Suchergebnisse

Primaries frequently exacerbate ideological divisions within a party. When parties select more moderate candidates whom they believe will appeal to a broader audience, the nominee must find a way to win over their party's base. We investigate the potential rewards of using the vice presidential nominee to increase voter turnout among those ideologically alienated by a party's moderate nominee. We also examine the risks of a more extreme vice presidential nominee costing a president the support of moderate voters. To perform this analysis, we examine how voters' ideologies and attitudes toward Sarah Palin affected their voter turnout and their vote choice. By doing this, we are able to assess the effectiveness of the attempt to activate the base and find that while vice presidential nominees may provide the opportunity to effectively target ideological groups, they may also contribute to a loss of support from moderately inclined voters.

AbstractScholars of political parties frequently note that a party's candidates are aided by the presence of a consistent and favourable party brand name. We argue that partisan success in maintaining a consistent position on important policy issues hinges on how their role in the government motivates their strategies about public policy formation. Specifically, when parties share control of government institutions, parties need to balance their electoral interest in promoting a consistent brand name with the need to generate public policy that leads to effective governance. When control is held by one party, the costs and benefits of effective governance are born entirely by the majority, absolving both parties of the need to compromise on the substance of policy. By employing item response theory methods to assess patterns of party voting on deficit issues, we find strong support for these hypotheses.

Congressional votes are only recorded if a member formally requests a roll call vote, and that request is supported by one-fifth of those present. Many votes pass viva voce and are never recorded. We seek to examine changing patterns of unrecorded voting, analyze the causes of these changes, and consider the implications of these changes for congressional scholars. Using landmark legislation from the 39th (1865-1867) to the 104th Congress (1995-1996), we analyze whether bills receive a recorded or unrecorded final passage vote. We find that while the likelihood that a landmark law receives a recorded final passage vote fluctuates over time, electoral pressures consistently influence members' decisions to record their votes. We argue that studies of Congress must account for the roll call generating process when analyzing roll call data. Adapted from the source document.

ObjectiveCongressional votes are only recorded if a member formally requests a roll call vote, and that request is supported by one‐fifth of those present. Many votes pass viva voce and are never recorded. We seek to examine changing patterns of unrecorded voting, analyze the causes of these changes, and consider the implications of these changes for congressional scholars.MethodsUsing landmark legislation from the 39th (1865–1867) to the 104th Congress (1995–1996), we analyze whether bills receive a recorded or unrecorded final passage vote.ResultsWe find that while the likelihood that a landmark law receives a recorded final passage vote fluctuates over time, electoral pressures consistently influence members' decisions to record their votes.ConclusionsWe argue that studies of Congress must account for the roll call generating process when analyzing roll call data.

Previous studies have sought to assess the aggregate impact new voter identification (ID) laws have on voter turnout. In this study, we extend on this research by considering how the advertising of voter ID laws can affect voters' perception of these laws and how these perceptions may affect individuals' decisions to turnout. In Kansas, county clerks were given discretion in how to advertise new voter ID laws. Employing a quasi-experimental design and matching techniques, we examine these differences in the county-level advertising. We find that different advertising strategies can influence the impact voter ID laws have on turnout.

"As the U.S. Congress has steadily evolved since the Founding of our nation, so too has our understanding of the institution. The second edition of New Directions in Congressional Politics offers an accessible overview of the current developments in our understanding of America's legislative branch. Jamie L. Carson and Michael S. Lynch help students bridge the gap between roles, rules, and outcomes by focusing on a variety of thematic issues: the importance of electoral considerations, legislators' strategic behavior to accomplish objectives, the unique challenges of Congress as a bicameral institution in a polarized environment, and the often-overlooked policy outputs of the institution. This book brings together leading scholars of Congress to provide a general overview of the entire field. Each chapter covers the cutting-edge developments on its respective topic. As the political institution responsible for enacting laws, the American public regularly looks to the U.S. Congress to address the important issues of the day. The contributors in this volume help explain why staying atop the research trends helps us better understand these issues in the ever-changing field of American politics. New to the Second Edition: New and updated chapters highlighting party recruitment, redistricting, women in Congress, the nationalization of Congressional elections, and the reassertion of Congressional oversight. A first look at Congressional-executive relations in the Trump era. Updated data through the 2018 Midterm elections"--

ObjectivesScholarship on the U.S. Senate has demonstrated the pivotal role the presiding officer can play when asked to interpret the chamber's rules and precedents. Therefore, our objective is to broadly evaluate how questions of order are arbitrated in the U.S. Senate.MethodsUsing a multinomial logistic regression, we estimate the effect of partisanship on adjudicating questions of order in the Senate before and after the institutionalization of the parliamentarian.ResultsOur results indicate that while short‐term partisan interests play an important role in determining how presiding officers interpret rules and precedents, the emergence of the Senate parliamentarian in the 1920s served to reduce uncertainty regarding procedural matters in the chamber.ConclusionsThis change has led to fewer instances of partisan rulings on questions of order and raised the costs of executing a drastic change in Senate procedure via unorthodox procedures. However, the introduction of the parliamentarian has not reduced the likelihood a ruling is overturned. As such, more narrow procedural changes have been used to support majorities over time.

All major legislation in the House necessitates a special rule from the Rules Committee before it can be brought to the chamber floor. These rules often strictly limit floor amendments to bills considered by the House. Scholars of political parties have argued that the House majority party can bias policy output away from the floor median through its usage of restrictive rules. In this article, we argue that in order to secure the passage of restrictive rules, the majority often makes concessions to centrist legislators through the amending process. We examine this theory using a newly collected data set that includes all amendments considered by the Rules Committee during the construction of structured rules in the 109th, 110th, and 111th Congresses (2005–2010). Our results are mixed, but they do suggest that moderate members of the majority party often receive concessions via amendments for their support of the majority party's agenda‐setting regime.

AbstractOn November 21, 2013, U.S. Senate Democrats utilized the long threatened "nuclear option," thereby allowing a simple-majority of the chamber to end debate on lower federal court judicial nominations. Formal theory predicts that this change should permit the president to nominate more ideologically extreme nominees. By comparing President Obama's nominees before and after the Senate's change to the confirmation process, we are able to provide the first comprehensive examination of how the nuclear option is likely to impact the ideological makeup of the lower federal courts. We additionally examine the impact of the nuclear option on time to confirmation and nominee success. Our results indicate, while post-nuclear option nominees are not significantly more liberal, they are being confirmed more often and more quickly, allowing Obama and Senate Democrats to more efficiently fill the federal judiciary with Democratic-leaning judges.

Recent studies have questioned the familiar characterization of Congress as unidimensional. We argue that agenda control, orchestrated through the House Rules Committee and other techniques, can make multidimensional congresses appear more unidimensional. We evaluate this argument by examining the relationship between measures of unidimensionality and various measures of party control for the House of Representatives from 1875 to 1997, at both the roll-call level and congress level. Our findings contribute to an expanding literature explaining why a single dimension could explain most of the variance in voting data, even if latent ideology is multidimensional. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]