Suchergebnisse

This paper analyzes a spatial model of two‐party competition where parties are not monolithic decision makers but collections of self‐motivated officeholders. Party platforms are chosen collectively by incumbent officeholders. The main result is that in a stable equilibrium party platforms do not converge to the same point. Instead, the parties choose platforms so that voters can distinguish between them, and these platforms divide the set of legislative districts cleanly along party lines. All incumbents prefer this situation to one where the platforms converge, because it improves their own chances of reelection.

This paper tests a simple asset market model of campaign contributions, using data from recent U.S. Senate races. When applied to "investor" PACs, the model performs surprisingly well, and suggests that the contributions market is relatively efficient. When applied to "ideological" PACs, political parties, and individuals, the model is rejected. The results not only provide empirical support for the model, but also point out important differences in the apparent motives behind different types of contributions.

This paper analyzes a simple spatial voting model that includes lobbyists who are able to buy votes on bills to change the status quo. The key results are: (i) if lobbyists can discriminate across legislators when buying votes, then they will pay the largest bribes to legislators who are slightly opposed to the proposed change, rather than to legislators who strongly support or strongly oppose the change; (ii) equilibrium policies exist, and with quadratic preferences these equilibria always lie between the average of the lobbyists' ideal points and the median of the legislators' ideal points; and (iii) "moderate" lobbyists, whose positions on a policy issue are close to the median of the legislators' ideal points, will prefer the issue to be salient, while more extreme lobbyists will generally prefer the issue to be obscure.

In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly, we find as much change after the 1910s as before, which contributes to the existing literature that focuses on changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We also investigate words and phrases that had negative or positive partisan connotations in particular periods. Finally, we examine whether some of the common hypotheses offered in the literature can account for the changes. The initial findings suggest that these explanations can only account for part of the decline.

We studied the effects of districting on intergovernmental aid by state governments to local governments in the United States. We found that metropolitan areas receive relatively more aid when represented in the state legislature by an at‐large delegation than when divided into single‐member districts. This suggests that the free‐riding that may occur with at‐large representation is more than counterbalanced by other factors. The estimated effects are robust to the effects of other confounding factors as well as the choice of estimators.