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During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American elections underwent a series of reforms that weakened partisan control over elections. The variation in the electoral rules during this period offers scholars a unique opportunity to examine how electoral institutions and reforms structure election outcomes. In this article, I examine how electoral rules translated voter preferences into outcomes for the selection of two prominent positions, governors and U.S. senators. These two elected positions offer an interesting comparison because while they are chosen to represent the same geographic constituency, there is notable variation in the rules used to elect each office. Based on analysis of more than 350 senate-gubernatorial election pairs, I find that varying levels of partisan control over elections throughout time conditioned the likelihood that the partisan outcome of these elections mirrors one another.

AbstractDuring the last several elections, numerous high-profile candidates for the U.S. Senate have raised a majority of their campaign funds from donors who reside in a different state. These efforts have garnered substantial media coverage and have been fodder for attacks by the candidate's opponents. Despite the increased attention to the role of out-of-state donors, it is not clear if these cases are outliers or if this is now common practice in our more nationalized electoral environment. In this paper, we examine trends in Senate candidate's fundraising from out-of-state donors between 2000 and 2020. We find that there has been a general increase over time in Senate candidates' reliance on out-of-state donations. There is, however, variation in terms of who relies heavily upon the support of a more national donor base. A Senate candidate's share of out-of-state donations varies with factors like incumbency, electoral competition, and geography.

Presidents routinely employ Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs) to inform Congress about the executive's thoughts and position on pending legislation. Such statements are used for a variety of purposes, including bill promotion, suggesting changes, issuing veto threats, and addressing perceived threats to traditional powers. While SAPs have been identified as an important vehicle for interbranch communication and a key source of insight into presidential preferences, many questions remain as to how presidents make use of SAPs' full range of potential. Using a novel data set of over 4,600 SAPs across multiple administrations, we explore the content of these interbranch communications to uncover how, when, and why presidents use such statements over time. Ultimately, we demonstrate the many ways that presidential use of SAPs is strategic based on political contexts.

Presidents and presidential candidates serve as an important source cue for the mass public's attitudes toward and evaluations of the political parties. Our study evaluates these dynamics during the transition from a lame duck president, Barack Obama, to a new party standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton. Our analysis takes advantage of the fact that the 2014 and 2016 Cooperative Election Study (CES) and the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) surveys asked respondents to evaluate both Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic Party. These data allow us to examine whether the transition from Obama to Clinton changed the primary referent for public attitudes toward the Democratic Party. Our results provide mixed evidence about a change in the relative importance of attitudes toward Clinton and Obama when the former became the nominee, and the latter was a lame duck. While the public's view of the connection between Obama and Democratic Party's ideological profile remained constant across time, respondents did update their affective assessments of the party in the face of a new party leader once Clinton was the nominee.

ObjectivePresidents routinely employ public statements to inform Congress about their position on pending legislation. Position‐taking is strategic, with presidents choosing whether, how, how often, and when to intervene. We move beyond the traditional dichotomies of issuance and position to explore the timing and frequency of presidential position‐taking during the lawmaking process.MethodWe use Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs)–bill‐specific messages addressed to Congress–to analyze presidential communications. Our regression analyses examine both the frequency of SAPs usage on bills and when in the process presidents communicate their position.ResultsWe find that presidents take positions sparingly and most often at the early stages of the lawmaking process.ConclusionPresidential communications during the lawmaking process are more about winnowing options and bargaining over bill text than influencing pivotal votes.

Although signing statements have been touted as a powerful addition to the president's toolkit, their use has dropped off considerably in recent years. We argue that this decrease can be explained by the changing costs of using signing statements. In particular, we posit that Congress' response to signing statements, which included committee hearings on the use of signing statements, raised the costs of this tool above any potential benefits. Investigating over 650 presidential signing statements among over 1,800 public laws, we find that public and congressional outcry influenced the issuance of signing statements and helps explain their decreased use.

Signing statements constitute a salient executive power that has recently captured scholarly and political attention. Prior literature suggests that presidents use signing statements to gain additional policy concessions from Congress. Evidence of policy motivations are, however, difficult to demonstrate and policy motives fail to explain a wide range of existing statements. The authors propose an additional incentive mechanism based on defending traditional presidential authority. Using original data on approximately 8,500 public laws and 1,250 signing statements, the authors investigate when and why signing statements occur. They find presidents are likely to issue constitutional signing statements on bills traditionally falling under the president's purview. Adapted from the source document.

Presidential signing statements, especially "constitutional" ones, have been characterized as line‐item vetoes and a general abuse of power. But are signing statements so sinister? We suggest that the popular unilateral powers framework, as applied to signing statements, is inappropriate and that signing statements of all types function more like a dialogue with Congress. Using content analysis of all signing statements from 1977 to 2010, we demonstrate that signing statements routinely address general interbranch themes rather than the substance of a law. We thus provide a new perspective on presidential signing statements as a continuation of interbranch dialogue.