Congressional Elections in Presidential Years: Presidential Coattails and Strategic Voting

This article analyzes voting for Congress in presidential election years. The national Democratic vote for the House increases with the Democratic vote for president but decreases with the Democrats' perceived chances of winning the presidency (anticipatory balancing). The evidence for coattails and for balancing become visible only when statistically controlling for the other. The aggregate evidence for coattails and balancing in presidential years is reinforced by the analysis of National Election Studies (NES) survey respondents. That analysis shows that politically informed voters are more likely to vote for Congress against the party that they believe will win the presidency.     

Congressional Performance,Incumbent Behavior,and Voting in Senate Elections

Conventional wisdom suggests that individual members of Congress have no real incentive to act in ways that might improve public evaluations of their collective body. In particular, the literature provides no clear evidence that public evaluations of Congress affect individual races for Congress, and little reason to expect that voters would hold specific individuals responsible for the institution's performance. We suggest that this conventional wisdom is incorrect. Using multiple state‐level exit polls of Senate voting conducted by Voter News Service in 1996 and 1998, we arrive at two key findings. First, we find that evaluations of Congress do have a significant effect on voting within individual U.S. Senate races across a wide variety of electoral contexts. Second, we find that punishments or rewards for congressional performance are not distributed equally across all members, or even across members of a particular party. Instead, we find that the degree to which citizens hold a senator accountable for congressional performance is significantly influenced by that senator's actual level of support for the majority party in Congress, as demonstrated on party votes.     

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.     

Military Base Closures and the 1996 Congressional Elections

This article examines the extent to which changes in distributional benefits influence congressional election outcomes. Although conventional wisdom holds that a direct link exists between distributional benefits and electoral outcomes (Mayhew 1974b), recent evidence suggests that this link only exists under certain circumstances (Stein and Bickers 1994). In this article, I use 1995 military base closures to test the nature of the relationship. Contrary to recent research on the politics of pork barreling, my findings indicate support for a direct relationship between major base realignments and closures and House electoral outcomes. Specifically, major realignments and closures significantly decreased first‐year Democrats' vote margins in the 1996 House elections.     

Class War in the Voting Booth: Bias Against High-Income Congressional Candidates

Do Americans care how much money congressional candidates earn? We conducted three experiments to examine how candidates' incomes affect voters' perceptions of the candidates' traits and ultimately their vote intention. Subjects evaluated otherwise identical candidates with annual incomes randomly varying between $75,000, $3 million, and a candidate with no income information provided. Results from the three experiments are remarkably similar. Subjects viewed the $3 million earner as significantly more intelligent than the candidate with no income information provided, but this benefit of high income was overshadowed by significant biases against the $3 million candidate. Subjects consistently viewed the $3 million earner as less honest, less caring, and less representative of them than the other candidates. Ultimately, subjects were less likely to say they would vote for the $3 million candidate. These findings demonstrate that the campaign advantages that high-income candidates enjoy are somewhat offset by voters' initial bias against them.     

Electoral Reform and Changes in Legislative Behavior: Adoption of the Secret Ballot in Congressional Elections

There is widespread agreement that the Australian ballot fundamentally altered the American electoral system. One common approach to test the effects of ballot reform is to examine legislators elected under the party and secret ballot. An alternative research design, which we adopt here, compares changes in the behavior of legislators who were elected under both ballot types. We use this approach to investigate whether ballot reform directly influenced legislators' decisions to seek renomination and their behavior within the institution. Our results raise a number of important implications for understanding the effects of electoral reform on political behavior.     

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.     

Decentralizing Pork: Congressional Roll‐Call Voting,Decentralized Administration,and Distributive Politics

Congress packages pork‐barrel spending in complicated proposals that belie theories of distributive politics. We theorize that roll‐call voting on such bills depends on grant programs' administrative centralization, party ties with presidents or home‐state governors, and differences in geographic representation between chambers. Analyzing votes between 1973 and 2010 using a within‐legislator strategy reveals that House members are less likely to support decentralized spending when they are copartisans with presidents, while senators support decentralization regardless of such party ties. When House members or senators share affiliation with only governors or with neither chief executive, the likelihood of support rises with decentralization.     

Assessing the President's Role as Party Agent in Congressional Elections: The Case of Bill Clinton in 2000

Presidents have become their parties' chief fund‐raisers and thus have the capacity to further their parties' collective fortunes by imposing a more efficient distribution of campaign resources than might otherwise prevail. In order to succeed, presidents must, first, accurately target their efforts where they will best improve candidates' prospects for winning seats, and second, either directly or indirectly (through signaling to other donors) generate sufficient new resources to affect the election outcome. Analyses of Bill Clinton's extensive fund‐raising efforts during the 1999–2000 election cycle confirm that presidents can indeed use their unmatched fund‐raising ability to help their parties win congressional contests they might otherwise lose. But analysis of the Clinton record also shows that presidential fund‐raising activities may be shaped by other purposes that lead to a distribution of effort that is suboptimal for the party.     

Voting from the Pew: The Effect of Senators' Religious Identities on Partisan Polarization in the U.S. Senate

Partisan polarization in the Senate is in part a product of the increased sorting of evangelical Christians into the Republican caucus. The relationship between senators' religious identities, party affiliation, and ideology has changed since the 1970s. Whereas congressional party caucuses in the past were more diverse in their religious composition, evangelical Christian senators have sorted themselves into the party that most closely resembles the values of their religious identities, leading to greater overall polarization.     

优先股之无表决权质疑

认为优先股无表决权的观点在理论上和实践中均无法成立。优先股与表决权并不存在必然关系,既存在无表决权的优先股,也存在有表决权的优先股。优先股的表决权有两种立法模式,一是授权公司决定模式,二是法定无表决权模式,优先股有无表决权既取决于其所处的法域,叉受到当事人约定的影响。授权公司决定模式较法定无表决权模式为优,应是我国优先股立法的理想选择。     

Elections and the Soviets

Elections for the local Soviets now functioning were held in March 1961. The number of Soviets elected in the USSR as a whole was 49,858, of which 7 were for territories, 107 for regions, 9 for autonomous regions, 10 for national areas, 3,401 for districts, 1,678 for towns, 343 for districts in cities, 3,061 for settlements, and 41,242 for villages.     

Testing Spatial Models of Elections: The Influence of Voters and Elites on Candidate Issue Positions

This research tests spatial models of electoral competition using survey data on state legislative candidates' policy positions and ideology in eight U.S. states. Our data support several hypotheses: 1) candidates' issue positions do not converge; 2) party elites have more extreme positions than do candidates; 3) candidate issue positioning is a function of party‐elite issue positions and union involvement in the campaign, as well as constituency characteristics; and 4) when candidates rely heavily on elite resources during their campaign, elites become more important in shaping candidate issue positions.     

Congressional Oversight Hearings and Policy Control

Oversight hearings should be an important congressional tool for controlling recalcitrant agencies, but it is not clear that this should always be equally true. The logic of principal‐agent models of legislative policy control implies that oversight might sometimes, but not always, be superfluous to said control. Here, I reintroduce oversight hearings to theories of policy control and argue that congressional committees conduct oversight hearings primarily as a response to the extent to which agencies have different policy preferences from them and as a function of their capacity to conduct hearings cheaply. I test these hypotheses using committee hearings data (Policy Agendas Project) from both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate from 1947 to 2006 and provide support for theoretical arguments about the institutional nature of legislative policymaking strategies and ultimately help clarify the role of oversight in legislative‐executive relations.     

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.     

Congressional Party Defection in American History

In this paper, we analyze the roll‐call voting behavior of House and Senate members who changed party affiliation during the course of their political careers. We analyze members who switched during the stable periods of the three major two‐party systems in American history: the Federalist‐Jeffersonian Republican system (3d to 12th Congresses), the Democratic‐Whig System (20th to 30th Congresses), and the Democratic‐Republican System (46th to 106th Congresses). Our primary findings are that the biggest changes in the roll‐call voting behavior of party defectors can be observed during periods of high ideological polarization and that party defections during the past 30 years are distinct from switches in other eras because of high polarization and the disappearance of a second dimension of ideological conflict.     

The Partisan: Carl Schmitt and Terrorism

This article critiques and expands upon the jurisprudence of law’s violence from feminist and lesbian/gay/queer perspectives. The incorporation of gender and sexuality into the jurisprudence of law’s violence, via the social experiences of women and gay men, highlights the masculine and heteronormative character of law’s violence, while bringing into view particular forms of law’s violence, and forms of extra-legal but thoroughly legitimate heterosexual male violence, that have remained invisible in previous accounts. A feminist analysis of violence also suggests that law’s regime of violence is neither totalising nor inevitable, and that possibilities for resistance, if not avoidance, do exist.     

The Strategic Use of Prisons in Partisan Gerrymandering

The census data used to redraw legislative districts counts the country's nearly 2 million prisoners in the location of their incarceration, rather than their previous place of residence. By drawing these phantom populations into districts that lean heavily toward the majority party, legislators can free up eligible voters from those districts to be distributed among neighboring marginal ones, thereby increasing that party's likelihood of winning additional seats in the state legislature. An analysis of state senate district finds that prison populations shift systematically from districts controlled by one party to districts controlled by the other following a switch in partisan control.     

Political Trust and Judicial Retention Elections

Retention elections are that part of the merit selection plan designed to hold judges accountable to the public. While more than one scholar has concluded that votes cast in a retention election are often not informed evaluations of the judge's qualifications and/or conduct on the bench, the few existing systematic empirical studies have failed to explain why people vote for or against retention. This study fills part of this void by testing the hypothesis that political trust is a major cue in judicial retention voting. In contrast to most previous work which was either limited to the appellate level or to elections in a single state, the data set consists of 1,864 retention elections held from 1964 through 1984 for major trial court judges. The national trends in political trust in the last two decades are found to be reflected in the trends in the mean vote for retention.     

GATS框架下自然人流动的法律界定及缺陷分析

自然人流动是GATS规定的提供服务的一种模式,发展中国家在此领域具有天生明显的比较优势。本文在简要回顾了乌拉圭回合的自然人流动谈判历史的基础上,详细分析了GATS框架下自然人流动的法律界定问题及其缺陷。