Suchergebnisse

In Incremental Polarization, Justin Buchler fills critical gaps in our understanding of legislative polarization by crafting a unified spatial theory of legislative elections, parties, and roll call voting. He contends that we need to move beyond elections and factor in Congress members' behavior in roll call voting-where a different but related spatial continuum operates

Conventional theories of elections hold that an election is analogous to a consumer product market. This analogy underlies decades of electoral theory, but in Hiring and Firing Public Officials, Justin Buchler contends that it does not capture the real nature of elections. As Buchler shows, an election is a mechanism by which voters hire and fire public officials. Thus, the health of democracy depends not on regular competitive elections, but on posing a credible threat to fire public officials who do not perform their jobs well. However, the purpose of that threat is to force public officials to act as faithful public servants so that they do not have to be fired. Thus, competitive elections, by most definitions, are indicative of a failure of the democratic system.

"Civic engagement" is the cornerstone of democracy, right? Everyone knows we need more civic engagement—everyone, that is, except Ben Berger, whose willingness to argue against convention, particularly when that convention is a key tenet of good governmentism, makes me reflexively sympathetic to his argument. Berger and I both attack foundational assumptions of conventional democratic thought, but we differ in our approaches. I base my arguments on economic theory and quantitative analysis, whereas he bases his arguments primarily on interpretations of canonical theorists, most importantly Hannah Arendt and Alexis de Tocqueville. Ultimately, I am convinced by Berger's argument that civic engagement is a messy concept that cannot be considered an "intrinsic good" for democracy, but like most formal theorists, I needed little convincing because the debate that he characterizes is remarkably similar to one that game theorists held some years ago, and resolved in the same direction. Ironically, then, he may face a more hostile audience from within his own subfield than outside of it.

I am encouraged by Ben Berger's reaction to my book, and hopeful that other readers will be as open-minded. Of course, the drawback of Berger's Cassandra comparison is that if it is apt, that will not be the case. Similarly, the drawback of any attempt at a paradigm shift in Kuhn's terms is that nearly every attempt fails, and it is difficult for the author himself to distinguish a negative reaction motivated by philosophical conservatism from a negative reaction motivated by intrinsic weakness in the unconventional argument itself.

Legislators like Michele Bachmann and Alan Grayson become nationally infamous for their provocative behavior, yet there is little scholarly attention to such infamy. This paper examines the predictors of congressional infamy, along with its electoral consequences. First, infamy is measured through the frequency with which internet users conduct searches of legislators' names, paired with epithets attacking their intelligence or sanity. Then, ideological extremism and party leadership positions are shown to be the best statistical predictors. The electoral consequences of infamy follow: infamous legislators raise more money than their lower-profile colleagues, but their infamy also helps their challengers to raise money. In the case of House Republicans, there appears to be an additional and direct negative effect of infamy on vote shares. The fundraising effect is larger in Senate elections, but there is no evidence of direct electoral cost for infamous senatorial candidates.