The establishment
Representation, neighboring districts, and party loyalty in the U.S. Congress
Justin Kirkland & Lucas Williams
Public Choice, December 2015, Pages 263-284
Abstract:
Legislative scholars often assume that legislators are motivated by concerns over re-election. This assumption implies that legislators are forward-looking and are motivated by a concern over what their re-election constituency will look like during their next electoral cycle. In this research, we show how the forward-looking nature of legislators motivates members of the U.S. House of Representatives to represent both their home district and their neighboring districts in their choices regarding when to support their own party. Using survey responses to the 2006, 2008, and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Elections Study to construct measures of Congressional District ideology, empirical analysis is strongly supportive of our claims. Legislators' choices are strongly influenced both by the ideology of their home district and that of the districts that neighbor their home district. Thus, the electoral connection between citizens and representatives extends beyond a legislator's own constituents to include the constituents in neighboring districts.
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Catie Snow Bailard
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
The clear financial benefits accrued to owners of television stations as a result of the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (FEC) decision opens the door to an important question: Did the degree to which media corporations benefited from the changes in campaign finance law influence their news outlets' coverage of the Citizens United decision? In other words, is it possible to identify variation in how media outlets covered the Supreme Court decision that correlates with the degree to which those outlets' parent companies profited from the resulting increase in campaign spending? Answering this question will provide an important and much-too-uncommon opportunity to systematically test for bias in news coverage. Replicating the method used by Gilens and Hertzman (2000) in their own test of coverage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, this analysis reveals that newspapers belonging to media corporations that own more television stations covered the Citizens United ruling systematically differently - and more favorably - than those with few or no television stations. This has important implications for the degree to which the news produced by increasingly conglomerated and corporatized media companies may eschew neutral or balanced coverage in favor of news frames that promote their own financial interests.
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Inferences Made Easy: Partisan Voting in Congress, Voter Awareness, and Senator Approval
Logan Dancey & Geoffrey Sheagley
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates whether constituents are able to accurately infer their senators' votes when the senator frequently votes against the party line. We find that when senators repeatedly vote against the party line, constituents' ability to correctly identify their senators' votes drops precipitously while levels of misinformation rise. We then show that citizens represented by senators who tend to vote against the party line are also less able to connect their policy positions with their evaluations of those senators. These findings indicate that there is substantial variation across senators in the ability of their constituents to hold them accountable for their votes while in office. Constituents simply know less about the positions taken by moderate senators and have a harder time aligning their levels of policy agreement with a senator with their evaluation of that senator if she frequently votes against her party.
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Mohammad Reza Mirhosseini
Southern Economic Journal, January 2016, Pages 1004-1020
Abstract:
I consider a society that has to decide on the wage that it offers for an elected official. Potential candidates differ in their abilities, which determines their effectiveness in office and their opportunity cost. They consider the wage when deciding whether to enter as candidates, and if they do, how hard to campaign. The remuneration for the official that maximizes ordinary citizens' expected utility is a function of the proportion of competent voters who are better informed about the quality of the candidates and are not influenced by the campaign. I use the data on U.S. governor salaries over six decades to evaluate some implications of the model. Specifically, the proportion of the state's population with a bachelor's degree - a proxy for the proportion of competent voters - is negatively correlated with the governors' salaries when controlled for other factors.
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Senate Dynamics in the Shadow of Money
Matias Iaryczower, Gabriel Lopez-Moctezuma & Adam Meirowitz
Princeton Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
Incumbent politicians seeking reelection face an inherently dynamic problem: They observe the change in their poll standing and incoming contributions, and respond by adjusting their political stances and by spending money in political advertising. In this paper, we formulate a model that captures this problem and estimate the model using data for US senators. Our empirical strategy allows us to obtain an estimate of senators' policy preferences that discounts pandering. This approach contrasts with current methods to estimate legislators' ideal points, which assume that all votes are sincere expressions of preference. The difference is consequential: we find that while there are some truly extreme senators, the vast majority is actually relatively moderate, and appear extreme due to electoral pressures. This finding contrasts with the conventional wisdom on the polarization of elites in American politics.
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Constituents' Responses to Descriptive and Substantive Representation in Congress
Philip Edward Jones
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: This article examines whether the descriptive representation of race and ethnicity influences how constituents respond to the substantive representation of their policy preferences. Hypotheses derived from theories of descriptive representation suggest that voters may overestimate policy congruence, or downplay its importance, while evaluating politicians who "look like" them.
Methods: A unique sample of black, Hispanic, and white Americans was asked to evaluate a (fictitious) member of the U.S. Congress whose race/ethnicity and policy positions are randomly manipulated.
Results: Regardless of their actual policy positions, blacks perceived greater substantive representation from black politicians. Also holding policy congruence constant, whites approved of white politicians at distinctly higher rates. Education moderates this effect, such that less-educated whites respond more negatively to representation by nonwhite legislators.
Conclusions: Being represented by someone of the same race can diminish accountability for legislators' substantive records, an important cost of descriptive representation.
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The Dead Hand of the Past? Toward an Understanding of "Constitutional Veneration"
James Zink & Christopher Dawes
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Some observers argue that excessive veneration of the U.S. Constitution has blinded Americans to its flaws and made them reluctant to consider necessary reforms. In this paper, we test the assumptions that underlie these claims. We report the results of two survey experiments that examine the existence and effects of constitutional status quo bias at both the state and federal levels. Our findings support the notion that a proposed policy involving constitutional change imbues the constitutional status quo with normative value and, in turn, disposes individuals to resist the proposal. These results hold even at the state level. In addition to the institutional obstacles to constitutional amendment, therefore, we find evidence of another, psychological barrier to constitutional change that is based specifically in a sense of constitutional attachment.
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Daniel Butler, Christopher Karpowitz & Jeremy Pope
Political Science Research and Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article considers the hypothesis that the positive actions taken by members of Congress (MCs) influence citizens' evaluations of them, their party, and Congress as an institution. We begin with a look at the available cross-sectional survey data on contact with legislators and legislator and institutional approval. Their legislative responsiveness appears to have a small spillover effect on institutions. However, when we employ a unique panel design that controls for prior levels of opinion and avoids recall bias, we find no evidence of spillover effects. Overall, we find that constituents who received a response from their own MC evaluate that representative more positively than those who did not receive a response, but legislator responsiveness does not predict evaluations of the MC's political party or the Congress.
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Public Corruption in the United States: Implications for Local Firms
Nishant Dass, Vikram Nanda & Steven Chong Xiao
Review of Corporate Finance Studies, March 2016, Pages 102-138
Abstract:
We study the relation between state-level public corruption in the United States and firm-value and firms' disclosure policies. Consistent with our hypotheses, firms have significantly lower value (Tobin's q) and informational transparency in more corrupt areas. Local corruption has a less negative effect on industries that sell primarily to the government, suggesting a quid pro quo between these firms and public officials. Several tests address endogeneity concerns: for example, firms located in different states but close to state borders are affected by differences in state-level corruption, indicating legal jurisdiction matters despite similar local conditions.
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Matias Iaryczower & Gabriel Katz
Economics & Politics, March 2016, Pages 79-104
Abstract:
We study the conditions under which members of Congress incorporate policy-specific considerations in their decisions. To do this, we estimate a model that accounts for the influence of private information about legislation quality on voting patterns in the House and Senate. We find that minority party members are more likely to evaluate proposals on their merits than majority members, but institutional and electoral considerations significantly attenuate these partisan differences. In particular, seniority, electoral safety, and constituents' political knowledge have a balancing effect on partisan predispositions to rely on policy-relevant information, making minority (majority) members less (more) likely to vote informatively.
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Beyond Lobbying Expenditures: How Lobbying Breadth and Political Connectedness Affect Firm Outcomes
Jason Ridge, Amy Ingram & Aaron Hill
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Firms are increasingly emphasizing lobbying, yet the theoretical rationale explaining the firm-level implications of lobbying remains limited and the empirical evidence contradictory. In particular, extant research largely focuses on aggregate expenditures, suggesting that more lobbying nets firm benefits (typically measured as firm performance). We argue that focusing solely on aggregate expenditures largely ignores how expenditures are targeted and the connections of firms doing the targeting and, as such, that exploring such factors both will add to our understanding of the theoretical mechanisms underlying lobbying and help clarify contradictory results. Specifically, we argue that a lobbying strategy consists of the amount of agencies and legislation targeted (lobbying breadth) and firms' connections in political circles (political connectedness). Empirical results support our contentions that lobbying breadth and political connectedness affect the benefits firms receive from lobbying, which we operationalize using both government contracts and Tobin's Q. Our results support our theoretical arguments that more is not always better in the case of lobbying breadth, as the benefits firms accrue via dispersing lobbying across more entities reaches a point of diminishing returns. Further, political connectedness has both a direct effect and interacts with lobbying breadth in determining firm benefits from lobbying.
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On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs
David Robert Grimes
PLoS ONE, January 2016
Abstract:
Conspiratorial ideation is the tendency of individuals to believe that events and power relations are secretly manipulated by certain clandestine groups and organisations. Many of these ostensibly explanatory conjectures are non-falsifiable, lacking in evidence or demonstrably false, yet public acceptance remains high. Efforts to convince the general public of the validity of medical and scientific findings can be hampered by such narratives, which can create the impression of doubt or disagreement in areas where the science is well established. Conversely, historical examples of exposed conspiracies do exist and it may be difficult for people to differentiate between reasonable and dubious assertions. In this work, we establish a simple mathematical model for conspiracies involving multiple actors with time, which yields failure probability for any given conspiracy. Parameters for the model are estimated from literature examples of known scandals, and the factors influencing conspiracy success and failure are explored. The model is also used to estimate the likelihood of claims from some commonly-held conspiratorial beliefs; these are namely that the moon-landings were faked, climate-change is a hoax, vaccination is dangerous and that a cure for cancer is being suppressed by vested interests. Simulations of these claims predict that intrinsic failure would be imminent even with the most generous estimates for the secret-keeping ability of active participants - the results of this model suggest that large conspiracies (?1000 agents) quickly become untenable and prone to failure. The theory presented here might be useful in counteracting the potentially deleterious consequences of bogus and anti-science narratives, and examining the hypothetical conditions under which sustainable conspiracy might be possible.
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How Michigan Became a Right to Work State: The Role of Money and Politics
Michelle Kaminski
Labor Studies Journal, December 2015, Pages 362-378
Abstract:
The passage of Right to Work (RTW) legislation in Michigan was a surprise to many, given its relatively high unionization rate. Previous studies that examine state RTW status and the process of passing RTW legislation are not a good fit for the events in Michigan. Instead, single-party Republican control of state government and a wealthy donor who prioritized RTW combined to introduce legislation, pass it, and sign it into law in a one-week period. Contextual factors helped create an opportunity for this campaign to succeed. The Michigan experience raises questions about long-term strategies for labor in similar environments in the era of big-money donors.