House Party Switchers and Committee Assignments: Who Gets “What,When, How?”

What are the political consequences for members of Congress who switch parties? Roll‐call and electoral consequences of congressional party switching have been studied, but other implications of party defections have yet to be systematically explored. In this article, I examine the committee assignments of House party switchers and argue that party leaders seek to reward members of the opposing party who join their ranks. Using committee assignment data from the 94th House (1975–76) through the 107th House (2001–02), I show that party switchers are more likely than nonswitchers to be the beneficiaries of violations of the seniority norm. The findings from this article are of interest to students of political parties and legislative institutions, and fill a gap in the literature on party switching. When you joined the Republican Conference on August 6, 1995, the elected leadership …determined that your accumulated seniority in the Congress would be credited when you joined the Republican Conference…. Therefore, the Republican Steering Committee's Seniority List ranks you nineteenth in overall conference seniority and designates May 22, 1980, as the beginning of your tenure in the House for purposes of Republican seniority. Letter from Speaker Dennis Hastert to party switcher Billy Tauzin, April 4, 2000.¹     

What Happens When House Members “Run with Congress”? The Electoral Consequences of Institutional Loyalty

This article characterizes the electoral consequences of messages of institutional loyalty and disloyalty sent by incumbent House members to their constituents. We show that, for the contemporary House, there is variation in these messages—not all incumbents in the contemporary House “run for Congress by running against Congress.” Moreover, we show that these messages can, under the right conditions, have significant electoral consequences, even after controlling for party affiliation and district political factors. In addition to demonstrating the electoral relevance of legislators' presentations, our results show an incumbent‐level link between constituents' trust in government and their voting behavior—a link created by interaction between constituents' perceptions, legislators' party affiliations, and the messages that legislators send to their constituents.     

Sore Loser Laws and Congressional Polarization

To enhance explanations for party polarization in the U.S. Congress, we focus on an unappreciated legal structure known as the sore loser law. By restricting candidates who lose partisan primaries from subsequently appearing on the general election ballot as independents or as nominees of other parties, these laws give greater control over ballot access to the party bases, thus producing more extreme major party nominees. Using several different measures of candidate and legislator ideology, we find that sore loser laws account for as much as a tenth of the ideological divide between the major parties.     

Electoral Rules and Legislative Parties in the Ukrainian Rada

Critics of Ukraine's single‐member district majoritarian and mixed‐member majoritarian electoral systems argue that they undermined the efficiency of the Supreme Rada by permitting nonpartisan single‐member district deputies to enter the legislature in large numbers. Such deputies changed parties and ignored party positions. This article argues that the effect of the differences in how legislators are elected is dependent upon whether legislators are partisans. The statistical analysis of party switching and party cohesion in the Rada from 1998 to 2002 shows that nonpartisan single‐member district deputies were the most likely to switch parties and the least cohesive.     

Party Differentiation in Congress

Abstract At times, the American political parties are so close in terms of policy positions that critics denounce the lack of a “dime's worth of difference” between them. At other times, the gap between them on a left‐right dimension is huge. How can we explain this variation? We argue that parties can behave rationally as collective units, and that shifts in divergence and convergence can be explained as rational responses to changes within governmental institutions and to shifts in conditions outside. We analyze this argument using adjusted ADA scores (Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder 1999) to compare voting score differences between the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress from 1952 to 1996. We pose specific hypotheses for potentially important factors shaping party behavior and test them with a multivariate model. Our results support the argument that the variation in the behavioral gap between the two parties in Congress can be explained as rational party responses to internal and external stimuli.     

Incumbency Effects under Proportional Representation: Leaders and Backbenchers in the Postwar Italian Chamber of Deputies

We study incumbency effects for individual legislators from two political parties (Christian Democracy and the Italian Socialist Party) in Italy's lower house of representatives over 10 legislatures (1948–92) elected using open‐list proportional representation. Our analysis finds no reelection advantage for the average incumbent legislator. Only a tiny elite in each party successfully creates an incumbency advantage. We find incumbents advantaged for reselection by their political party. We interpret reselection advantage as a party loyalty premium. Our study depicts a political environment monopolized by party leaders who reward party loyalty but hamper legislators in appealing directly to voters.     

Sources of Competition in State Legislative Primary Elections

Primaries are an important but understudied component of American elections. In this article, I examine competition in state legislative primaries across 25 states during the 1994 and 1996 election cycles. My findings indicate that competition varies greatly and is affected by a number of factors on the state and district levels. The presence of an incumbent reduces competition, but strong district support for a party leads to greater competition in that party's primaries. Population size and social diversity do little to affect competition, but urbanism and unified party control have a positive impact. Further, legislative professionalism is associated with greater competition, particularly in open‐seat races. Overall, the results have important implications for theories about the conditions that enhance or inhibit competition across different types of elections.     

Party Unity,Ideology, and Polarization in Primary Elections for the House of Representatives: 1956–2012

Increasing party polarization in Congress is a vexing phenomenon for political scientists, as it offers a theoretical conundrum. Members of Congress have become increasingly ideologically divided by party in recent years, which seems counterintuitive as the public electorally punishes representatives for excessive partisanship and ideological behavior. One explanation for this result is that members receive benefits for such behavior during primaries. This article examines the effect of ideological and partisan behavior on primary challenges and primary vote totals for incumbent House members. The results show that incumbents receive benefits in the primary from greater levels of partisanship but not greater levels of ideological extremity. This finding is substantively important as it provides further insight into the motivation of congressional incumbents and offers a partial explanation for the rise in congressional polarization.     

Is Timing Everything? Retirement and Seat Maintenance in the U.S. House of Representatives

Literature on open‐seat elections has focused on the individual attributes of a candidate and/or institutional arrangements. When a seat becomes an open contest could be a significant indicator as to how likely the incumbent party is able to maintain the seat. Examining data on open U.S. House seats from 1996 to 2008, we use OLS regression and logistic regression analysis, finding that time is a significant predictor for incumbent party fund‐raising and seat maintenance. We conclude that political parties have an interest in encouraging members of Congress to announce their retirement early in the election cycle.     

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.     

Third Parties,Elections, and Roll‐Call Votes: The Populist Party and the Late Nineteenth‐Century U.S. Congress

What effect do electorally successful third parties have on congressional roll‐call votes? There is widespread belief among scholars that third parties influence the policies of the major parties, but there is little systematic evidence of this influence. I exploit the unique historical context surrounding the Populist Party formation in 1892 to examine the effect of the Populist Party's electoral success on congressional roll‐call votes related to Populist issues. The results are consistent with two claims. First, co‐optation of the Populist Party's issues occurred even before the formation of the party. Second, the co‐optation of Populist policies does not appear to be correlated with the electoral success of the Populist candidates.     

How Strong Should Our Party Be? Party Member Preferences Over Party Cohesion

In this article, we seek to explain when and why political parties pressure their members to vote with the party. We model party cohesion as an endogenous choice of preference alignment by party members. Couched in Krehbiel's (1996, 1998) pivotal politics model, the formal theory advanced here shows party cohesion to be related to the initial preference alignment of party members, the divergence in preferences between parties, the cohesion of the opposing party, the party's size, and the party's majority or minority status. We solved the model analytically for generalized‐partial equilibrium results and further analyzed it through computer simulations. We tested the model's predictions in the U.S. Senate using Rice party cohesion scores from the 46th through 104th Congresses. The data analyses show strong support for this theory of endogenous choice of party pressure.     

Do Ideological Preferences Explain Parliamentary Behaviour? Evidence from Great Britain and Canada

Are parliamentary parties cohesive because leaders successfully impose discipline on their MPs or because MPs prefer - hence support - the same policies as their leaders do? If the latter is correct, and party cohesion is produced largely by members' concordant preferences, then models that explain cohesion as a function of the disciplinary mechanisms available to parties once the MP is in Parliament (for example, the distribution of patronage or the threat of de-selection) are not useful. This article uses British and Canadian MPs' responses to candidate surveys to estimate MPs' positions on a variety of ideological dimensions and then shows that MPs' preferences on these ideological dimensions only partially explain how often they vote against their parties. Indeed, even after one controls for an MP's ideological preferences, party affiliation remains a powerful predictor of the MP's loyalty or dissent - suggesting that party discipline does, in fact, contribute to cohesion. Additional tests indicate that these results are not spurious.     

Party,Policy, and the Ambition to Run for Higher Office

This article examines why some state legislators run for Congress and others do not. Our main argument is that there are differences in the expected value of a state legislative seat and the expected benefits of being a member of Congress. One key component of this value is how closely the candidate fits with her party. We find that the probability of seeking congressional office increases among state legislators who are distant from the state party and proximate to the congressional party and decreases among those who are distant from the congressional party and proximate to the state party.     

Party Discipline and Universalism: The Case of Budgeting in Berlin

Work on the US Congress has found that when partisan differences are strong, legislation tends to be passed by minimum winning coalitions. When partisanship is weak, Congress and its committees often rely on the norm of universalism or 'giving something to everyone' to pass legislation. Universalism in legislative voting is expected to lead to bloated or inefficient public spending. This article investigates whether these hypotheses about party discipline and universalism hold true outside the United States. A comparison of fiscal decision-making in local legislatures in eastern Berlin, where newly created political parties are weakly disciplined, and in western Berlin, where established party caucuses are highly disciplined, finds this is indeed the case. The article concludes by raising questions for future research on universalism and other post-communist legislatures.     

Parliamentary deadlock and the removal of the prime minister: Incumbency and termination theory in Trinidad and Tobago

In December 2001, the result of the general election in Trinidad and Tobago was an 18–18 tie for the 36 seats in the House of Representatives. The party led by the then incumbent prime minister, Basdeo Panday (the United National Congress – UNC) and the party led by the then leader of the opposition, Patrick Manning (the People's National Movement – PNM) found themselves in a situation in which the President of the Republic, Arthur N.R. Robinson, had to decide on which one of them to appoint as prime minister. The incumbency theory has been an established principle in most parliamentary democracies in the Commonwealth in situations where there is a ‘hung’ parliament insofar as offering the incumbent prime minister the opportunity to form a government is concerned. The decision of President Robinson to revoke the appointment of Prime Minister Panday and to appoint the leader of the opposition, Patrick Manning, as prime minister opened a new debate about the powers of the Head of State to terminate the appointment of an incumbent prime minister in spite of the fact that both aspirants for the office commanded the support of an equal number of elected MPs.     

How Parties Create Electoral Democracy,Chapter 2

Parties neither cease to exist nor cease to compete for office when the general election is over. Instead, a new round of competition begins, with legislators as voters and party leaders as candidates. The offices at stake are what we call “mega‐seats.” We consider the selection of three different types of mega‐seats—cabinet portfolios, seats on directing boards, and permanent committee chairs—in 57 democratic assemblies. If winning parties select the rules by which mega‐seats are chosen and those rules affect which parties can attain mega‐seats (one important payoff of “winning”), then parties and rules should coevolve in the long run. We find two main patterns relating to legislative party systems and a country's length of experience with democratic governance.     

A Cross‐National Analysis of Party Switching

Though instances of party switching have been widely documented, there is little cross‐national research on this phenomenon. The prevalence of switching is therefore unknown, and the factors influencing this behavior remain unclear. Using the most comprehensive dataset on party switching ever constructed, we illustrate both that interparty movement is more common than previously assumed and that there are substantial differences in its prevalence across parties. To explain this variation, we examine the relationship between legislators' motivations, institutional arrangements, and switching. We find that motivational explanations are correlated with interparty movement and that institutional arrangements exhibit only limited direct influence on switching.     

Legislative Fragmentation and Government Spending in Presidential Democracies: Bringing Ideological Polarization into the Picture

We claim that, in presidential democracies, the effect of increasing fragmentation on government spending should be conditional on polarization, defined as the ideological distance between the government's party and other parties in Congress. We build a model where this result follows from negotiations between the legislature and an independent government seeking the approval of its initiatives—as in presidential democracies. Using cross‐country data over time, we test the empirical validity of our claim finding that, in presidential democracies, there is indeed a positive effect of fragmentation only when polarization is sufficiently high. The same is not true for parliamentary democracies.     

Moderate Caucuses in a Polarised US Congress

Despite putting themselves in a thorny relationship with heavy-handed party leaders, some US legislators continue to join moderate coalitions. To understand why, this article derives seven explicit hypotheses concerning electoral, institutional, and strategic dimensions and tests them on two moderate coalitions from the 107th to the 110th Congress (2001–8): the Republican Main Street Partnership and the New Democrat Coalition, along with the Senate's ‘Gang of 14’ during the 109th Congress (2005–6). The article finds that, as expected, a member's ideology and previous affiliation strongly predict who joins these caucuses. What is surprising from the findings is that the constituencies' partisanship does not always predict the legislators' decision to be a moderate caucus member. There is little evidence that more electorally vulnerable members join these caucuses; on the contrary, when it does matter, members from competitive districts appear to stay away from moderate coalitions. Therefore, the findings call into question the prevailing ‘constituency-based’ understanding of moderate coalition membership in a polarised Congress and call for a new examination of electoral connection between moderate members and moderate caucuses.