The Responsiveness of Direct and Indirect Elections

Previous research argues the Seventeenth Amendment made Senate elections more responsive. To make this claim, existing work compares the vote‐seat relationships of direct and indirect elections before and after the Seventeenth Amendment. I argue this approach is problematic because it does not account for regional variation and compares elections from different time periods using presidential instead of Senate vote. I overcome these problems by simulating indirect elections using state legislatures’ partisan compositions to evaluate the responsiveness of direct and indirect elections after the Seventeenth Amendment. With this counterfactual approach, my findings suggest direct elections are not necessary for electoral responsiveness.     

Public Approval ofU.S. State Legislatures

The determinants of public approval for state legislatures have not received much attention, but one important finding is that more professionalized legislatures experience lower levels of public support. We argue that this result is an artifact of limited data and problematic model specifications. Analyzing a large national survey sample, we demonstrate that the negative relationship holds primarily for conservatives and to a lesser extent for moderates but not liberals. Additionally, we find that legislative approval in states with term limits and ballot initiatives is no different than in states without these institutions.     

Re-election and political career paths in the Uruguayan Congress, 1985–99

Given the presumed marginal – or at best the ‘rubber-stamp legitimising’ – character of Latin American legislatures, they ‘have escaped careful scrutiny’. Even in cases where legislatures are supposed to play a much more significant role than the continental average, such as Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay, knowledge of legislative politics is still far from conclusive. This article studies re-election patterns of legislators in Uruguay during the four post-authoritarian elections. During these elections in Uruguay, we observed a decreasing but still high rate of turnover of legislators. These high rates of legislative turnover are affected by a significant number of legislators who do not seek re-election. While inter-party electoral volatility strongly influences the rates of incumbent re-election, intra-party volatility does not seem to have an impact on this phenomenon. Lastly, the closed and blocked lists in conjunction with the Uruguayan multiple simultaneous vote, and the fact that a legislator belongs to the Senate, are additional institutional features that help to explain the turnover and incumbent re-election in the legislature.     

Campaigning for the Bench: The Corrosive Effects of Campaign Speech?

A new era has emerged in the ways in which candidates for state judicial office campaign. In the past, judicial elections were largely devoid of policy content, with candidates typically touting their judicial experience and other preparation for serving as a judge. Today, in many if not most states, such campaigns are relics of the past. Modern judicial campaigns have adopted many of the practices of candidates for other types of political office, including soliciting campaign contributions, using attack ads, and even making promises about how they will decide issues if elected to the bench. Not surprisingly, this new style of judicial campaigning has caused considerable consternation among observers of the courts, with many fearing that such activity will undermine the very legitimacy of legal institutions. Such fears, however, are grounded in practically no rigorous empirical evidence on the effects of campaign activity on public evaluations of judicial institutions. The purpose of this article is to investigate the effects of campaign activity on the perceived legitimacy of courts. Using survey data drawn from Kentucky, I use both post hoc and experimental methods to assess whether public perceptions of courts are influenced by various sorts of campaign activity. In general, my findings are that different types of campaign activity have quite different consequences. For instance, policy pronouncements by candidates do not undermine judicial legitimacy, whereas policy promises do. Throughout the analysis, I compare perceptions of courts and legislatures, and often find that courts are far less unique than many ordinarily assume. I conclude this article with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the contemporary debate over the use of elections to select judges to the high courts of many of the American states.     

Disentangling the Relationship between Legislative Professionalism and Government Spending

Recent movements to deprofessionalize American state legislatures have been driven partly by the notion that professional legislators spend more than their citizen counterparts. This article explores the relationship between legislative professionalism and government spending, a connection complicated by the possibility that legislators in high‐spending states may choose professional institutions to handle their responsibilities more effectively. I employed propensity score matching, an increasingly used technique of causal inference, to disentangle the relationship. Contrary to previous academic work and popular notions, I found that professional legislatures do not spend significantly more than part‐time bodies do, if one accounts for the fact that legislatures in high‐spending states have a greater need to be professionalized and therefore select those structural frameworks. These findings have important implications for the study of the effects of legislative institutions on public policies more generally and attest to the utility of recently developed techniques of causal inference to disentangle these relationships.     

The Impact of Party and Ideology on Roll‐Call Voting in State Legislatures

To assess the relative impact of party and ideology on legislative behavior, I utilize survey‐based measures of legislator ideology to examine voting in five state legislatures. The results suggest that, although party and ideology both influence voting, the impact of party is greater. The magnitude of this impact varies, however, from chamber to chamber. The activity of parties in the electoral arena explains part of this variance, with more active parties having more influence. Thus, research on legislative behavior should focus on the context surrounding the decision‐making process in order for us to understand the influences on voting.     

Subnational Determinants of National Multipartism in Latin America

Recent research points to the importance of subnational elections as variables shaping the national party system in federal states (Jones 1997b; Mainwaring and Shugart 1997; Samuels 2000). I propose that the effects of subnational elections are not limited to federal states but instead can be seen throughout the region. This paper examines the impacts of gubernatorial elections across eighteen Latin American countries during the most recent democratic period. The analysis suggests that intermediate subnational elections do exert an influence on national party systems, whether the state is federal or not, and particularly influence how many parties are elected to a legislature's lower house.     

Strategic Challenger Entry in a Federal System: The Role of Economic and Political Conditions in State Legislative Competition

Over a third of state legislators do not face challengers when seeking reelection. Existing analyses of state legislative contestation almost exclusively focus on the stable institutional features surrounding elections and ignore conditions that change between elections. I remedy this oversight by investigating how political contexts influence challenger entry. State legislators—particularly members of the governor's party—more often face opposition during weak state economies, but the president's copartisans are even more likely to receive a challenger when the president is unpopular. My findings suggest that both national‐ and state‐level political conditions have an important impact on challengers' entry strategies.     

Majority Party Change and Committee Jurisdictions in State Legislatures

Committee jurisdictions are important in legislative organization, but the reorganization of jurisdictions has received scant attention, particularly in state legislatures, where the fluidity of committee organization allows us to examine rationales for change. In this article, I examine whether new majorities use jurisdiction reorganization for agenda‐control purposes. Examining 39 state legislatures between 2003 and 2012, I test whether committee patterns are less stable in legislative sessions under new majorities and the extent to which reorganization reflects party priorities. I find that new majority parties eliminate committees that reflect the other party's policy priorities and create committees that reflect their priorities.     

Cut from the Same Cloth? A Comparative Study of Domestic Extremists and Gang Members in the United States

Despite calls for research on the similarities and differences between violent extremist groups and criminal street gangs, there have been few empirical comparisons. We develop a comparative model that emphasizes explicit, spurious, and indirect linkages between the two groups and use national sources of data on domestic extremists and gang members—the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97)—to compare them across group involvement, demographic, family, religion, and socioeconomic status characteristics. Six percent of domestic extremists in PIRUS have a history of gang ties, which constitutes a minimal proportion of domestic extremists and is likely the rare exception among the population of gang members. Gang extremists more closely resemble non-gang extremists in PIRUS than they do gang members in the NLSY97. While these groups have some similarities, one of the major differences is that gang members are younger than domestic extremists. This likely contributes to many of the other differences between the groups across the life course, including marriage, parenthood, unemployment, and education. Given that the evidence is most consistent with the independence model, further comparative testing is needed before generalizing gang-related policies and programs to domestic extremism.     

The Policymaking Role of State Supreme Courts in Education Policy

In this article, I examine the relationship between courts and legislatures from a comparative perspective. Specifically, I discuss how (1) the ideological composition of the bench, (2) the propensity of court involvement in a given policy area, and (3) the presence of an advisory opinion affect the number of bill introductions and policy enactments by state legislatures. Examination of education policy in the American states reveals that ideologically distant courts limit the number of bill introductions and bill enactments in state legislatures. Alternatively, the presence of an advisory opinion increases policy introduction and enactment in state legislatures. A fundamental implication of these findings is that courts exert the greatest impact on policy during the introduction stage of the legislative process. Previous studies have not examined the introduction stage and have therefore marginalized the real impact of court influence on policy.     

Principled Moderation: Understanding Parties’ Support of Moderate Candidates

Recent scholarship has argued that parties strategically support more moderate, and thus more electable, candidates. Using interviews with party elites and new data on the party support and the ideology of primary candidates for the US Senate, I show that parties do support moderate candidates. However, using evidence from districts with different levels of competitiveness and over time, I find that support of moderate candidates appears not to be strategic. Rather, party support of moderate candidates appears to be the result of the ideological preferences of party leadership rather a strategic effort to win elections.     

Examining Parties as Procedural Cartels: Evidence from the U.S. States

Procedural cartel theory states that the majority party exerts influence over legislative outcomes through agenda control. This research tests predictions from the party cartel theory in five state legislatures. I assess party influence through comparison of term‐limited and nonterm‐limited legislators. I argue that term‐limited legislators (who are not seeking elective office) are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect means to determine the existence of party influence. The results demonstrate that party influence is present in these legislatures. I find that party influence is magnified on the procedural, rather than final‐passage, voting record which is precisely where procedural cartel theory predicts. I find lower levels of ideological consistency and party discipline among members for whom the party leadership offers the least—those leaving elective office. These results provide support for party cartel theory, demonstrating further evidence of how parties matter in modern democracies.     

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.     

Using Term Limits to Estimate Incumbency Advantages When Officeholders Retire Strategically

Empirical study of U.S. elections over the last 50 years has documented a strong electoral advantage to incumbency in state and federal elections. Recently, however, critics have argued that traditional estimates of the incumbency advantage may overstate the advantage by as much as 100% because the estimates fail to consider strategic retirements. This article directly examines whether or not strategic retirement biases conventional regression estimates of incumbency advantages. We use term limits in state executive and legislative elections as instrumental variables to correct for strategic retirement. We find that, as an empirical matter, strategic retirement is not substantively important. Estimates of incumbency advantages that take account of strategic retirement actually are marginally larger than estimates that do not.     

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.     

When Voters Pull the Trigger: Can Direct Democracy Restrain Legislative Excesses?

Direct democracy is sometimes described as a “gun behind the door,” but how do legislators react when voters pull the trigger? Leveraging the high‐profile referendum defeat of a controversial law passed by the Ohio legislature, I examine how legislators respond to voter disaffection. Using interest groups to “bridge” votes before and after the election, I show that the measure's defeat induced moderation on the part of the Republican legislative majority, while leaving the behavior of opposition Democrats largely unchanged. The results suggest that direct democracy has the potential to restrain legislative excesses and alleviate polarization in state legislatures.     

The Power of an Hour: Effects of Candidate Time Expenditure in State Legislative Elections

Using survey data from more than 500 legislative candidates in 17 states during the 2008 election, I examine whether state house candidates who devote more time to their campaign win a larger share of the major‐party vote. Consistent with previous work studying campaign spending in state legislative elections, I find a positive and significant association between campaign time and vote percentage for challengers—but not incumbents—in incumbent‐contested elections.     

Is Incumbency Advantage Gendered?

Do incumbents have an electoral advantage and if so, do these advantages differ across gender? In this study, I estimate the electoral advantages enjoyed by incumbents in 10 Canadian federal elections, across 3059 ridings, from 1990 to 2021. Using a regression discontinuity design, I compare men and women who have very narrowly won or lost elections on three different indicators: propensity to run again, probability of winning the next election, and vote share. I find that women incumbents are just as likely to run again in subsequent elections as men incumbents. However, women who lose an election appear to be more likely to quit politics compared to men who lose an election. I do not find clear incumbency effects for probability of winning at the next election and vote share.