Priming Partisan Evaluations of Congress

Congress has been the scene of increasingly partisan and ideologically polarized conflict in recent years. I examine the extent to which the national political climate mutes or amplifies the effect of partisanship on evaluations of Congress. Using data from the National Election Studies and a content analysis of national media coverage, I find that public evaluations of Congress divide most sharply along party lines when elite‐level discourse is most partisan (as during an election season or a highly charged partisan debate in Congress). This finding is consistent with an opinion leadership or priming hypothesis of public opinion. In addition, the most knowledgeable citizens are most likely to be primed by the partisan political climate in Washington. In contrast, less attentive citizens tend to rely on nonpartisan cues when evaluating Congress. I discuss the implications of these findings for public opinion and improving the public standing of Congress in an increasingly partisan climate.     

Partisanship,Sophistication, and Public Attitudes about Majority Rule and Minority Rights in Congress

The balance between majority rule and minority rights is a central issue in the design and operation of democratic institutions and remains a contested issue in debates of policy‐making processes. Remarkably, public attitudes about this balance are not subjected to scholarly investigation. In this article, we report the findings of the first survey experiment in which the American public's attitudes about majority rule and minority rights in legislative bodies are explored. We find robust support for both majority rule and minority rights, discover that only a few Americans distinguish between the US House of Representatives and Senate in the application of these principles, and demonstrate that views of majority rule and minority rights can be moved once we introduce respondents to the partisan implications of procedural rules. Moreover, with conflicting theoretical expectations about the effect of political sophistication on attitudes about majority rule and minority rights, we find that higher levels of political sophistication are associated with stronger partisan effects on attitudes about the balance between majority rule and minority rights in Congress.     

Using Computer Simulations to Measure the Effect of Gerrymandering on Electoral Competition in the U.S. Congress

Recent research has leveraged computer simulations to identify the effect of gerrymandering on partisan bias in U.S. legislatures. As a result of this method, researchers are able to distinguish between the intentional partisan bias caused by gerrymandering and the natural partisan bias that stems from the geographic sorting of partisan voters. However, this research has yet to explore the effect of gerrymandering on other biases like reduced electoral competition and incumbency protection. Using a computer algorithm to design a set of districts without political intent, I measure the extent to which the current districts have been gerrymandered to produce safer seats in Congress. I find that gerrymandering only has a minor effect on the average district, but does produce a number of safe seats for both Democrats and Republicans. Moreover, these safe seats tend to be located in states where a single party controls the districting process.     

The Effect of Electoral Institutions on Tort Awards

We argue that partisan elected judges have an incentive to redistributewealth from out-of-state defendants (nonvoters) to in-stateplaintiffs (voters). We first test the hypothesis by using cross-statedata. We find a significant partisan effect after controllingfor differences in injuries, state incomes, poverty levels,selection effects, and other factors. One difference that appearsdifficult to control for is that each state has its own tortlaw. In cases involving citizens of different states, federaljudges decide disputes by using state law. Using these diversity-of-citizenshipcases, we conclude that differences in awards are caused bydifferences in electoral systems, not by differences in statelaw.     

Democratic Party Control Reduces Gender Inequality

Women earn less than men who work in the same job with the same level of experience. We know much about this gender wage gap but relatively little about its political or partisan sources. In this article, we examine the effects of party control of state government on gender inequality in income, wages, unemployment, and poverty. Employing both a regression discontinuity design and a dynamic difference‐in‐difference analysis, we find that electing a Democratic majority to the state house leads to substantial improvement in women's incomes, wages, and unemployment relative to men—especially in recent years. We also show that greater female representation in office and more liberal policymaking on policies related to women's rights could be driving that process. We find, however, fewer clear effects on poverty and less robust results for partisan control of the governor's office or the state senate. Parties and politics matter, but not always.     

The public salience of crime, 1960–2014: Age–period–cohort and time–series analyses†

The public salience of crime has wide-ranging political and social implications; it influences public trust in the government and citizens’ everyday routines and interactions, and it may affect policy responsiveness to punitive attitudes. Identifying the sources of crime salience is thus important. Two competing theoretical models exist: the objectivist model and the social constructionist model. According to the first, crime salience is a function of the crime rate. According to the second, crime salience is a function of media coverage and political rhetoric, and trends in crime salience differ across population subgroups as a result of differences in their responsiveness to elite initiatives. In both theories, period-level effects predominate. Variation in crime salience, however, may also reflect age and cohort effects. Using data from 422,504 respondents interviewed between 1960 and 2014, we first examine the nature of crime salience using hierarchical age–period–cohort (HAPC) models and then analyze period-level predictors using first differences. We find that 1) crime salience varies mostly at the period level; 2) crime salience trends are parallel (cointegrated) across demographic, socioeconomic, and partisan groups; and 3) crime salience trends within every population subgroup are most consistent with the constructionist model. The crime rate does not exert a significant effect in any subgroup.     

Parties,Preferences, and Petitions: Discharge Behavior in the Modern House

Although discharge petitions lie at the confluence of personal preferences, committee prerogatives, and party leadership in Congress, these procedures have received little scholarly scrutiny. We capitalize on the public nature of petition signatures since 1993 to examine the behavior of the most cross‐pressured members in discharge battles: bill sponsors and cosponsors belonging to the majority party who personally prefer the bills they have sponsored but who face party pressure not to sign the petitions that threaten the leadership's control of the legislative agenda. After controlling for personal preferences, we find a statistically significant partisan effect in the U.S. House, which further illuminates the “Where's the party?” debate.     

Out in the Open: The Emergence of Viva Voce Voting in House Speakership Elections

We examine the internal politics that preceded the House adoption in 1839 of viva voce (voice) voting for Speaker and other House officers. First, we find that the struggles over the rule's adoption actually centered on the election of the House Printer. These struggles were tied to attempts by the two major parties to establish effective newspaper networks to assist in national political campaigns. Democrats generally favored public election of House officers, whereas Whigs generally opposed. In the short term, the change to public voting for Speaker and other House officers had the expected effect of instilling greater partisan regularity among House members. As sectional divisions grew in the nation at large, however, the public election of the Speaker made it increasingly difficult for House leaders to forge the transregional coalitions necessary to organize the House.     

Elections as Focusing Events: Explaining Attitudes Toward the Police and the Government in Comparative Perspective

Traditional views hold that citizens' attitudes toward the police are driven by local concerns. We contend that public attitudes toward the police are responsive to systematic and periodic national-level political factors. In particular, we show that national elections as a focusing event alter periodically the determinants of attitudes toward the police. Using a logistic regression model and diachronic data from Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States, we find that attitudes toward the police and the national government are linked, and this linkage is responsive to the influence of national election campaigns in varying degrees. In addition, we find that attitudes toward the Mexican police are sensitive to partisan changes in the composition of the national political government. We find no such sensitivity in the police attitudes of Costa Rican and U.S. citizens. This suggests that police attitudes are not only affected by the performance of the national political government but also by the character (consolidated versus unconsolidated) of the national political government. In short, police attitudes in new democracies are an indication of the unconsolidated nature of the state apparatus.     

Candidates,Campaigns, or Partisan Conditions? Reevaluating Strategic‐Politicians Theory

According to strategic‐politicians theory, political elites help ensure electoral responsiveness even when the mass public is deficient. Testing this theory requires measuring the effects of candidate experience and campaign spending, but one must confront endogeneity problems, because the theory requires potential candidates and campaign contributors to be responsive to district partisan conditions and national partisan tides. By applying an instrumental‐variable method to control for selection bias, we found that challenger experience only matters indirectly, through its effect on campaign expenditures, but partisan context matters both directly and indirectly. We theorize that challenger experience is best understood as an informational shortcut: it signals incumbent vulnerability to potential campaign contributors.     

Explaining Partisanship on Special Rules in the Postreform House

Informational, distributive and partisan theories offer competing interpretations of the role of restrictive rules in the US House. Empirical tests in this literature focus almost exclusively on the amendment restriction portion of special rules, treating open rules as friendly and restrictive rules as unfriendly to the minority party or chamber as a whole. Oddly, however, there is a significant amount of conflict - partisan conflict in particular - connected with open rules. This suggests that the structuring of amendment possibilities cannot be the only relevant feature of special rules and that an exclusive focus on amendment restrictions might cause analysts to underestimate the importance of partisanship in the rules process. We find that partisan conflict on special rules results not only from the restrictiveness of the rule, but also from specific types of waivers (especially blanket waivers and waivers protecting legislative language in appropriations bills) and other under-studied features of special rules (such as time caps and pre-print requirements).     

Political Parties and the Representativeness Of Legislative Committees

What role do parties play in determining which interests committees represent? In this article, I compare committee organization and representativeness in Nebraska's nonpartisan legislature with those in the partisan senates of Kansas and Iowa. I demonstrate that when parties do not organize legislative conflict, committees are less representative of the full chamber. I argue, however, that committee representativeness does not necessarily result from parties actively working to create representative committees. Rather, when legislative conflict has a definitive partisan structure and the committees are always controlled by the majority party, representative committees will result as a simple by‐product of the partisan structure and organization.     

The dynamics of health care opinion, 2008-2010: partisanship, self-interest, and racial resentment

Recent debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act highlights the extent of party polarization in Washington. While the partisan divide on this issue is stark among political elites, it is less clear how the mass electorate has responded to this divisive conflict. In this article we examine individual-level dynamics in health care attitudes between 2008 and 2010. We find partisan attachments and self-interests strongly predict change in health care attitudes, with Republicans growing more opposed to universal health insurance between 2008 and 2010, and those personally worried about medical expenses less likely to abandon support. We find, however, that the effect of partisanship is moderated by self-interest, with strong Republicans significantly less likely to switch to opposition if they were personally worried about medical expenses. Finally, we find that health care policy preferences, already tinged with racial attitudes in 2008, became increasingly so by 2010.     

PARTISAN POLITICS,ELECTORAL COMPETITION AND IMPRISONMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF STATES OVER TIME*

The now well‐documented explosion in prison populations over the last 30 years has spurred significant attention in the literature. Early research focused primarily on economic explanations. More recently it has focused on political explanations of prison growth. Here we extend research on political explanations of imprisonment by drawing on the literature on state politics and public policy. We argue that the effect of partisan politics on punishment is conditional on how much electoral competition legislators face. We test this hypothesis using annual state level data on imprisonment from 1978 to 1996. Our findings show that the effect of Republican state legislative strength on prison admissions depends on time and the level of competition in state legislative elections. We argue that these findings suggest the need for a more nuanced understanding of the link between partisan U.S. politics and imprisonment.     

Amicus Curiae and the Public Interest: A Search for a Standard1

Despite the widespread and influential presence of an increasingly partisan amicus curiae brief, the role of the "friend of the court" brief remains controversial. Changing rules of access and diverging recommendations for its behavior are associated with two distinct views of jurisprudence. A traditional understanding of adversarial proceedings emphasizes the individual interests of the litigants, and correspondingly excludes consideration of non-parties and the general public. An alternative to the traditional, individual-based, liberal jurisprudence (and its skepticism toward public interest arguments) is a recognition of the need to integrate individual and public interests and to find a coherence between them.
The skeptical view of the public interest can be avoided by adopting a post-empiricist view, which recognizes a plurality of interpretations of the public interest. The amicus curiae role, if given wide access, can serve as a tool of inclusive pluralism, which recognizes a diversity of views regarding the public interest and the impact of legal decisions on the public.     

Face mask mandates: Unilateral authority and gubernatorial leadership in US states

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the coordination and cooperation between the federal government and the states failed. American governors were thus tasked with making critical public health policy choices—under extreme uncertainty—with varying institutional capacities, partisan pressures, and state demographic differences. Yet most of the nation's governors chose to impose a face covering or mask mandate to limit the spread of cases. We collected each governor's executive order that mandated the conditions under which their residents would be required to wear a mask and employed a sentiment analysis program to extract key qualities of crisis leadership communication. Our analyses provide insights into the institutional and partisan factors that determined a face mask mandate as well as the institutional, demographic, and leadership communication qualities that affected the total number of cases per capita in the states. Our findings have important implications for post-pandemic policy recommendations with respect to the effectiveness of policies that seek to lower the transmission of viruses in public spaces and the characteristics of impactful public health messaging by government leaders.     

Strategic Constituency Manipulation in State Legislative Redistricting

Scholars often identify gerrymanders by examining changes to districts' partisan composition. However, advantages can also be gained by systematically varying the extent to which incumbents' constituencies remain the same. In this article, I examine the post‐2000 redistricting in 22 state legislatures. I find that parties, particularly in legislatures with low turnover levels, gain advantages from constituency manipulation, but that these advantages are counteracted by geographic redistricting regulations. Lastly, I find that ostensibly bipartisan outcomes nonetheless feature partisan constituency manipulation. These findings echo a growing literature that analyzes the geographic aspects of gerrymandering and highlight how turnover patterns motivate redistricting strategies.     

Party Effects in State Legislative Committees

Legislative scholars have theorized about the role of committees and whether they are, or are not, tools of the majority party. We look to the states to gain more empirical leverage on this question, using a regression discontinuity approach and novel data from all state committees between 1996 and 2014. We estimate that majority‐party status produces an 8.5 percentage point bonus in committee seats and a substantial ideological shift in the direction of the majority party. Additionally, we leverage a surprisingly frequent, but as if random occurrence in state legislatures—tied chambers—to identify majority‐party effects, finding similar support for partisan committees. We also examine whether the extent of committee partisanship is conditional on party polarization or legislative professionalism, but we find that it is not. Our results demonstrate that parties create nonrepresentative committees across legislatures to pursue their outlying policy preferences.     

Improved access to care for the uninsured poor in large cities: do public hospitals make a difference?

This study compares the volume of uncompensated care provided to the uninsured poor in cities with public hospitals to that provided in cities without a public hospital in order to determine whether public hospitals increase access to care. Multiple regression analysis is used to control for selected variables that also influence utilization of hospital care. Cities with public hospitals were found to provide between 31 and 34 uncompensated adjusted admissions per 100 uninsured poor; in cities without a public hospital, 24 such admissions were provided. In the regression analysis the coefficients for dummy variables representing three types of public hospital governance structures were all positive and statistically significant. The coefficient measuring teaching commitment among a city's hospitals was also positive and statistically significant. This analysis suggests that local tax support for public hospitals does not merely offset philanthropic or other revenue sources for voluntary hospital uncompensated care but is also likely to increase the amount of uncompensated care offered. We also find that public hospital closures may reduce access to care for the uninsured poor in large cities.     

Partisan Bridges to Bipartisanship: The Case of Contraceptive Coverage

The negative consequences of polarization have been pointed to by scholars and politicians alike as evidence of a need for a renewal of bipartisanship. However, scholarship on bipartisanship remains limited. This article develops a theory of partisan bridging that predicts when and why certain legislators might be willing to cross the partisan aisle. I argue that personal preferences can lead some legislators to cross the aisle in search of consensus, in effect serving as “partisan bridges.” I test my theory by examining the role of Republican women in the diffusion of contraceptive coverage at the state level. Through an individual‐level analysis of sponsorship and vote choice and an aggregate‐level analysis of policy diffusion, I find that moderate Republican women at times served as critical actors in the policy process.