the abandonment of the previous policy. Yet little is known about whether governments abandon policies that have failed elsewhere, as would be consistent with states acting as policy laboratories not only for policy successes but also for failures. This article focuses on the possible abandonment of failing welfare-to-work policies in the formative years (1997–2002) of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program across the 50 U.S. states. Using a dyad-based event history analysis, I find that, if both states in a pairing have a policy and one state’s policy fails (in employing welfare recipients, reducing welfare rolls, or reducing overall poverty rates), then the other state is much more likely to abandon that failing policy. Moreover, such learning from the other state’s experience is more common when the states are ideologically similar to one another and when the legislature in the potentially learning state is more professional.
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How Institutions Affect Gender Gaps in Public Opinion Expression
Lilach Nir & Scott McClurg
Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 2015, Pages 544-567
Abstract:
The expression of opinions in ordinary political discussions between citizens is essential to public opinion dynamics such as opinion leadership, false consensus, or pluralistic ignorance. One of the main predictors of expressiveness in citizens’ discussions is gender. Although research documents consistent gaps between men’s and women’s expressiveness through political discussion, most insights are based on the United States. Absent a comparative perspective, little consideration has been given to major differences across countries in men’s and women’s access to various institutions, and whether this access correlates with gender gaps in discursive expression. Access affects opportunities of women and men to encounter politically relevant information and connect with potential discussants. The present article tests whether greater egalitarianism in political representation, education, and workforce participation reduces gender gaps in political discussion. Multilevel analyses of the International Social Survey Program data set (approximately N = 36,600; 33 countries) show that several country-level features affect the contribution of gender to political discussion, but in ways that suggest a trade-off between gender equality and opinion expressiveness.