Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe Senate Budget Committee is a unique and potentially powerful institution in the US legislature. It was begun to help coordinate the federal budget making process in the US Senate. Long-term trends and short-term institutional dynamics have weakened the coordinating capacity of the committee to the point that the budget process was entirely ignored in 2011. This article explores these changes. It shows evidence for Democrats and Republicans on the committee moving further apart ideologically since the 1970s resulting in more partisanship and less deliberation on the committee. It also shows how a combination of a narrow Democratic majority on the committee along with a recent uptick in ideological heterogeneity among Democrats but without prospects for bipartisanship, resulted in no budget process in 2011.

Discontent with the Republican and Democratic parties has sparked widespread concerns about third-party vote splitting. However, few studies have measured the policy preferences of Republicans and Democrats who believe a third party is needed. Our survey addresses this gap in the literature. Across 14 issues, we compare the policy preferences of disaffected partisans who say a third party is needed and the preferences of partisans who do not. We provide evidence against the popular narrative that disaffected partisans converge towards a centrist or moderate third party. Our results show that disaffected partisans are just as polarized. Additionally, we confirm research showing most Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — now say both parties are inadequate, and a third party is needed. This willingness to signal dissatisfaction with one's own party may suggest that partisanship functions not as an expressive social identity, but as an instrumental reflection of personal ideological preferences.