Suchergebnisse

Understanding the dynamics of lawmaking in the United States is at the center of the study of American politics. A fundamental obstacle to progress in this pursuit is the lack of measures of policy output, especially for the period prior to 1946. The lack of direct legislative accomplishment measures makes it difficult to assess the performance of our political system. We provide a new measure of legislative significance and accomplishment. Specifically, we demonstrate how item‐response theory can be combined with a new dataset that contains every public statute enacted between 1877 and 1994 to estimate "legislative importance" across time. Although the resulting estimates and associated standard errors provide new opportunities for scholars interested in analyzing U.S. policymaking since 1877, the methodology we present is not restricted to Congress, the United States, or lawmaking.

Recent studies of American federalism have emphasized the division of government functions between the national government and the states. But the effects of federalism depend not only on the balance of functional authority but also on the structure of federalist institutions. The institutional structure of Aid to Dependent Children, created by the Social Security Act of 1935, comprised a system of state operational control unhindered by federal supervision. The effect of this federal bargain was the exclusion of African-Americans from welfare benefits in the South. But the federal structure of the programme also shaped implementation in the North, where decentralization allowed its capture by urban machines, which used welfare as a political benefit. New techniques for ecological inference establish these results. Administrative institutions structured the entry of African-Americans into the American welfare state and created the conditions for the welfare 'crisis' of the 1960s and later.

Recent studies of American federalism have emphasized the division of government functions between the national government and the states. But the effects of federalism depend not only on the balance of functional authority but also on the structure of federalist institutions. The institutional structure of Aid to Dependent Children, created by the Social Security Act of 1935, comprised a system of state operational control unhindered by federal supervision. The effect of this federal bargain was the exclusion of African-Americans from welfare benefits in the South. But the federal structure of the programme also shaped implementation in the North, where decentralization allowed its capture by urban machines, which used welfare as a political benefit. New techniques for ecological inference establish these results. Administrative institutions structured the entry of African-Americans into the American welfare state and created the conditions for the welfare 'crisis' of the 1960s and later. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

AbstractThe study of political conflict in legislatures is fundamental to understanding the nature of governance, but also difficult because of changes in membership and the issues addressed over time. Focusing on the enduring issue of civil rights in the United States since Reconstruction, we show that using current methods and measures to characterize elite ideological disagreements makes it hard to interpret or reconcile the conflicts with historical understandings because of their failure to adequately account for the policies being voted upon and the consequences of the iterative lawmaking process. Incorporating information about the policies being voted upon provides a starkly different portrait of elite conflict—not only are contemporary parties relatively less divided than is commonly thought, but the conflict occurs in a smaller, and more liberal, portion of the policy space. These findings have important implications for a broad range of work that uses elite actions to compare political conflict/polarization across time.

Using a newly constructed data set of 443 episodes of legislative bargaining between the president & Congress, we evaluate two game theoretic models of political bargaining: Matthews's coordination model & Ingberman & Yao's commitment model. We empirically test whether political rhetoric (i.e., presidential veto threats) are important in bargaining over public policy in the US between 1946 & 1992. The paper provides empirical insight into presidential power & also addresses some difficult issues in the empirical evaluation of formal models with necessary conditions, sufficient conditions, or no stochastic components. We find that the coordination model does a better job than the commitment model of accounting for the data. 2 Tables, 4 Figures, 1 Appendix, 24 References. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractUsing the registration-based samples and disposition codes of state-level pre-election telephone polls conducted by the National Election Pool as part of the National Exit Poll in 12 states, we test whether likely Democrats were more likely to cooperate with the National Exit Poll than likely Republicans and independents. Using information about both respondents and nonrespondents, we find that Democrats are more likely to cooperate with telephone interviewers than Republicans and independents by 3 and 6 percentage points, respectively, even after controlling for individual and geographic features plausibly related to nonresponse (e.g., age, gender, race, urban/rural, community support for President Trump, and effects of COVID-19). Equalizing the partisan cooperation rate when post-stratifying to account for the partisan differences in cooperation decreases the average polling error on the margin of victory by 4 percentage points in the polls we examine, but sizable errors remain in critical swing states because of within-party differences in who responds and/or errors in the available partisanship measures in the voter file.