Officialdom
Gridlock: Ethnic Diversity in Government and the Provision of Public Goods
Brian Beach & Daniel Jones
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does ethnic diversity in government impact public good provision? We construct a novel dataset linking the ethnicity of California city council candidates to election outcomes and expenditure decisions. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we find that increased diversity on the council leads to less spending on public goods. This is especially true in cities with high segregation and economic inequality. Those serving on councils that experience an increase in diversity also receive fewer votes when they run for reelection. These results point towards disagreement within the council generating lower spending.
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Representing the Preferences of Donors, Partisans, and Voters in the US Senate
Michael Barber
Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 2016, Pages 225-249
Abstract:
Who do legislators best represent? This paper addresses this question by investigating the degree of ideological congruence between senators and constituents on a unified scale. Specifically, I measure congruence between legislators and four constituent subsets - donors, co-partisans, supporters, and registered voters. To estimate the preferences of these groups, I use a large survey of voters and an original survey of campaign contributors that samples both in- and out-of-state contributors in the 2012 election cycle. I find that senators' preferences reflect the preferences of the average donor better than any other group. Senators from both parties are slightly more ideologically extreme than the average co-partisan in their state and those who voted for them in 2012. Finally, senators' preferences diverge dramatically from the preference of the average voter in their state. The degree of divergence is nearly as large as if voters were randomly assigned to a senator. These results show that in the case of the Senate, there is a dearth of congruence between constituents and senators - unless these constituents are those who write checks and attend fund-raisers.
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Extremity in Congress: Communications versus Votes
Lindsey Cormack
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
I propose a theory of legislator-to-constituent communication that describes a relationship between the types of votes a legislator reveals and the partisan composition of her constituency. To test this theory, I use an original data set of 40,000 official communications containing 30,000 vote revelations from the 111th Congress. I find evidence substantiating this theory; the extent to which a legislator endeavors to appear more ideologically extreme in communications varies systematically with the relative amounts of different types of voters in her district. This result is contrasted with an analysis of voting extremism where I find that the ideological preferences of donors better explain voting patterns.
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Leadership Power in Congress, 1890-2014: Evidence from PAC Contributions and Newspaper Coverage
Pamela Ban, Daniel Moskowitz & James Snyder
Harvard Working Paper, April 2016
Abstract:
For decades, scholars have studied the relative power of parties and committees in the U.S. Congress. An influential theory, Conditional Party Government (CPG), hypothesizes that as intra-party preferences converge and inter-party preferences diverge, rank-and-file members and committees transfer power to party leaders. Most previous tests of CPG and other theories of party power rely on roll call votes to measure both the distribution of preferences within the chamber and the relative power of party leaders. We propose an alternative that assesses shifts of power within Congress by using PAC contributions and newspaper coverage. Since PACs are sophisticated donors who target their contributions to gain access and influence in Congress, following the money allows us to construct a measure of relative power. During the period 1978-2014, we find that party leaders receive an increasing share of the donations over time at the expense of committee leaders and rank-and-file. The share of PAC donations to party leaders closely tracks standard measures of CPG. Another measure of power, based on newspaper coverage, produces similar patterns for an even longer period, from 1890-2014. Overall, our results provide strong support for the CPG theory.
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Stuart Kasdin & Federica Iorio
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
When programs are grants to states, federal funds will be used to meet both the national objectives and the local priorities of the state or local government recipients. This article examines the decision to design new federal programs as either a grant to states or as administered by federal agencies. We predict that Congress will choose either the states or the federal bureaucracy based on which agent is more likely to manage the program consistent with the preferences of the Congressional majority. We examine the political and economic conditions present in the year before Congress created a program. We find that Congress's perception of a government agency's partisan orientation matters: A perceived divergence in partisan orientation between the Congress and federal agency increases the likelihood of a grant design. In addition, we see evidence that a grant design is preferred when the president is not a co-partisan of Congress.
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Bypassing Congressional Committees: Parties, Panel Rosters, and Deliberative Processes
William Bendix
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although scholars have examined committee rosters extensively, no study has considered the relationship between the ideological composition of panels and their participation in bill drafting. I thus ask: Which committees are frequently excluded from legislative deliberations? Does the composition of committees affect the degree to which they contribute to bill development? Using DW-NOMINATE data, I calculate ideological scores for congressional panels between 1989 and 2010 to see whether certain committees are routinely bypassed. I find that moderate panels, polarized panels, and panels with moderate chairs are often excluded, while extreme committees in the majority direction tend to retain bill-writing duties.
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Corporate lobbying, CEO political ideology and firm performance
Omer Unsal, Kabir Hassan & Duygu Zirek
Journal of Corporate Finance, June 2016, Pages 126-149
Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate the influence of CEO political orientation on corporate lobbying efforts. Specifically, we study whether CEO political ideology, in terms of manager-level campaign donations, determines the choice and amount of firm lobbying involvement and the impact of lobbying on firm value. We find a generous engagement in lobbying efforts by firms with Republican leaning-managers, which lobby a larger number of bills and have higher lobbying expenditures. However, the cost of lobbying offsets the benefit for firms with Republican CEOs. We report higher agency costs of free cash flow, lower Tobin's Q, and smaller increases in buy and hold abnormal returns following lobbying activities for firms with Republican managers, compared to Democratic and Apolitical rivals. Overall, our results suggest that the effects of lobbying on firm performance vary across firms with different managerial political orientations.
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Lobbying, political connectedness and financial performance in the air transportation industry
Richard Brown
Journal of Air Transport Management, July 2016, Pages 61-69
Abstract:
While there is a deeper understanding of the outcomes to firm-level political activities in general, there are very few papers that address this relationship in transportation studies. In this paper, I empirically test firm-level rent-seeking through corporate political activity (CPA) in the air transportation industry. I find, in a sample of 46 firms over 15 years, that lobbying intensity and political connections are positively related to subsequent profitability in both fixed-effects and random-effects estimations. I also test the interaction of these two main effects and find mixed support for the moderating effect of political connections on lobbying intensity. This paper contributes to the theoretical literature on political rent-seeking and the topical literature on political action in air transportation.
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US political corruption and firm financial policies
Jared Smith
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using US Department of Justice data on local political corruption, I find that firms in more corrupt areas hold less cash and have greater leverage than firms in less corrupt areas. The results are robust to including a range of controls and to using an instrumental variable approach, two alternative survey measures of corruption, and propensity score matching. Further, the association between corruption and leverage is largest among firms that operate primarily around their headquarters. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that firms manage liquidity downward and debt obligations upward to limit expropriation by corrupt local officials.
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When Voters Pull the Trigger: Can Direct Democracy Restrain Legislative Excesses?
Vladimir Kogan
Legislative Studies Quarterly, May 2016, Pages 297-325
Abstract:
Direct democracy is sometimes described as a "gun behind the door," but how do legislators react when voters pull the trigger? Leveraging the high-profile referendum defeat of a controversial law passed by the Ohio legislature, I examine how legislators respond to voter disaffection. Using interest groups to "bridge" votes before and after the election, I show that the measure's defeat induced moderation on the part of the Republican legislative majority, while leaving the behavior of opposition Democrats largely unchanged. The results suggest that direct democracy has the potential to restrain legislative excesses and alleviate polarization in state legislatures.
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Slow-Rolling, Fast-Tracking, and the Pace of Bureaucratic Decisions in Rulemaking
Rachel Augustine Potter
University of Virginia Working Paper, April 2016
Abstract:
The slow pace of administrative action is arguably a defining characteristic of modern bureaucracy. The reasons proffered for delay are numerous, often centering on procedural hurdles or bureaucrats' ineptitude. I offer a different perspective on delay in one important bureaucratic venue: the federal rulemaking process. I argue that agencies can speed up (fast-track) or slow down (slow-roll) the rulemaking process in order to undermine political oversight provided by Congress, the president, and the courts. That is, when the political climate is favorable agencies rush to lock in a rule, but when it is less favorable they "wait out" the tenure of current political overseers. I find empirical support for this proposition using an event history analysis of more than 9,600 agency rules from 147 agencies. The results support the interpretation that agencies strategically delay, and that delay is not simply evidence of increased bureaucratic effort.
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Getting Short-Changed? The Impact of Outside Money on District Representation
Anne Baker
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: As incumbent House members increasingly recruit campaign contributions from individuals who reside outside of their districts, this raises the question of whether a dependency on outside money affects members' responsiveness and ideological proximity to district constituents.
Method: Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies of 2006, 2008, and 2010 as well as individual contribution data corresponding to those years from the U.S. Federal Election Commission, I examine this relationship using responsiveness and proximity models of representation.
Results: I find a dependency on outside contributions decreases members' responsiveness to their districts and increases the members' ideological extremity. Moreover, within-district contributions only minimally improve ideological alignment between the member and the district.
Conclusion: Donors receive additional representation from members of the House at the expense of constituents.
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Up the Hill and Across the Aisle: Discovering the Path to Bipartisanship in Washington
Matthew Beckmann
Legislative Studies Quarterly, May 2016, Pages 269-295
Abstract:
Appeals for bipartisan diplomacy pepper popular commentary, often with wistful references to a bygone era where leaders (like Lyndon Johnson and Everett Dirksen) set aside partisan point scoring to serve the public interest. Here we reconsider the elements driving bipartisan contact in Washington. Stepping back from popular narratives, we situate the president-opposing leader relationship within a more general class of institutional bargaining, leading to the prediction that bipartisan negotiation emerges from a particular combination of incentives and institutions - namely, when the president is strong politically (rendering opposing leaders willing to compromise) but opposing party leaders are strong institutionally (rendering them crucial to passing the deal). Utilizing Presidential Daily Diaries, hypotheses are tested against original data on presidents' personal interactions with opposing Senate leaders across 40 years, 20 Congresses, and eight presidencies (1961-2000).
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Congressional Assertions of the Spending Power: Institutional Conflict and Regulatory Authority
Miranda Yaver
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, May 2016, Pages 272-305
Abstract:
This study seeks to answer a crucial and unexplored question about American regulatory law and policy: How do majority coalitions in Congress use the spending power to circumvent intra-branch conflict and judicial constraints against regulating by finding alternate avenues to regulate states and private actors? This study provides the first large-scale empirical evidence of congressional use of the spending power to assert implementation authority in the face of constraints against more direct legislating. It is through this process of conditioning funds upon regulatory compliance that Congress works toward ideal policy outcomes without inciting institutional conflict with the other branches or from the opposing party. I base my conditional spending analysis on data on statutory specificity and congressional delegation from the 80th to the 110th Congresses provided by Farhang, and include additional measures of institutional conflict. The above argument is supported by the empirical analysis.
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Legislative Error and the "Politics of Haste"
Jonathan Lewallen
PS: Political Science & Politics, April 2016, Pages 239-243
Abstract:
Legislative error is an important and understudied element of the policy process. Even simple clerical mistakes - if unnoticed before enactment - can lead to ambiguity about a law's meaning, spark political battles concerning rulemaking and implementation, and involve the courts in statutory interpretation. Understanding how and why error occurs can help us better understand how political institutions are intertwined in the design, enactment, and implementation of public policy. This article analyzes the sources of legislative error using data on corrected legislation in the US Senate from 1981 to 2012. The author finds that Senate drafting error is related to unified control of Congress and new majority parties, inexperienced committee members, and committee workload. In addition to bringing in different perspectives and preferences, elections can affect a legislature's ability to draft clear, error-free statutes.
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Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech
Adam Ramey, Jonathan Klingler & Gary Hollibaugh
Political Science Research and Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
We apply recent advances in machine learning to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996 to 2014. We also demonstrate the superiority of text-based measurement over survey-based measurement by showing that personality traits are correlated with survey response rates for members of Congress. Finally, we provide one empirical application showcasing the importance of personality on congressional behavior.
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Informal Consequences of Budget Institutions in the US Congress
Andrew Clarke & Kenneth Lowande
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Though considerable research focuses on formal institutions in Congress, scholars have long acknowledged that much of what guides legislative behavior is unwritten. To advance this area, we leverage a tool that allows appropriators to redirect billions of dollars from mandatory programs to discretionary projects. Changes in mandatory program spending - known as "CHIMPs" - show that existing institutions are often maintained by the strategic action of legislators. In the case of CHIMPs, we find their use is largely a response to formal constraints and that they are preserved through avoidance of minimum reform coalitions. This highlights that the legislative process - and budgetary outcomes in particular - cannot be understood without attention to procedures which remain "off the books."
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Transparency by Conformity: A Field Experiment Evaluating Openness in Local Governments
Jim ben-Aaron et al.
Public Administration Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Sunshine laws establishing government transparency are ubiquitous in the United States; however, the intended degree of openness is often unclear or unrealized. Although researchers have identified characteristics of government organizations or officials that affect the fulfillment of public records requests, they have not considered the influence that government organizations have on each other. This picture of independently acting organizations does not accord with the literature on diffusion in public policy and administration. In this article, we present a field experiment to test whether a county government's fulfillment of a public records request is influenced by the knowledge that its peers have already complied. We argue that knowledge of peer compliance should (1) induce competitive pressures to comply and (2) resolve legal ambiguity in favor of compliance. We find evidence of peer conformity effects both in the time to initial response and in the rate of complete request fulfillment.