Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Party Crashers
Partisan Polarization and Congressional Accountability in House Elections
David Jones
American Journal of Political Science, April 2010, Pages 323-337
Abstract:
Early research led scholars to believe that institutional accountability in Congress is lacking because public evaluations of its collective performance do not affect the reelection of its members. However, a changed partisan environment along with new empirical evidence raises unanswered questions about the effect of congressional performance on incumbents' electoral outcomes over time. Analysis of House reelection races across the last several decades produces important findings: (1) low congressional approval ratings generally reduce the electoral margins of majority party incumbents and increase margins for minority party incumbents; (2) partisan polarization in the House increases the magnitude of this partisan differential, mainly through increased electoral accountability among majority party incumbents; (3) these electoral effects of congressional performance ratings hold largely irrespective of a member's individual party loyalty or seat safety. These findings carry significant implications for partisan theories of legislative organization and help explain salient features of recent Congresses.
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Jacob Hirsh, Colin DeYoung, Xiaowen Xu & Jordan Peterson
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political conservatism has been characterized by resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, with liberalism characterized by the polar opposite of these values. Political attitudes are heritable and may be influenced by basic personality traits. In previous research, conservatism (vs. liberalism) has been associated positively with Conscientiousness and negatively with Openness-Intellect, consistent with the association of conservatism with resistance to change. Less clear, however, are the personality traits relating to egalitarianism. In two studies, using a personality model that divides each of the Big Five into two aspects, the present research found that one aspect of Agreeableness (Compassion) was associated with liberalism and egalitarianism, whereas the other (Politeness) was associated with conservatism and traditionalism. In addition, conservatism and moral traditionalism were positively associated with the Orderliness aspect of Conscientiousness and negatively with Openness-Intellect. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of personality's relation to political attitudes and values.
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Partisan Bias in Responses to Factual Questions
John Bullock, Alan Gerber & Gregory Huber
Yale Working Paper, March 2010
Abstract:
Partisanship has long been known to affect people's attitudes and votes, but political scientists increasingly suggest that it may also affect people's beliefs about purely factual matters. For example, Republicans seem more likely than Democrats to believe that the deficit rose during the Clinton administration; Democrats seem more likely than Republicans to believe that inflation rose under Reagan. What remains unclear is whether partisan patterns in responses to factual questions actually reflect differing beliefs among partisans or instead reflect a desire to voice support for one party or opposition to another. We report results from a 2x2 survey experiment designed to shed light on this question. All subjects were asked a set of factual questions about politics. Some received financial incentives to answer correctly. Others were told that their answers would be scored and reported back to them. And others were exposed to neither or both of these treatments. We find consistent partisan response patterns across all four conditions, which constitutes the strongest evidence to date that such patterns reflect sincere differences in factual beliefs.
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The Effect of Daughters on Partisanship
Dalton Conley & Emily Rauscher
NBER Working Paper, April 2010
Abstract:
Washington (2008) finds that, controlling for total number of children, each additional daughter makes a member of Congress more likely to vote liberally and attributes this finding to socialization. However, daughters' influence could manifest differently for elite politicians and the general citizenry, thanks to the selection gradient particular to the political process. This study asks whether the proportion of female biological offspring affects political party identification. Using nationally-representative data from the General Social Survey, we find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive fitness strategy that daughters may evince.
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Candidate Valence and Ideological Positions in U.S. House Elections
Walter Stone & Elizabeth Simas
American Journal of Political Science, April 2010, Pages 371-388
Abstract:
We examine the relationship between the valence qualities of candidates and the ideological positions they take in U.S. House elections based on a study of the 2006 midterm elections. Our design enables us to distinguish between campaign and character dimensions of candidate valence and to place candidates and districts on the same ideological scale. Incumbents with a personal-character advantage are closer ideologically to their district preferences, while disadvantaged challengers take more extreme policy positions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, challengers can reap electoral rewards by taking more extreme positions relative to their districts. We explore a possible mechanism for this extremism effect by demonstrating that challengers closer to the extreme received greater financial contributions, which enhanced their chances of victory. Our results bear on theories of representation that include policy and valence, although the interactions between these two dimensions may be complex and counterintuitive.
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Jeffrey Ladewig
Journal of Politics, April 2010, Pages 499-512
Abstract:
The extensive literature on the recent ideological polarization in the U.S. Congress has not provided much in the way of incremental and member-specific explanations. I develop such a theory; I posit that members' past electoral performance can influence their ideological extremity. This link requires a reexamination of congress members' roll-call vote calculus. To do so, I adapt the theory of citizen retrospective voting to congress members' roll-call voting. This new theory also provides a missing link in many studies of ideological shirking and democratic accountability. I test and confirm the theory of retrospective roll-call voting for the current period of ideological polarization, 1970 to 2008. As such, I argue that the recent trend of vanishing marginals has been a contributing cause in the recent trend of ideological polarization in the U.S. House.
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The Polarized Presidency: Depth and Breadth of Public Partisanship
Brian Newman & Emerson Siegle
Presidential Studies Quarterly, June 2010, Pages 342-363
Abstract:
This essay examines the extent of partisan polarization in the public's views of the president from 1972 to 2008, extending earlier studies by placing the George W. Bush administration in historical context and exploring the depth and breadth of polarization. The authors find that the party gap in presidential approval has grown significantly over time. Moreover, more inpartisans strongly approve of the president and more outpartisans strongly disapprove. In addition, polarization has become broader as assessments of economic conditions, the president's handling of foreign relations, perceptions of the ideological difference between the president and citizens, and views of the president's competence and morality have become increasingly partisan. Suggestive evidence is offered that especially positive or negative views of the economy and "rally" events can alter the extent of polarization. Ultimately, the depth and breadth of polarization may hold dire implications for presidential governance.
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Party Strength, the Personal Vote, and Government Spending
David Primo & James Snyder
American Journal of Political Science, April 2010, Pages 354-370
Abstract:
"Strong" political parties within legislatures are one possible solution to the problem of inefficient universalism, a norm under which all legislators seek large projects for their districts that are paid for out of a common pool. We demonstrate that even if parties have no role in the legislature, their role in elections can be sufficient to reduce spending. If parties in the electorate are strong, then legislators will demand less distributive spending because of a decreased incentive to secure a "personal vote" via local projects. We estimate that spending in states with strong party organizations is at least 4% smaller than in states where parties are weak. We also find evidence that strong party states receive less federal aid than states with weak organizations, and we theorize that this is because members of Congress from strong party states feel less compelled to secure aid than members from weak party states.
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Are Congressional Leaders Middlepersons or Extremists? Yes
Stephen Jessee & Neil Malhotra
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Influential theories of legislative organization predict that congressional leaders should be selected from the center of their parties. Yet, the extant literature has generally rejected the "middleperson hypothesis," finding that leaders are extremists. We reexamine these findings by testing more appropriate null hypotheses via Monte Carlo simulation. We find that congressional leaders (and leadership candidates as a whole) tend to be closer to the party median than would occur by chance, but also tend to be selected to the left of the median for Democrats and to the right for Republicans. Compared to the pool of announced candidates for leadership positions, winners are not ideologically distinctive, suggesting that factors affecting the ideology of leaders tend to operate more at the candidate emergence stage.
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Ideological Segregation Online and Offline
Matthew Gentzkow & Jesse Shapiro
NBER Working Paper, April 2010
Abstract:
We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideological segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation. We find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members. We find no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.
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The World Wide Web and the U.S. Political News Market
Norman Nie, Darwin Miller, Saar Golde, Daniel Butler & Kenneth Winneg
American Journal of Political Science, April 2010, Pages 428-439
Abstract:
We propose a framework for understanding how the Internet has affected the U.S. political news market. The framework is driven by the lower cost of production for online news and consumers' tendency to seek out media that conform to their own beliefs. The framework predicts that consumers of Internet news sources should hold more extreme political views and be interested in more diverse political issues than those who solely consume mainstream television news. We test these predictions using two large datasets with questions about news exposure and political views. Generally speaking, we find that consumers of generally left-of-center (right-of-center) cable news sources who combine their cable news viewing with online sources are more liberal (conservative) than those who do not. We also find that those who use online news content are more likely than those who consume only television news content to be interested in niche political issues.
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The multidimensional nature of party competition
Jeremy Albright
Party Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Left-right is a convenient tool for summarizing the complexities of voter-party linkages in a manner that is comparable across contexts and that avoids the pathologies of preference aggregation in higher dimensions. Yet several reasons exist to believe that left-right is increasingly incapable of summarizing political behavior: the inability of left-right to capture policy concerns beyond economics and religion; the accumulation of new issue concerns over time; pressures for policy convergence stemming from the globalization of the world economy; and the decline of social cleavages that historically structured vote choice. This paper shows that parties are indeed talking about a growing number of issues, they are converging on the left-right scale, and the ideological cues they are sending to voters are growing increasingly ambiguous. Social democratic parties have in particular been affected by these trends.
