People's Party
Kevin Smith et al.
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Evidence that political attitudes and behavior are in part biologically and even genetically instantiated is much discussed in political science of late. Yet the classic twin design, a primary source of evidence on this matter, has been criticized for being biased toward finding genetic influence. In this article, we employ a new data source to test empirically the alternative, exclusively environmental, explanations for ideological similarities between twins. We find little support for these explanations and argue that even if we treat them as wholly correct, they provide reasons for political science to pay more rather than less attention to the biological basis of attitudes and behaviors. Our analysis suggests that the mainstream socialization paradigm for explaining attitudes and behaviors is not necessarily incorrect but is substantively incomplete.
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James Adams, Jane Green & Caitlin Milazzo
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
In contrast to the growing elite policy polarization in the United States, the British Labour and Conservative Parties have converged dramatically on economic and social welfare policy over the past two decades. The authors ask the following question: Has there been a parallel depolarization in the British mass public's policy attitudes and partisan loyalties, pointing to a general mechanism that extends beyond the U.S. case? The authors report analyses of election survey data from 1987 to 2001 that document significant declines in the association between British citizens' policy positions and their partisanship (partisan sorting). However, they find only modest changes in the dispersion of British respondents' self-placements on the policy scales (policy extremity) and in mass attitude constraint, defined as the correlations between citizens' positions across different policy issues. These trends in the British public's policy preferences and partisan loyalties are mirror images of the trends in the American public's policy preferences and mass partisanship.
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Reconsidering Racial and Partisan Gerrymandering
Adam Cox & Richard Holden
University of Chicago Law Review, Spring 2011, Pages 553-604
Abstract:
In recent years, scholars have come to a general agreement about the relationship between partisan gerrymandering and racial redistricting. Drawing districts that contain a majority of minority voters, as is often required by the Voting Rights Act, is said to help minority voters in those districts but hurt the Democratic Party more broadly. This Article argues that this familiar claim is based on a mistaken assumption about how redistricters can best manipulate districts for partisan gain - an assumption grounded in the idea that all voters can be thought of as either Democrats or Republicans. Relaxing this assumption, and acknowledging that voters come in diverse ideological types, we highlight the fact that the optimal partisan gerrymandering strategy is quite different from the pack-and-crack strategy that is pervasive in the literature. Understanding this optimal strategy leads to a second insight - that the Voting Rights Act constrains Republicans' partisan ambitions, not Democrats', as is typically thought. We conclude by discussing some implications for the future of the Voting Rights Act and the next round of decennial redistricting.
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"An Attack Well Directed": Aaron Burr Intrigues for the Presidency
Thomas Baker
Journal of the Early Republic, Winter 2011, Pages 553-598
Abstract:
This article challenges a reigning interpretation of the pivotal contested U. S. presidential election of 1800: the view that Aaron Burr did not try actively to wrest victory from his running-mate Thomas Jefferson. With variations, this case is advanced in Nancy Isenberg's Fallen Founder (2007), Edward J. Larson's A Magnificent Catastrophe (2007), Joanne B. Freeman's Affairs of Honor (2001), and most other modern accounts of this election. This article offers new evidence of behind-the-scenes scheming to sustain the case that Burr did indeed act to compass the presidency for himself. First and foremost is a newly-discovered incriminating letter from a political deputy detailing a plan to steal the election in the U. S. House of Representatives. Re-examination of the political and constitutional crisis surrounding the election also yields new information about how Alexander Hamilton sabotaged Burr's schemes; evidence to show why delays in communication probably lost the presidency for Burr; and insight into how Burr and his deputies conspired to cover up their machinations despite the best attempts of partisan antagonists to expose their treachery. In offering a revised interpretation of this consequential electoral crisis and its partisan dimensions, the article redirects our attention toward the importance of might be called the dark side of early republican politics, a shadowy and Machiavellian world where ambition, deal-making, deceit, and disinformation could - as they did on this occasion - lead the nation to the brink of civil conflict.
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Elections and the Regression Discontinuity Design: Lessons from Close U.S. House Races, 1942-2008
Devin Caughey & Jasjeet Sekhon
Political Analysis, Autumn 2011, Pages 385-408
Abstract:
Following David Lee's pioneering work, numerous scholars have applied the regression discontinuity (RD) design to popular elections. Contrary to the assumptions of RD, however, we show that bare winners and bare losers in U.S. House elections (1942-2008) differ markedly on pretreatment covariates. Bare winners possess large ex ante financial, experience, and incumbency advantages over their opponents and are usually the candidates predicted to win by Congressional Quarterly's pre-election ratings. Covariate imbalance actually worsens in the closest House elections. National partisan tides help explain these patterns. Previous works have missed this imbalance because they rely excessively on model-based extrapolation. We present evidence suggesting that sorting in close House elections is due mainly to activities on or before Election Day rather than postelection recounts or other manipulation. The sorting is so strong that it is impossible to achieve covariate balance between matched treated and control observations, making covariate adjustment a dubious enterprise. Although RD is problematic for postwar House elections, this example does highlight the design's advantages over alternatives: RD's assumptions are clear and weaker than model-based alternatives, and their implications are empirically testable.
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Divisive politics and accountability
Àron Kiss
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
The paper analyzes a political accountability game with an electorate of ‘partisan' and ‘independent' voters. It is shown that politicians have a strategic incentive to engage in ‘divisive politics', that is, to force some independent voters to take sides, even if the direct electoral benefits are higher for their opponents than for themselves. By polarizing the electorate, the incumbent politician weakens the ability of independent voters to make him accountable for his policies in the common interest. Moreover, the interests of the incumbent and the opposition are aligned: the opposition also benefits from divisive politics because, in equilibrium, its election probability increases.
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When do voters actually think "It's the Economy"? Evidence from the 2008 presidential campaign
Matthew Singer
Electoral Studies, December 2011, Pages 621-632
Abstract:
Studies linking election outcomes to economics frequently assume that the economy's salience is constant. This study shows that the economy's salience systematically fluctuates. The number of voters focused on economic issues shifted dramatically throughout the 2008 campaign as the recession worsened and this change occurred well before the financial markets collapsed in September 2008. However, even during the recession substantial numbers of individuals said their vote was based on non-economic issues and for these individuals there was no relationship between their assessment of the economy and their electoral choice. Consistent with extant theories of issue attention, citizens who were the hardest hit by the recession and those who had the most anxiety about suffering a financial dislocation in the future were most likely to consider economic performance electorally important while secure voters were less likely to be economic voters.
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527 Committees and the Political Party Network
Richard Skinner, Seth Masket & David Dulio
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the links between 527s and other political organizations through the employment histories of 527 staff. We find that 527s are highly central to modern political party networks and are in positions to facilitate coordination within a party and to employ key party personnel. Furthermore, we find important differences between the networks charted out by the two major parties. The Republican Party, the majority party during the period under study, had a more hierarchical network than the Democratic Party did.
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The influence of strategic retirement on the incumbency advantage in US House elections
Benjamin Highton
Journal of Theoretical Politics, October 2011, Pages 431-447
Abstract:
Failure to take into account ‘strategic retirement' leads to inflated estimates of the incumbent electoral advantage. The one attempt to address this issue in the context of US House elections implies that much of the supposed incumbency advantage and most of its presumed increase over time are illusory (Cox and Katz, 2002). This paper identifies possible problems with the Cox and Katz (2002) method and develops a new approach based on simulating the counterfactual condition of incumbents standing for re-election rather than retiring. The results show that when the bias induced by strategic retirement is removed, much of the apparent incumbency advantage and its increase over time remain evident.
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Daniel Lee
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Institutional barriers frustrate third-party challenges to major-party dominance in American politics. Conventional wisdom claims that the ballot access petitioning requirement hurts minor parties.This claim, however, conflates two dimensions of third-party success: (a) ability to get on the ballot and (b) ability of actual candidates to win votes.The requirement is hypothesized to have a negative effect on the first dimension but a positive effect on the second. Modeling these two dimensions separately gives evidence of cross-cutting effects. The first equation is a probit model of entry that shows third-party candidates are more likely to enter when the requirement is low. The second equation is an OLS regression, which only includes the subsample of districts where at least one third-party candidate gained ballot access, that shows third-party candidates win more votes in districts with a higher requirement.
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Jeff DeWitt & Richard Engstrom
Politics & Policy, October 2011, Pages 741-759
Abstract:
The fact that political parties hold competitive nomination contests that require voters to choose among multiple candidates leaves open the possibility that the contest itself could damage the prospects of an eventual nominee. In this study, we employ the American National Election Study panel survey data from the 2008 U.S. presidential election to assess the impact of the Democratic Party nomination process on candidate evaluations and general election vote preference. We find evidence that Barack Obama had greater difficulty uniting his party than his Republican counterpart due to the fact that Clinton voters were slow to coalesce around Obama. These supporters failed to report higher levels of favorability until Clinton conceded the race in the summer, while Huckabee and Romney voters were seen rallying to their party's nominee in the spring. In the end, many Clinton primary voters either abstained from voting in November or crossed over to support the Republican nominee.