Legislating Representation
Adam Chamberlain
Politics & Policy, February 2010, Pages 97-116
Abstract:
The 2007/2008 Republican presidential primary run for Ron Paul was a relatively unique candidacy, as he was a former third-party presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1988. In this article, I argue that his recent run as a Republican needs to be studied as a third-party movement within a major party. To do so, I conduct a state-level analysis of support for Paul using a dependent variable measuring the number of online Paul donors. The results indicate that the strongest explanation for Paul support is a state's vote for Paul in 1988. This finding shows that a third-party campaign can help a politician's national-level career rather than serving merely as an outlet for popular discontent. It also shows that candidate-centered support can carry over into a major-party campaign, even if almost 20 years has elapsed and a candidate's third-party vote percentage was quite low.
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A Man for all Seasons: Partisan Constraints on U.S. Senate Majority Leaders
Andrea Hatcher
Party Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, I examine the roll-call voting behaviour of U.S. Senate Majority Leaders, finding that Leaders generally locate around the ideological mean and median of their party at selection and at the beginning of their tenure but move toward the partisan extreme as their leadership progresses. Statistical analysis links this movement to size of majority; that is, as their partisan majority increases, their roll-call voting becomes more extreme. These findings, then, contribute a new interpretation of the existing literature's 'middleman' theory of congressional party leadership.
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Wendy Tam Cho & James Fowler
Journal of Politics, January 2010, Pages 124-135
Abstract:
We examine the social network structure of Congress from 1973 to 2004. We treat two Members of Congress as directly linked if they have cosponsored at least one bill together. We then construct explicit networks for each year using data from all forms of legislation, including resolutions, public and private bills, and amendments. We show that Congress exemplifies the characteristics of a "small world" network and that the varying small-world properties during this time period are related to the number of important bills passed.
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David Fontana
Yale Law Journal, December 2009, Pages 548-623
Abstract:
In the past generation, in countries in all parts of the world, using all different forms of constitutional government, a new form of separation of powers has emerged in greater numbers, what this Article calls "government in opposition." After democratic elections are held, power to govern is granted to the winners of those elections-but substantial power to govern is also granted to the losers of those elections as well. This Article first discusses how this emerging regime of separation of powers differs from other major forms of separation of powers, and in doing so introduces a new way of understanding the major systems of separated power that the world's constitutional democracies have created. After providing some examples and illustrations of how this new, government in opposition system of separated powers operates - and why it has proven to be so consequential in so many countries - this Article discusses how government in opposition rules have much to offer constitutional designers around the world. In fragile democracies and stable democracies alike, government in opposition rules can better constrain power and stabilize the core elements of constitutional democracy, better prepare all parties to govern effectively, more fairly involve all interests in the process of governing-and can do all of this at minimal cost. To illustrate this point, this Article closes with a discussion of how government in opposition rules might work in the United States, and how they might remedy some of the current political and constitutional problems that we face.
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Broad Bills or Particularistic Policy? Historical Patterns in American State Legislatures
Gerald Gamm & Thad Kousser
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
When do lawmakers craft broad policies, and when do they focus on narrow legislation tailored to a local interest? We investigate this question by exploring historical variation in the types of bills produced by American state legislatures. Drawing on a new database of 165,000 bills-covering sessions over 120 years in thirteen different states-we demonstrate the surprising prominence of particularistic bills affecting a specific legislator's district. We then develop and test a theory linking the goals of legislators to their propensity to introduce district bills rather than broad legislation. We find that, consistent with our predictions, politicians are more likely to craft policies targeted to a particular local interest when a legislature is dominated by one party or when it pays its members relatively high salaries. These findings provide empirical support for Key's (1949) thesis that one-party politics descends into factionalism and undermines the making of broad public policy.
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The Effect of Initiatives on Local Government Spending
David Primo
Journal of Theoretical Politics, January 2010, Pages 6-25
Abstract:
Tools of direct democracy, such as the citizen initiative, are available at both the state and local levels in the United States, yet models of the process typically do not consider these institutions in tandem. In this article, I develop a model of local fiscal policy that incorporates the impact of a statewide as well as a local initiative process. I posit that the statewide initiative process leads to lower levels of state spending, additional spending mandates on the local level, and reduced deadweight costs of taxation, with these three factors leading to an increase in local spending. I then show that the ability of interest groups to secure particularistic spending through the local initiative has a similarly pro-spending impact. Subsequently, I explore data from the year 2000 in over 600 cities with a population greater than 25,000 and find that the spending-enhancing effects of the local initiative are strong when signature requirements are low, leading to a 12-14 percent increase in spending compared to local governments without such an initiative process in place.
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Political Competition, Policy and Growth: Theory and Evidence from the United States
Timothy Besley, Torsten Persson & Daniel Sturm
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper develops a simple model to analyze how a lack of political competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth. We test the predictions of the model on panel data for the US states. In these data, we find robust evidence that lack of political competition in a state is associated with anti-growth policies: higher taxes, lower capital spending and a reduced likelihood of using right-to-work laws. We also document a strong link between low political competition and low income growth.
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Redistricting and Polarization: Who Draws the Lines in California?
Corbett Grainger
Journal of Law & Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the U.S., the process of drawing election districts is left to individual states, and critics of legislative redistricting often argue for independent panels to take control of the process. A common claim is that legislative redistricting has been a major contributor to polarization in the American political system; however, there have been few tests of this hypothesis. Previous attempts to test for a relationship between redistricting and polarization have generally relied on cross-state comparisons in redistricting methods and examining behavior in the House of Representatives. In this paper, I exploit the fact that the redistricting process in California has alternated between legislatively-drawn and panel-drawn districts since the mid-1960s. Using data at the state legislature level, I find evidence that legislatively-drawn districts have be
en, on average, less competitive than panel-drawn districts. Moreover, as districts become "safer" legislators tend to take more extreme voting positions. Finally, I find evidence that legislative redistricting (compared with panel-drawn redistricting) is associated with increased polarization.
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Partisan gerrymandering and population instability: Completing the redistricting puzzle
Antoine Yoshinaka & Chad Murphy
Political Geography, November 2009, Pages 451-462
Abstract:
How can partisan mapmakers enact a partisan gerrymander in the presence of risk-averse co-partisan incumbents who wish to keep most of their constituencies intact? Until now the literature on redistricting has focused on how redistricting affects the geography of partisan support, that is, the underlying partisan balance of electoral districts. We posit that this emphasis on partisanship misses half of the story. Partisan mapmakers have another tool at their disposal: the fostering of population instability that may not affect a district's partisan balance. By examining all redistricting plans enacted in 2001-2002, as well as three case studies, we show that partisan mapmakers strategically foster population instability, which poses problems for incumbents in a way that may not be apparent when looking exclusively at the effects of redistricting on partisanship. Our results show how partisan mapmakers simultaneously achieve two goals: enacting an "optimal gerrymander," which strengthens some opposition-party incumbents, while inducing instability and reducing the personal vote of those same incumbents. We also show that so-called "neutral" redistricting plans are successful in disregarding incumbency. Finally, our results suggest another mechanism that explains why the 2002 congressional elections in the U.S. produced little competition.
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Bad Apples: Political Paralysis and the Quality of Politicians
Gabriel Leon
London School of Economics Working Paper, August 2009
Abstract:
Why do elected officials often suffer from political paralysis and fail to implement the best policies available? This paper considers a new yet intuitive explanation that focuses on the quality of the politicians competing to replace the incumbent. The key insight is that a 'good' incumbent with preferences identical to those of a representative voter will want to keep corrupt politicians out of office; she may do so by distorting her policy choices to signal her type and win re-election. The value of signalling and staying in office increases with the fraction of corrupt types in the population of politicians. Electing good types may therefore not be enough to ensure that the best policies are implemented, especially when corrupt politicians are common. This provides a new explanation for why political failure is particularly severe in corrupt democracies.
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Cecilia Testa
European Economic Review, February 2010, Pages 181-198
Abstract:
This paper studies the impact of bicameralism on the level of corruption of elected officials. The relationship between parliamentary organization and corruption is analyzed in a two-period game between legislators, citizens and a lobby group, which delivers several predictions that we empirically investigate using a panel of 35 democracies during the period 1996-2004. Assuming that legislators choose a multidimensional policy on which citizens and a lobby group have opposing interests, we show that bicameralism improves the accountability of legislators to the electorate when the same party controls the two chambers and party polarization is high, while the opposite holds if the two chambers are controlled by different parties. These predictions find strong support in our empirical analysis.
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Self-Organizing Legislatures: Policymaking under Procedural Endogeneity
Daniel Diermeiery & Razvan Vlaicuz
Northwestern University Working Paper, October 2009
Abstract:
A puzzling feature of legislative organization is the continuous support by a majority of seemingly non-majoritarian procedures, such as non-median committees and limits on amendments. This paper studies a legislature's choice of procedures. We focus on (a) why legislatures institute restrictions on the procedural rights of its members and (b) how these restrictions survive challenges. In our model the legislature is initially procedurally neutral. We find that when a risk-averse legislative majority allocates procedural rights it does so with the specific goal of improving procedural efficiency i.e. reduce the policy uncertainty that can result from prolonged floor bargaining. Interestingly, policy outcomes under equilibrium procedures can be biased away from median voter theorem predictions.
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Sincere Versus Sophisticated Voting in Congress: Theory and Evidence
Tim Groseclose & Jeffrey Milyo
Journal of Politics, January 2010, Pages 60-73
Abstract:
An asymmetry exists in the empirical literature on sophisticated voting in Congress. All studies that find supporting evidence of sophisticated voting have been only piecemeal-that is, they examine only one or a few roll calls. In contrast, the studies that systematically study many roll calls conclude that sophisticated voting is, at best, very rare. We are aware of three such systematic studies-those by Poole and Rosenthal (1997), Wilkerson (1999), and Ladha (1994). While Ladha's study has gone relatively unnoticed, we reexamine his results and explain why they may be the most important of all empirical work on sophisticated voting. In addition, we introduce a theoretical model, and we show how it, along with some subtle aspects of the rules for voting in the House and Senate, provides a rational-choice explanation for the lack of sophisticated voting in Congress.