Representing
Political Capital: Corporate Connections and Stock Investments in the U.S. Congress, 2004-2008
Andrew Eggers & Jens Hainmueller
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Spring 2014, Pages 169-202
Abstract:
Recent research suggests that, public perceptions notwithstanding, members of Congress are rather mediocre investors. Why do the consummate political insiders fail to profit as investors? We consider various explanations that pertain to members' political relationships to public firms. We show that members of Congress invest disproportionately in local firms and campaign contributors, which suggests that overall underperformance cannot be explained by the absence of political considerations in members' portfolio decisions. These connected investments (and particularly local investments) generally outperform members' other investments, which suggests that poor performance is not explained by an excessive political skew in members' portfolios. It appears that members of Congress earn poor investing returns primarily because their non-connected investments perform poorly, perhaps due to the usual failings of individual investors; a combination of political and financial considerations may explain why they do not make more extensive use of their political advantages as investors.
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James Gimpel, Frances Lee & Michael Parrott
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
We identify the economic interests in the United States that have a partisan alignment. We disaggregate corporate and trade association political action committees by economic sector, using the most fine-grained classifications available. We then analyze the campaign contributions to House incumbents from each sector, controlling for the majority party, economic geography, committee membership, and electoral competition. We find wide variation in how economic sectors relate to the parties. More than one third have a clear party tilt, with far more leaning toward Republicans than to Democrats. The remainder have no discernible partisan preference, either giving without reference to party or opportunistically to the majority. Republican-leaning sectors concentrate in particular enterprises, especially natural resources extraction, while most professional service sectors are nonpartisan. Business is not a monolith, to be contrasted with "labor" or "ideological interest groups," but embedded in economic sectors that are more or less politicized in partisan terms.
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Historical changes in American self-interest: State of the Union addresses 1790 to 2012
William Chopik, Deepti Joshi & Sara Konrath
Personality and Individual Differences, August 2014, Pages 128-133
Abstract:
Many psychological theories of morality suggest that satisfying our own self-interest motives and desires at the expense of others is the default condition in early childhood development, but that humans eventually learn to behave selflessly in the interest of others. Recent research examining societal increases in traits related to self-interest (e.g., narcissism) in the US finds increases in such traits over the past 30 years. The current study examined changes in self-interest from 1790 through 2012 using presidential State of the Union addresses. Self-interest (relative to interest in others) was low during the 19th century but rose after the turn of the 20th century.
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The Impact of Public Officials' Corruption on the Size and Allocation of U.S. State Spending
Cheol Liu & John Mikesell
Public Administration Review, May/June 2014, Pages 346-359
Abstract:
This article demonstrates the impact of public officials' corruption on the size and allocation of U.S. state spending. Extending two theories of "excessive" government expansion, the authors argue that public officials' corruption should cause state spending to be artificially elevated. Corruption increased state spending over the period 1997-2008. During that time, the 10 most corrupt states could have reduced their total annual expenditure by an average of $1,308 per capita - 5.2 percent of the mean per capita state expenditure - if corruption had been at the average level of the states. Moreover, at the expense of social sectors, corruption is likely to distort states' public resource allocations in favor of higher-potential "bribe-generating" spending and items directly beneficial to public officials, such as capital, construction, highways, borrowing, and total salaries and wages. The authors use an objective, concrete, and consistent measurement of corruption, the number of convictions.
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State politics, tuition, and the dynamics of a political budget cycle
Lockwood Reynolds
Empirical Economics, June 2014, Pages 1241-1270
Abstract:
This paper attempts to improve the understanding of political budget cycles by first identifying a previously undocumented cycle in tuition and required fees at public four-year institutions of higher education in the United States. I find that tuition and fees are 1.5 % lower during gubernatorial election years than in non-election years. No similar cycle is found in private tuition and fees. Using a newly constructed dataset, I then explore the variation in electoral competition in gubernatorial and state legislative elections within states over time to uncover the underlying electoral incentives creating the cycle. The results suggest that the tuition cycle is not designed to increase the reelection prospects of governors as standard theories would predict. I find that tuition decreases during gubernatorial election years as the reelection prospects of the incumbent governor increases. Instead, the evidence suggests that popular governors use lower tuition as political pork to expand party power in the state by capturing swing districts in concurrent state legislative elections. I find that the magnitude of the cycle increases with the level of competition in state house elections and that the effect is concentrated among those districts held by the opposition party, particularly if those opposition districts are populated with voters likely to be responsive to tuition as a policy lever. These results reveal important dynamics about party competition within states in the United States and suggest that the electoral incentives driving political budget cycles can be complex.
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Lawrence Ezrow & Timothy Hellwig
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conventional wisdom has it that political parties have incentives to respond to public opinion. It is also conventional wisdom that in open economies, policymakers must also "respond" to markets. Research on representation has provided ample evidence in support of the first claim. Research on the political economy of globalization has not, however, provided evidence for the second. This article examines the effects of globalization on how parties respond to voters. We argue that while elections motivate parties to respond to public sentiment, economic interdependence distracts political elites from their electorates and toward market actors, reducing party responsiveness to the mean voter. Evidence from a pair of distinct data sources spanning elections in twenty advanced capitalist democracies from the 1970s to 2010 shows that while parties have incentives to respond to left-right shifts in the mean voter position, they only do so when the national economy is sufficiently sheltered from the world economy. These findings have implications for party strategies, for representation, and for the broader effects of market integration.
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The Conditional Effect of Term Limits on Electoral Activities
Julie VanDusky-Allen
Politics & Policy, June 2014, Pages 431-458
Abstract:
In this article, I examine how term limits affect the amount of time that legislators focus on constituency service and fundraising. I use data from the 2002 U.S. State Legislative Survey conducted by Carey, Niemi, Powell, and Moncrief to provide support for my hypotheses. The results from the data analysis suggest that in the presence of term limits, legislators with long-term career goals in politics spend less time on constituency service activities and more time on fundraising with their caucus. For legislators with short-term career goals in politics, there is very little evidence to suggest that term limits have an effect on how much time they spend on constituency service activities and fundraising activities.
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Cynics and Skeptics: Evaluating the Credibility of Mainstream and Citizen Journalism
Jasun Carr et al.
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
With the increase in citizen-generated news, the need to understand how individual predispositions interact with news sources to influence perceptions of news credibility becomes increasingly important. Using a web-based experiment, this study examines the influences individual predispositions toward the media and politics have on perceived credibility of mainstream and citizen journalism. Analyzing data drawn from a representative sample of the U.S. adult population, results indicate that media skepticism and political cynicism interact, such that cynics and skeptics perceive citizen journalism as more credible, while non-cynics and non-skeptics think mainstream journalism is more credible.
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Sunshine as Disinfectant: The Effect of State Freedom of Information Act Laws on Public Corruption
Adriana Cordis & Patrick Warren
Journal of Public Economics, July 2014, Pages 18-36
Abstract:
We assess the effect of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws on public corruption in the United States. Specifically, we investigate the impact of switching from a weak to a strong state-level FOIA law on corruption convictions of state and local government officials. The evidence suggests that strengthening FOIA laws has two offsetting effects: reducing corruption and increasing the probability that corrupt acts are detected. The conflation of these two effects led prior work to find little impact of FOIA on corruption. We find that conviction rates approximately double after the switch, which suggests an increase in detection probabilities. However, conviction rates decline from this new elevated level as the time since the switch from weak to strong FOIA increases. This decline is consistent with officials reducing the rate at which they commit corrupt acts by about twenty percent. These changes are more pronounced in states with more intense media coverage, for those that had more substantial changes in their FOIA laws, for FOIA laws which include strong liabilities for officials who contravene them, for local officials, and for more serious crimes. Conviction rates of federal officials, who are not subject to the policy, show no concomitant change.
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"'Do This! Do That!' and Nothing Will Happen": Executive Orders and Bureaucratic Responsiveness
Joshua Kennedy
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
How effective is unilateral presidential power? Recent developments have shifted presidential scholarship in the direction of a more institutional approach, and one of the most important tenets of this work holds that the president has the ability to make policy on his own. However, there is significant anecdotal evidence suggesting that agency responsiveness to executive orders is not at all guaranteed. This study leverages a unique data set tracing the implementation of executive orders across 10 government agencies, and the results indicate that despite conventional wisdom, presidential directives are not universally implemented, and a host of factors come to bear on an agency's decision as to whether they will respond. This project represents among the first quantitative empirical assessments of the utility of unilateral power and suggests that the field may benefit most from shifting toward a bargaining-based model similar to those used in legislative scholarship.
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Chamber Size Effects on the Collaborative Structure of Legislatures
Justin Kirkland
Legislative Studies Quarterly, May 2014, Pages 169-198
Abstract:
The collective nature of legislating forces legislators to rely on one another for information and support. This collaborative activity requires a choice about partnerships in an environment of uncertainty. The basic size and organization of a legislature amplifies this uncertainty in relational choices. Analysis of collaborative patterns between all the U.S. state legislators in 2007 corroborates this expectation, indicating that large legislatures have highly partisan collaborative networks with generally low density, while larger legislative committees mitigate these effects. Thus, even when the attributes of legislators do not change, the organizational size of the legislature can shape how those legislators interact.
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Whistleblower laws and exposed corruption in the United States
Rajeev Goel & Michael Nelson
Applied Economics, Summer 2014, Pages 2331-2341
Abstract:
This research creates a unique internet-based measure of awareness about state-level whistleblower laws and provisions to examine their effects on observed corruption in the United States. Are whistleblower laws complementary or substitutes for other, more direct, corruption control measures? Placing the analysis within the corruption literature, the findings show that greater whistleblower awareness results in more observed corruption and this finding holds across specifications. Internet awareness about whistleblower laws seems relatively more effective at exposing corruption than the quantity and quality of state whistleblower laws themselves.
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The Role of Race, Ethnicity, and Party on Attitudes Toward Descriptive Representation
Jason Casellas & Sophia Wallace
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using original survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES), we examine variation in racial and ethnic group and partisan attitudes toward legislators and representation. Respondents were asked about their views on descriptive representation, its importance for their own elected official, and whether it was important to have more descriptive representatives in general. Using respondents' personal characteristics such as education, partisanship, race, ethnicity, income, and race and ethnicity of their House of Representatives member, we analyze the impact of these variables on attitudes toward representation. We find that Latino and Black respondents place a high level of importance on having descriptive representatives in their own districts in addition to articulating a high degree of importance to having more representatives from their respective group. However, Latino Republicans place less importance on descriptive representation overall than Latino non-Republican respondents. Non-Latino Republicans also place importance on more legislators of their same race or ethnicity. The findings have implications for democratic governance as the demographics of the United States rapidly changes.
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Transparency actually: How transparency affects public perceptions of political decision-making
Jenny de Fine Licht
European Political Science Review, May 2014, Pages 309-330
Abstract:
Building on a widely held account of transparency as integral to legitimate and successful governance, this article addresses the question of how transparency in decision-making can influence public perceptions of political decision-making. An original experiment with 1099 participants shows that people who perceive political decision-making to be transparent judge the degree of procedural fairness highly and are more willing to accept the final decision. Perceptions of transparency are, however, largely shaped by transparency cues (e.g. statements provided by external sources) rather than by the degree of actual transparency, and no direct effect of actual transparency can be found on decision acceptance. The implication is that it is difficult to influence people's acceptance of political decisions by means of transparency reforms, as people base their assessments of political decisions largely on considerations other than evalutations of actual decision-making procedures.
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Marta Fraile & Shanto Iyengar
International Journal of Press/Politics, July 2014, Pages 275-294
Abstract:
Across a sample of twenty-seven European nations, we examine variation in the level of factual political knowledge in relation to self-reported exposure to news programs aired by public or commercial channels, and to broadsheet or tabloid newspapers. Unlike previous studies, we estimate the effects of exposure to these news outlets while controlling for self-selection into the audience. Our results show that the positive effects of exposure to broadsheets and public broadcasting on knowledge remain robust. Finally, we show that only exposure to broadsheets (and not to public broadcasting) narrows the knowledge gap within nations; relatively apathetic individuals who read broadsheet newspapers are able to "catch up" with their more attentive counterparts.
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Maksymilian Kwiek
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
A committee is choosing between two alternatives. If the required supermajority is not reached, voting is repeated indefinitely, although there is a cost to delay. Under suitable assumptions the equilibrium analysis provides a sharp prediction. The result can be interpreted as a generalization of the seminal median voter theorem known from the simple majority case. If a supermajority is required instead, the power to select the outcome moves from the median voter to the more extreme voters. Normative analysis indicates that, in the utilitarian sense, simple majority is strictly inferior to some supermajorities. Even if unanimity is a bad voting rule, voting rules close to unanimity may be efficient. The more likely it is to have very many almost indifferent voters and some very opinionated ones, the more stringent a supermajority is required for efficiency.