Rigging the system
Business as usual: Politicians with business experience, government finances, and policy outcomes
Brian Beach & Daniel Jones
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, November 2016, Pages 292-307
Abstract:
Are government finances and policy outcomes different under politicians with business experience? We study California city councils and implement a regression discontinuity strategy to provide causal evidence on this issue. Ultimately, we find no evidence that the election of a candidate with business experience impacts city expenditures, revenues, unemployment rates, and other outcomes. Future vote shares for candidates with business experience are also unaffected, which suggests that these politicians are not having an impact that is observed to voters but unobserved in our data.
---------------------
Partisan Preemption: The Strategic use of Federal Preemption Legislation
Mallory SoRelle & Alexis Walker
Publius, Fall 2016, Pages 486-509
Abstract:
Federal preemption by both parties has risen dramatically since the 1960s. Scholars note that Democrats and Republicans routinely employ preemption to advance partisan political goals, but we know very little about how each party uses this tool of federal power. Are policymakers from both parties employing preemption in similar ways, or do strategic partisan differences exist? Using an original dataset, we show that Democrats and Republicans systematically vary in their use of preemption. Democrats put forward preemption legislation that maximizes regulation by mandating a floor of protection across the states, particularly for policies that promote consumer protection and expand civil rights. In contrast, Republicans enact preemptions that cap regulation by utilizing ceilings that curtail the states' ability to regulate, particularly for business and commerce policy. Ultimately, both parties have enhanced federal power and limited state authority, but they do so in dramatically different ways and for vastly different political goals.
---------------------
Jeremy Levine
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In an era of public-private partnerships, what role do nonprofit community-based organizations (CBOs) play in urban governance? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Boston, this article presents a new way to understand CBOs' political role in poor neighborhoods: CBOs as nonelected neighborhood representatives. Over the course of four years, I followed nine CBOs in six Boston neighborhoods as they planned community development projects. The CBOs in my study superseded elected politicians as the legitimate representatives of poor urban neighborhoods. Private funders and government agencies legitimated CBO leaders' claims and treated them as the preferred representatives of neighborhoods' interests. Elected district representatives, by contrast, exhibited limited influence over resources and were rarely involved in community development decision-making. By reconsidering CBOs' political role in urban neighborhoods, this study uncovers a consequential realignment of urban political representation. It also identifies an important tradeoff between the urban poor's access to resources and the ability to hold their leaders democratically accountable - a tradeoff that will remain so long as governments continue to rely on private actors in public governance.
---------------------
Why do Legislators Skip Votes? Position Taking Versus Policy Influence
Adam Brown & Jay Goodliffe
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
A legislator's duty is to vote on legislation, yet legislators routinely miss votes. Existing studies of absenteeism have focused on the US Congress, producing useful but partial explanations. We provide added insight by examining absenteeism in American state legislatures. Our data include 2,916,471 individual votes cast by 4392 legislators from 64 legislative chambers. This rich, multistate dataset produces insights that build on and sometimes conflict with Congressional research. We use a multilevel logistic model with nested and crossed random effects to estimate the influence of variables at five different levels. In particular, we investigate whether state legislators miss unimportant votes or important votes. Contrary to what Congressional studies have found, we find that state legislators avoid participating in close or major votes, favoring reelection concerns over policy influence. We also find that state-to-state variations in legislative professionalism - in particular, the length of the session - affect absenteeism, with shorter sessions leading to higher absenteeism.
---------------------
Clerks or Kings? Partisan Alignment and Delegation to the US Bureaucracy
Christine Kelleher Palus & Susan Webb Yackee
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, October 2016, Pages 693-708
Abstract:
Scholars often assert that the delegation of policy discretion to administrative agencies is driven, in part, by partisanship. In short, the "ally principle" dictates that elected officials delegate more policy discretion to agency officials when their partisanship aligns because such an alignment reduces uncertainty about future policy choices. In contrast, we draw on insights from social identity theory to theorize that partisan alignment may, in practice, decrease the overall perceived policy discretion by agency officials. We evaluate this hypothesis using data collected across three decades of state political elections and over 6,000 American state agency heads, finding consistent evidence against the ally principle. In fact, in keeping with our theorizing, we uncover slightly lower - not higher - levels of policy discretion are associated with partisan alignment. We conclude that partisanship may play a role in narrowing the perceived policy authority available to politically like-minded agency officials.
---------------------
Socialism for Red States in the Electric Utility Industry
Richard Schmalensee
MIT Working Paper, September 2016
Abstract:
TVA and the other federal electric utilities were created under Democratic administrations, and their service territories were initially bluer than average. These subsidized enterprises sell cheap power preferentially to non-investor-owned distributors, so such utilities are more prominent where the federal utilities are important sellers. The political map of the U.S. has changed dramatically since the federal utilities were created. The federal utilities and non-investor-owned distributors are now more important on average in red states than in blue ones. Interest has trumped ideology: Republican policy-makers strongly opposed to socialism in principle seem happy with the important role of government enterprises in the U.S. electric utility industry.
---------------------
The Institutional Determinants of Southern Secession
Mario Chacon & Jeff Jensen
NYU Working Paper, June 2016
Abstract:
We use the Southern secession movement of 1860-1861 to study how elites in democracy enact their preferred policies. Most states used specially convened conventions to determine whether or not to secede from the Union. We argue that although the delegates of these conventions were popularly elected, the electoral rules favored slaveholders. Using an original dataset of representation in each convention, we first demonstrate that slave-intensive districts were systematically overrepresented. Slaveholders were also spatially concentrated and could thereby obtain local pluralities in favor of secession more easily. As a result of these electoral biases, less than 10% of the electorate was sufficient to elect a majority of delegates in four of the six original Confederate states. We also show how delegates representing slave-intensive counties were more likely to support secession. These factors explain the disproportionate influence of slaveholders during the crisis and why secessionists strategically chose conventions over statewide referenda.
---------------------
Gridlock and Inefficient Policy Instruments
Michael David Austen-Smith et al.
Northwestern University Working Paper, July 2016
Abstract:
Policy makers often regulate the economy using inefficient rather than efficient policy instruments. For example, externalities are typically regulated by quotas or standards even if Pigou taxes could have raised revenues and led to a Pareto improvement. This paper recognizes that, in many political systems, there are multiple veto players and the current policy defines the status quo to be used in the future. Thus, even if a player benefits from the efficient policy instrument today, it is anticipated that this instrument will be particularly hard to repeal once implemented. Less interventionist players, therefore, may prefer use of a Pareto dominated instrument that is easier to repeal when appropriate. Within a dynamic political economy model that captures this intuition, we also show, inter alia, that both relatively more and less interventionist players may propose inefficient policy interventions in equilibrium, and that access to a Pareto dominated policy instrument can be welfare improving as it mitigates inefficiencies due to legislative gridlock.
---------------------
Conflict, democracy and voter choice: A public choice analysis of the Athenian ostracism
George Tridimas
Public Choice, October 2016, Pages 137-159
Abstract:
Ostracism, the removal of a political leader from ancient Athens for a period of ten years without any additional financial sanction or other punishment, was an important and rather unique institutional aspect of the direct democracy. The present study explains the adoption of ostracism as the utility maximizing choice of a self-interested constitutional writer-cum-political actor to resolve violent political conflict and illustrates that it acted as a type of negative referendum on politicians. Using notions from game theory and spatial decision modeling, the paper goes on to attribute the infrequent use of ostracism to its two-stage decision making process wherein the decisive voter of the first stage differed from the decisive voter of the second stage.
---------------------
Three Practical Tests for Gerrymandering: Application to Maryland and Wisconsin
Samuel Wang
Election Law Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Partisan gerrymandering arises when many single-district gerrymanders are combined to obtain an overall advantage. The Supreme Court has held that partisan gerrymandering is recognizable by its asymmetry: for a given distribution of popular votes, if the parties switch places in popular vote, the numbers of seats would change in an unequal fashion. However, the asymmetry standard is only a broad statement of principle, and no analytical method for assessing asymmetry has yet been held to be manageable. Recently I proposed (68 Stanford Law Review 1263) three statistical tests to reliably assess asymmetry in state-level districting schemes: (a) a discrepancy in winning vote margins between the two parties' seats; (b) undue reliable wins for the party in charge of redistricting, as measured by the mean-median difference in vote share, or by an unusually even distribution of votes across districts; and (c) unrepresentative distortion in the number of seats won based on expectations from nationwide district characteristics. These tests use district-level election outcomes, do not require the drawing of maps, and are accessible via nearly any desktop computer. Each test probes a facet of partisan asymmetry. The first two tests analyze intent using well-established, century-old statistical tests. Once intents are established, the effects of gerrymandering can be analyzed using the third test, which is calculated rapidly by computer simulation. The three tests show that two current cases, the Wisconsin State Assembly (Whitford v. Nichol) and the Maryland congressional delegation (Shapiro v. McManus), meet criteria for a partisan gerrymander. I propose that an intents-and-effects standard based on these tests is robust enough to mitigate the need to demonstrate predominant partisan intent. The three statistical standards offered here add to the judge's toolkit for rapidly and rigorously identifying the consequences of partisan redistricting.
---------------------
One, Two, Many - Insensitivity to Group Size in Games with Concentrated Benefits and Dispersed Costs
Heiner Schumacher et al.
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
We experimentally analyze distributional preferences when a decider chooses the provision of a good that benefits herself or a receiver, and creates costs for a group of payers. The treatment variation is the number of payers. We observe that subjects provide the good even if there are many payers so that the costs of provision exceed the benefits by far. This result holds regardless of whether the provision increases the decider's payoff or not. Intriguingly, it is not only selfish or maximin types who provide the good. Rather, we show that a substantial fraction of subjects are "insensitive to group size": they reveal to care about the payoff of all parties, but attach the same weight to small and large groups so that they ignore large provision costs that are dispersed among many payers. Our results have important consequences for the approval of policies with concentrated benefits and large, dispersed cost, as well as the analysis of ethical behavior, medical decision making, and charity donations.
---------------------
Core Values and Partisan Thinking about Devolution
Jennifer Wolak
Publius, Fall 2016, Pages 463-485
Abstract:
Why do people call for states' rights and the devolution of national authority? Are they driven by partisan motives, where they like devolution the most when the President is of the opposing party? Or are calls to shift the balance of federal power rooted in sincere support for decentralized political authority? Using survey data from 1987 to 2012, I explore how support for devolution varies across time and individuals. I find that people are not strictly partisan in how they think about devolution. While people are more likely to favor decentralization when the President is of the opposing party, they are no more likely to want devolution when their own party controls state government. Substantive considerations are also important, where those who support limited government increasingly favor the devolution of central authority as the size of the national government increases relative to the size of state and local government.
---------------------
Adam Cayton
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
While democratic theory suggests that representatives should be willing to adjust their issue positions to adapt to new circumstances, politicians face serious political risks from "flip flopping." How do members of Congress balance these risks? Using an original data set of district economic conditions and opinion from 2007 to 2010 and sets of repeated roll call votes, I leverage the exogenous shock of the Great Recession to explain position change on three major economic policies. I find that position change occurs in response to the constituency on final passage votes, but that partisan pressures exert greater influence, especially on procedural votes. This novel test of responsiveness has implications for the nature of policy representation and the mechanisms behind aggregate responsiveness.
---------------------
Electoral Institutions and Legislative Particularism
Jon Rogowski
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do electoral institutions affect legislative behavior? Though a large body of theoretical scholarship posits a negative relationship between multimember districting and the provision of particularistic goods, empirical scholarship has found little evidence in support of this expectation. Using data on the provision of US post offices from 1876 to 1896, a period during which many states elected congressional representatives from at-large districts, and a differences-in-differences approach, I find that counties represented by at-large representatives received approximately 8% fewer post offices. The results have important implications for studying how electoral institutions affect incentives for legislative behavior.
---------------------
Ratio Bias and Policy Preferences: How Equivalency Framing of Numbers Can Affect Attitudes
Rasmus Pedersen
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Numbers permeate modern political communication. While current scholarship on framing effects has focused on the persuasive effects of words and arguments, this article shows that framing of numbers can also substantially affect policy preferences. Such effects are caused by ratio bias, which is a general tendency to focus on numerators and pay insufficient attention to denominators in ratios. Using a population-based survey experiment, I demonstrate how differently framed but logically equivalent representations of the exact same numerical value can have large effects on citizens' preferences regarding salient political issues such as education and taxes. Furthermore, the effects of numerical framing are found across most groups of the population, largely regardless of their political predisposition and their general ability to understand and use numerical information. These findings have significant implications for our understanding of framing effects and the role played by numbers in public opinion formation.