Minority Status,Ideology, or Opportunity: Explaining the Greater Retirement of House Republicans

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives tend to retire at a higher rate than Democrats—a fact with potentially important electoral and policy ramifications—but research on the possible explanations for this partisan disparity has been scarce. I test various explanatory hypotheses using multilevel statistical analyses and find that Republicans are more likely to retire—not because they have been the predominant minority party, had more political opportunities, or had different private‐sector experiences, but because they harbor more conservative ideologies than their Democratic colleagues.     

Evangelizing Congress: The Emergence of Evangelical Republicans and Party Polarization in Congress

The realignment of evangelical voters is well‐documented, but religion's impact within Congress is less clear. New data on home churches of members of Congress shows that the realignment of congressional evangelicals, combined with their growth and distinctly conservative legislative behavior, has significantly contributed to party polarization in Congress. Controlling for other factors, evangelicals are significantly more conservative than members of other religious traditions. This conservatism also has second‐order effects on the polarization of the House, where their more partisan proposals comprise a larger share of the roll‐call agenda when Republicans are in the majority. Moreover, evangelical Republicans in Congress differ significantly from evangelical Democrats in terms their geography, denominations, and experiences prior to 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.     

Issue Accountability and the Mass Public

Under what conditions, if any, does the mass electorate hold congressional members accountable for their records on specific issues? We examine this question on the issue of crime, for which salience has varied substantially and opinion has favored Republicans, and the environment, for which salience has not varied much and voters have favored Democrats. Because different parametric specifications produce divergent findings, we utilize matching analysis in addition to ordinary least squares. The tests suggest that issue accountability exists even controlling for a member's overall record. However, such accountability depends crucially on issue salience and a member's partisan affiliation.     

Who Is a Worker? Partisanship,the National Labor Relations Board,and the Social Content of Employment

In opinions addressing whether graduate students, medical residents, and disabled workers in nonstandard work arrangements are employees under the National Labor Relations Act, I analyze partisan differences in how National Labor Relations Board members, under the previous two US presidents, confronted the contradictory permeation of wage‐labor into relatively noncommodified relationships. I argue that Republicans mediated the contradictions by interpreting indicia of employer property rights as status authority. They constructed employment as a contractual relationship consummated through exchange relations and demarcated a nonmarket social sphere in which to locate the relationships before them. This construction suppressed the class dimension of employment and the connection between relations of production and relations in production ( Burawoy 1979 ). Democrats mediated the contradictions by recognizing them in part and arguing that the workers were engaged in commodity production. They proposed the Act as a means for workers to negotiate “differentiated ties” ( Zelizer 2005 ) in nonstandard employment.     

The Effects of Term Limits on State Legislatures: A New Survey of the 50 States

Term limits on legislators were adopted in 21 states during the early 1990s. Beginning in 1996, the limits legally barred incumbents from reelection in 11 states, and they will do so in four more by 2010. In 2002, we conducted the only survey of legislators in all 50 states aimed at assessing the impact of term limits on state legislative representation. We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office—whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition—but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a “Burkean shift,” whereby term‐limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons.     

Time,Term Limits,and Turnover: Trends in Membership Stability in U.S. State Legislatures

Increases in legislative professionalization along with the implementation of term limits in about one‐third of the American states raise significant questions about the path of state house and senate turnover. We first update turnover figures for all states, by chamber, from the mid‐1980s through 2002. We then compare turnover rates in states with and without term limits. We find that turnover rates, overall, continued to decline through the 1980s but that the long downward trend abated in the 1990s as a result of term limits. The effects of term limits vary depending on the length of the term limit and the opportunity structure in the state. There is also a strong relationship between the presence of term limits and interchamber movement. In addition to term limits, professionalization levels, redistricting, the presence of multi‐member districts, and partisan swings explain differences in turnover rates between states.     

Reexamining the Institutional Effects of Term Limits in U.S. State Legislatures

Research on term limits suggests that they have substantial consequences for the power of legislatures vis‐à‐vis the executive and interest groups and for the relationship between leaders and rank‐and‐file members within a chamber. Existing work, however, has not accounted for the actual power of relevant state actors. We contribute to this research by examining the effect of term limits on the influence of institutional actors conditional on the existing political power structure in a state. The inclusion of controls for the direct and moderating effect of actual institutional power suggests some significant extensions of previous findings regarding the institutional effects of term limits.     

Term Limits and Pork

We describe a model of electoral selection and legislative policy choice that explores the effects of term limits on legislative spending. In the model, self‐interested voters in a collection of districts prefer representatives who deliver pork over representatives who maximize aggregate social welfare. Term limits can, in some cases, inhibit voters from selecting representatives who deliver particularistic benefits, and, in these cases, term limits reduce pork spending. On the other hand, when pork is extremely socially inefficient, representatives who want to deliver pork to their districts have incentives to refrain from doing so to reduce future pork in other districts. In this scenario, term limits actually prevent legislators from promoting future spending moderation and thus paradoxically increase pork spending.     

Remaking the House and Senate: Personal Power,Ideology, and the 1970s Reforms

Although much has been written on the critical congressional reforms of the 1970s, few studies have analyzed support for reform systematically. In this article, we draw upon previously untapped sources of information that make an individual‐level, quantitative analysis possible. We analyze 20 indicators that measure support for a wide variety of reforms in both chambers. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent pattern: in virtually every case, junior members and liberals were more pro‐reform than were senior members and conservatives. Also, Republicans were often more likely than Democrats to back reform. Our findings challenge the view that the reform movement was essentially a Democratic party phenomenon; liberals and junior members in both parties—not just Democrats—supported reform.     

Do Term Limits Restrain State Fiscal Policy? Approaches for Causal Inference in Assessing the Effects of Legislative Institutions

Scholars of state politics are often interested in the causal effects of legislative institutions on policy outcomes. For example, during the 1990s a number of states adopted term limits for state legislators. Advocates of term limits argued that this institutional reform would alter state policy in a number of ways, including limiting state expenditures. We highlight a number of research design issues that complicate attempts to estimate the effect of institutions on state outcomes by addressing the question of term limits and spending. In particular, we focus on (1) treatment effect heterogeneity and (2) the suitability of nonterm‐limit states as good counterfactuals for term‐limit states. We compare two different identification strategies to deal with these issues: differences‐in‐differences (DID) estimation and conditioning on prior outcomes with an emphasis on synthetic case control. Using more rigorous methods of causal inference, we find little evidence that term limits affect state spending. Our analysis and results are informative for researchers seeking to assess the causal effects of state‐level institutions.     

Term Limits and Legislative‐Executive Conflict in the American States

State governments have experienced considerable institutional change in the last several decades. None appeared at first glance to be as far‐reaching as the legislative term limits that were adopted by over 20 states in the 1990s. The evidence to date suggests that term limits have indeed changed the character of many of the states' legislatures, if not always as predicted by their advocates. We report data on veto dynamics over the period 1989–2008 to determine how term limits have impacted legislative‐executive relations. Our data both challenge and support what has become the conventional wisdom, i.e., that term limits will weaken legislatures relative to their governors. States with more stringent term limits experienced fewer gubernatorial vetoes but proved more likely to override those vetoes when they were issued. Taken together the evidence suggests that the relationship between governors and legislatures in the wake of term limits is more complex and variable than scholars and others had previously thought.     

Legislative Term Limits and Fiscal Policy Performance

Do term limits impede the ability of legislators to effectively set fiscal policy? To address this question, I examine state bond ratings from 1996 to 2009. Bond ratings serve as a valuable indicator of a state's fiscal performance, gauging the risk and uncertainty that investors face when buying these bonds. In addition, bond ratings are important policy ends in themselves. High bond ratings make it easier for states to borrow and raise revenue, while lowering interest rates. Results from analyses of “Term‐Limitedness” and legislator experience suggest that term limits negatively impact a state's fiscal performance, leading to lower bond ratings.     

Are Congressional Leaders Middlepersons or Extremists? Yes

Infuential theories of legislative organization predict that congressional leaders will be selected from the center of their parties. Yet previous research has generally rejected the “middleperson hypothesis,” finding leaders to be extremists. We challenged these findings by testing more‐appropriate null hypotheses via Monte Carlo simulation. We found that congressional leaders (and leadership candidates as a whole) tend to be closer to their party's median than would occur by chance, but leaders also tend to be selected from the left of the median for Democrats and to the right for Republicans. Compared to the pool of announced candidates for leadership positions, winners are not ideologically distinctive. This result suggests that factors affecting the ideology of leaders tend to operate more at the candidate emergence stage.     

Opportunity Costs and Outside Careers in U.S. State Legislatures

Cost‐benefit models of career choice predict that potential legislators choose legislative careers when they expect greater utility from legislative service than from other options. In state legislatures, the utility of legislative service includes the monetary value of outside careers. I hypothesize that legislators are more likely to pursue outside careers when financial opportunity costs are higher or when they derive less non‐monetary value from legislative service. In particular, I posit that individual characteristics that predict labor market value (such as age, education, race, and sex) and legislative salary predict outside careers. I test this model employing a new dataset of individual outside‐career activity derived from financial disclosure reports. The findings strongly support the hypothesis that outside‐career behavior is a function of the financial opportunity costs of legislative service. In addition, I find that Republicans are more likely to hold outside careers than are Democrats. This research has important implications for the study of state legislative participation, legislative organization, and the Democratic bias hypothesis.     

Partisan Turnout Bias in Midterm Legislative Elections

Abstract: Lower salience elections present greater opportunities for representational bias at the polls than do elections with higher levels of political interest. We hypothesize that turnout bias is most likely to occur during midterm congressional elections in which there are clear short‐term forces that exploit the low turnout setting. The effects of these forces are more likely to be observable among registered nonvoters than citizens who are not registered to vote because registrants have access to the polls and are likely to have voted in previous presidential contests. Using midterm National Election Study data from 1978 to 1998, we find that registered nonvoters are frequently more Democratic than midterm election voters, particularly in 1994 and 1998. The historic 1994 congressional election seat losses for Democrats may be partially explained by the finding that voters going to the polls were clearly more conservative than registered nonvoters.     

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.     

Rights by Fortune or Fight? Reexamining the Addition of Sex to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act

It is widely believed that the extension of protection against employment discrimination to women through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) was a fluke, the product of an attempted “killer amendment” by civil rights opponents gone awry. My analysis challenges this conventional wisdom, showing that the coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats in support of the sex amendment to Title VII was consistent with broader patterns of support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the early to mid‐20th century. In other words, support appears to have been sincere, not sophisticated—proponents preferred a CRA with the sex amendment to one without. I proceed to show that concern about the direct impact on women, and not simply the instrumental impact on labor, played an important role in motivating this support. But, I also find reason for caution in interpreting support for workplace rights as evidence of broad support for women's rights at this time.     

The war on coal is over: assessing Obama-era regulations and the Trump Administration’s efforts to date

Abstract

For nearly a decade, Republicans accused Democrats and the Obama Administration of waging a “war on coal” and Democrats has cited economics as the primary cause of the industry’s troubles. Now that President Trump has declared the war on coal to be over, it is time to examine the regulations promulgated during the Obama Administration and their impact on the industry. This article will discuss the coal industry prior to, during, and after the Obama Administration with particular attention to Obama-era regulations that impacted the industry and President Trump’s efforts to repeal and replace the same.