Branching out
It is not just scale that matters: Political trust in Utah
Peggy Petrzelka, Sandra Marquart-Pyatt & Stephanie Malin
Social Science Journal, September 2013, Pages 338-348
Abstract:
While the traditional assumption is residents have more confidence in governments that are closest to them, empirical studies supporting this claim remain limited. In this study, we test the claim that 'small is beautiful' by comparing citizen reactions to similar types of decisions affecting Utah residents made by political leaders at different levels of governance. Our primary goal is to test the claim that trust is higher for local governments. Our secondary goal is to examine potential determinants of trust and whether they vary across levels of governance. The central finding from this study is that, despite claims to the contrary, citizens are not necessarily more trusting of government closer to the people and higher levels of government can engender as much trust as more local levels of government. Our findings also emphasize that regardless of the level of governance considered, interrelations exist between residents' views of procedural justice and trust in these officials.
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Women, Earmarks, and Substantive Representation
Corina Schulze
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Spring 2013, Pages 138-158
Abstract:
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate women's substantive impact on government by examining the earmark requests of the US House representatives. Women representatives are hypothesized to make more funding requests for women's issues than male representatives. Through use of OLS statistical analysis, women's issue earmark requests, as reported by the 111th congressional House members for the fiscal year 2010, serve as the dependent variable. Gender is a significant predictor of earmark requests even when controlling for the ideology, partisanship, and racial minority status of a House member. This finding is evidence of women's substantive representation in the form of earmark requests.
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Luke Keele, Neil Malhotra & Colin McCubbins
Legislative Studies Quarterly, August 2013, Pages 291-326
Abstract:
Scholars of state politics are often interested in the causal effects of legislative institutions on policy outcomes. For example, during the 1990s a number of states adopted term limits for state legislators. Advocates of term limits argued that this institutional reform would alter state policy in a number of ways, including limiting state expenditures. We highlight a number of research design issues that complicate attempts to estimate the effect of institutions on state outcomes by addressing the question of term limits and spending. In particular, we focus on (1) treatment effect heterogeneity and (2) the suitability of nonterm-limit states as good counterfactuals for term-limit states. We compare two different identification strategies to deal with these issues: differences-in-differences (DID) estimation and conditioning on prior outcomes with an emphasis on synthetic case control. Using more rigorous methods of causal inference, we find little evidence that term limits affect state spending. Our analysis and results are informative for researchers seeking to assess the causal effects of state-level institutions.
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Salaries and Work Effort: An Analysis of the European Union Parliamentarians
Naci Mocan & Duha Altindag
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Before July 2009, salaries of the Members of the European parliament (MEPs) were paid by their home country, and there were substantial salary differences between MEPs representing different countries. Starting in July 2009, salaries are pegged to 38.5% of a European Court judge's salary, paid by the EU. This created an exogenous change in salaries, the magnitude and direction of which varied substantially. Using information on each MEP between 2004 and 2011, we show that an increase in salaries decreases attendance to plenary sessions and reduces the number of questions asked, but it has no impact on other job-related activities.
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Political Geography and Corporate Political Strategy
Murad Antia, Incheol Kim & Christos Pantzalis
Journal of Corporate Finance, September 2013, Pages 361-374
Abstract:
We examine the relationship between political geography and corporate political strategy by considering lobbying expenditures. We find that firms increase their lobbying intensity when local politicians cannot provide a direct link to the governing elite, i.e. when firm location on the political map shifts to an area that is not closely aligned with the president. Our results indicate that firm lobbying is a means for exerting influence on political power and is primarily geared toward building valuable political capital in order to exploit short-term opportunities. Lobbying expenditures are a matter of expediency for politically active firms that tend to spend less on lobbying when there is an alignment of power and more when there is misalignment of power. We also find that more sophisticated, better informed institutional investors recognize and/or encourage corporate political strategies that involve adjusting lobbying efforts in response to changes in political geography.
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Keeping score on Congress: Explaining variations in interest group ratings of US senators
Daniel Chand & William Schreckhise
Business and Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We adopt a novel use for an old type of data - interest group scorecards - to explore the impact business organizations have on the political process. By aggregating congressional scorecards, we can develop a sense of how satisfied groups are with the US Congress as a whole. To do this, we generate interest group-level ratings of the US Senate derived from individual-level ratings of each senator. We find business groups tend to give higher aggregated scores relative to other types of groups, suggesting business organizations more often get what they want form Congress, which in turn, illuminates the importance of these groups in the political process. We also find that well-funded "niche" organizations tend to show higher levels of satisfaction with senators than larger groups with broad public missions.
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Legislatures, Courts, and Statutory Control of the Bureaucracy across the U.S. States
Robert McGrath
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do state legislatures use statutory language to control policy implementation by state agencies? In this article, I consider - in a specific policy area and time period - the extent to which this decision is affected by legislative anticipation of the likely actions of state courts. Previous literature has argued that the legislative use of statutory language to control bureaucrats varies with the availability of nonstatutory methods of control, but it does not explicitly consider the potential role of courts. My expectations are derived from a simple formal model of executive-legislative relations and are supported when I test them using data on the number of words added to a state's Medicaid laws from 1995 to 1996. In particular, I find that state legislatures write longer, more constraining, statutes when the likelihood that state courts intervene on their behalf is neither very high nor very low.
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Civil Service Rules and Policy Choices: Evidence From US State Governments
Gergely Ujhelyi
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies the policy impact of civil service regulations, exploiting reforms undertaken by US state governments throughout the 20th century. These reforms replaced political patronage with a civil service recruited based on merit and protected from politics. I find that state politicians respond to these changes by spending relatively less through the reformed state-level bureaucracies. Instead, they allocate more funds to lower level governments. The reallocation of expenditures leads to reduced long-term investment by state governments.
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Crises, Commissions, and Reform: The Impact of Blue-Ribbon Panels
Jordan Tama
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars have found that, even when a crisis creates demand for reform, a focal point is often necessary to overcome obstacles to change. I argue that, with surprising frequency, U.S. blue-ribbon commissions use their bipartisan political credibility to provide this focal point and thereby catalyze postcrisis government reform. Since commission-inspired reform is often designed to integrate or centralize policy making, I further explain that commissions can be useful presidential tools for asserting power over agencies. I test my argument on an original data set that includes new measures of commission influence.
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Elections and reform: The adoption of civil service systems in the U.S. states
Michael Ting et al.
Journal of Theoretical Politics, July 2013, Pages 363-387
Abstract:
Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to "politicize" the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to voters in a way that will increase her electoral prospects, or she can "insulate" the bureaucracy, which prevents all future winners from using the bureaucracy for electoral advantage. Our main result is that politicization persists when incumbents expect to win, and insulation takes place when they expect to lose. We test this hypothesis using data from the adoption of civil service reforms across the U.S. states. The predictions of the model are consistent with the empirical patterns leading up to the implementation of the general civil service reforms. Using both state and city level data, we observe an increase in partisan competition prior to the reforms.
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Determinants of post-congressional lobbying employment
Jin-Hyuk Kim
Economics of Governance, May 2013, Pages 107-126
Abstract:
This paper studies the determinants of lobbying-employment decisions of former members of the U.S. House of Representatives for the 105th-108th Congresses. The main empirical findings indicate that there are two groups more likely to become lobbyists: members not re-elected who had more conservative voting records and held important committee assignments and longer-serving members who voluntarily retired and voted less conservatively in their last term compared to their previous terms in office. A decomposition analysis confirms that the revolving doors for the two groups of legislators differ because of differences in employer response rather than in legislator characteristics.
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Congressional Oversight Hearings and Policy Control
Robert McGrath
Legislative Studies Quarterly, August 2013, Pages 349-376
Abstract:
Oversight hearings should be an important congressional tool for controlling recalcitrant agencies, but it is not clear that this should always be equally true. The logic of principal-agent models of legislative policy control implies that oversight might sometimes, but not always, be superfluous to said control. Here, I reintroduce oversight hearings to theories of policy control and argue that congressional committees conduct oversight hearings primarily as a response to the extent to which agencies have different policy preferences from them and as a function of their capacity to conduct hearings cheaply. I test these hypotheses using committee hearings data (Policy Agendas Project) from both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate from 1947 to 2006 and provide support for theoretical arguments about the institutional nature of legislative policymaking strategies and ultimately help clarify the role of oversight in legislative-executive relations.
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Michelle Pautz & Megan Warnement
PS: Political Science & Politics, July 2013, Pages 569-579
Abstract:
Movies continue to be the most accessible art form to Americans and that reach allows films to have a tremendous effect on moviegoers. With more than a billion movie tickets sold annually in the United States, the ability of movies to influence the perceptions of moviegoers is pronounced. Frequently, the government is part of those depictions. Although film is routinely studied in a host of disciplines, a focus on the portrayal of government generally and government officials more specifically, remains elusive. Instead of using a case-study approach, we examine recent, popular films to investigate how government is portrayed generally and how individual governmental characters are depicted. For our sample, we use the top-10 box office grossing films from 2000 to 2009 to assess how government is depicted in the films most likely seen by the majority of movie-watching Americans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that films generally have a mixed view of government with more negative depictions than positive. However, in examining bureaucrats, police officers, soldiers, and politicians, we found a much more positive depiction of these individual government characters. Americans may view government negatively, but in film they see positive depictions of individual civil servants.
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Stephen Farnsworth & Robert Lichter
Politics & Policy, June 2013, Pages 447-463
Abstract:
Content analysis of front page New York Times stories during the first and second years of the Barack Obama presidency revealed news coverage that was far more positive in tone than the norm for recent U.S. presidents, particularly with respect to foreign policy coverage. While coverage of Obama was somewhat less positive during 2010 when compared to 2009, the Obama findings overall reveal a much longer honeymoon than seen in the past. Coverage of specific problematic policy areas, like offshore drilling issues in the wake of the BP oil spill, was particularly negative. Coverage of arms control matters was very positive in tone in 2010 for Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
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Lying aversion, lobbying, and context in a strategic communication experiment
William Minozzi & Jonathan Woon
Journal of Theoretical Politics, July 2013, Pages 309-337
Abstract:
Almost all institutions within modern democracies depend on a mix of communication and competition. However, most formal theory and experimental evidence ignores one of these two features. We present a formal theory of communicative competition in which senders vary in their aversion to lying, and test hypotheses from this theory using a strategic communication experiment. To influence lying aversion, we compare a Context Condition, in which pre-play instructions are cast in political language, with a Baseline Condition, in which all language is abstract. We find that in early rounds of play, subjects in the Context Condition exaggerated more as a function of their biases than those in the Baseline Condition when we control for the past history of play. However, by the last round of play, subjects in both conditions converged on persistent exaggeration. This finding indicates that competition crowds out lying aversion in settings of strategic communication.
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The role of political trust in conditioning perceptions of corruption
Andrew Wroe, Nicholas Allen & Sarah Birch
European Political Science Review, July 2013, Pages 175-195
Abstract:
Political trust and corruption have both elicited considerable academic and popular commentary in recent years. Much attention has been focused on the extent to which corruption has contributed to citizens' increasing distrust of their politicians. But little attention has been paid to the possibility that distrust may condition responses to alleged corruption, and no work has hitherto demonstrated the veracity of this relationship in a mature democracy. Drawing on data from the United Kingdom, this paper finds that less trusting individuals are consistently more censorious of politicians' misbehaviour and more likely to perceive the presence of corruption than are their more trusting peers. The paper further demonstrates that people who are less trusting become relatively more critical (compared with the more trusting) as the generally perceived corruptness of a certain scenario declines. It also demonstrates how trust increases in importance as a predictor of ethical judgements when behaviour is generally reckoned to be less corrupt. Further analysis suggests that this effect is partly connected to uncertainty. Less obviously corrupt acts are associated with higher levels of uncertainty, which appears to open up a space for trust to play an even more significant role in shaping individual's judgements of politicians' behaviour.
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Moving in, managing up: Executive job formation and political behavior
Manuel Teodoro
Journal of Public Policy, August 2013, Pages 137-164
Abstract:
Public agency executive jobs are temporary matches of individual bureaucrats with government employers. Together, the buyers and sellers of executive labour form jobs in ways that define critical links in the policy process: the relationships between agency administrators and their elected officials. This article argues that when the executive is hired from outside, the job typically carries a mandate for significantly greater engagement with elected officials than when the executive is promoted from within an agency. Analysis of three very different types of agencies demonstrates that individuals who were hired from outside interact with their elected officials more frequently than do those who were promoted from within. These results shed new light on bureaucratic executives' roles in the policy process, their relationships with the governments that they serve, and the theoretical significance of bureaucratic jobs as units of analysis in public policy studies.