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AbstractContrary to media reports, California's 2003 recall election was anything but a circus. Despite the presence of 135 candidates, just 3 managed to split 94% of the vote, and the winner came close to achieving a majority. In this article, the author uses elite interviews and a social network analysis of campaign donations to study how the Republican Party sought to impose order on the potentially chaotic political environment. The author finds that a network of Republican donors, activists, and officeholders coordinated their efforts to advantage Arnold Schwarzenegger and pressure other Republicans out of the race.

Relative to other social scientists, political scientists seem disengaged from the political world outside the academy. In this article, I suggest that this is regrettable, arguing that such service is beneficial both for scholarship and for society at large. I examine two such forms of outside service: writing for a blog and working in a political party. I examine the potential pitfalls and benefits from such service.

Relative to other social scientists, political scientists seem disengaged from the political world outside the academy. In this article, I suggest that this is regrettable, arguing that such service is beneficial both for scholarship and for society at large. I examine two such forms of outside service: writing for a blog and working in a political party. I examine the potential pitfalls and benefits from such service. Adapted from the source document.

This article builds on Matthews and Stimsons (1975) study of legislative cue taking, analyzing the extent to which legislators sitting next to each other influence each others voting behavior. Data come from three decades of roll call votes in the California Assembly, a chamber in which each member is paired with a deskmate. By comparing deskmate pairs with nondeskmate pairs, I find that legislators vote identically to their deskmates on a sizeable subset of roll calls. This deskmate effect appears to remain strong even as a rival influence, legislative partisanship, increases in strength. Adapted from the source document.

Why are American politicians "single‐minded seekers of reelection" in some decades and fierce ideological warriors in others? This article argues that the key to understanding the behavior of members inside a legislative chamber is to follow the actions of key figures outside the chamber. These outsiders—activists, interest groups, and party bosses—use their control over party nominations, conditioned on institutional rules, to ensure ideological behavior among officeholders. To understand how vital these outsiders are to legislative partisanship, this article takes advantage of a particular natural experiment: the state of California's experience with cross‐filing (1914–59), under which institutional rules prevented outsiders from influencing party nominations. Under cross‐filing, legislative partisanship collapsed, demonstrating that incumbents tend to prefer nonpartisanship or fake partisanship to actual ideological combat. Partisanship quickly returned once these outsiders could again dominate nominations. Several other historical examples reveal extralegislative actors exerting considerably greater influence over members' voting behavior than intralegislative party institutions did. These results suggest that candidates and legislators are the agents of activists and others who coordinate at the community level to control party nominations.

"A modern book for a modern parties course Seth Masket and Hans Noel bring a contemporary perspective and engaging writing to the political parties course. Using key material from contemporary and foundational research, Masket and Noel focus on how parties solve important problems in the American political system. This perspective reveals the importance of political parties, their inner workings, and their failures and successes"--

Studies comparing the ideological leanings of voters and elected officials are often hampered by the lack of a common measure. The authors use legislative referenda-on which state legislators and voters both vote on the same issue-as bridging observations to develop a common measure for both. They use this measure to help assess two theories of legislative representation, the well-known dyadic model and a partisan model that assumes legislators are also accountable to a collective party agenda. Examining referenda votes during several sessions of the California Assembly, the authors report several findings that are consistent with the partisan model. They find that legislators are significantly more ideologically extreme than the median voter in their districts. They also find that members of the majority party are considerably more extreme relative to their districts than members of the minority party are and that the majority party becomes even more extreme the longer it maintains control of the chamber. Adapted from the source document.