Ideology and Polarization Among Women State Legislators

In early work on women in Congress, scholars consistently identified a tendency among women legislators to be more liberal roll‐call voters than male copartisans. Recent changes in Congress point to the polarization of women, where Democratic women remain more liberal than Democratic men but Republican women are no different from, or more conservative than, Republican men. We use newly available state legislative roll‐call data to determine whether women state legislators are more liberal or polarized than male copartisans. We find that while Democratic women state legislators remain consistently more liberal than male copartisans in most state chambers, Republican women legislators are growing more conservative. Thus, women state legislators are increasingly polarized in most U.S. states. Legislator replacement and increasing polarization among state legislators in office contribute to this effect. We argue that polarization among women legislators has implications for the representation of women in the states.     

The Mask of Neutrality: Judicial Partisan Calculation and Legislative Redistricting

Do judges ruling on redistricting litigation increase electoral competition in congressional races while simultaneously drawing districts favoring their party's congressional candidates? I offer a novel theory of judicial partisan calculation, arguing that judges draw more competitive districts than legislatures or commissions, but that judge‐drawn districts favor the electoral interests of their copartisans. These claims are reconcilable because judges target districts held by contrapartisan legislators to maximize their copartisans’ fortunes. I find that Democratic judges draw competitive districts by adding Democratic voters to Republican‐held House constituencies. Court‐administered redistricting increases competitiveness, ostensibly due to judicial neutrality. This mask of neutrality, however, conceals sophisticated partisan calculation.     

Partisan Infighting Among House Republicans: Leaders,Factions, and Networks of Interests

Congressional parties are commonly viewed as unified legislative teams, but recent intraparty battles have revealed serious ideological divisions within the House Republican caucus. Using annual ratings from nearly 300 interest groups, we estimate the ideological locations of Republican legislators in order to map their party's factional structure. Based on the distribution of interest‐group support from 2001 to 2012, we detect three Republican factions that we characterize as worker oriented, pro‐business, and ethno‐radical. We find that Republican leaders block bills by legislators in the worker and ethno‐radical subgroups and that they advance bills by members in the corporate faction.     

Executive Decree Authority in Brazil: How Reactive Legislators Influence Policy

Abstract At first glance, wide‐ranging presidential decree authority suggests executive branch domination of legislatures. However, decree power may also be a rational delegation of authority by legislators, in accord with their political objectives. Seen in this light, the key issue for legislators is not halting decree authority but reducing the agency losses that result from delegation. This paper shows how decree authority, as practiced in Brazil, constitutes an example of rational delegation by a legislature in which seniority and policy specialization are relatively undervalued. Brazilian legislators prefer to endow presidents with broad decree power and then monitor presidents on an issue‐by‐issue basis by amending executive decrees. This method of “oversight after delegation” lowers the transaction costs of delegation and speaks to the influence of Brazilian legislators over what is typically seen as an important source of presidential power.     

When Free Traders Become Protectionists: Constituent Advocacy at the International Trade Commission

Although Members of Congress vote on few trade bills, they participate regularly in venues such as the International Trade Commission (ITC), where important trade policy decisions are made. We assert that once removed from the voting chambers of Congress, legislators are motivated overwhelmingly by the desire to advance constituents’ trade policy interests, even those that contradict the member’s established positions on trade. Utilizing an original dataset on legislator participation in antidumping cases, we find that both Democratic and Republican members advocate protection at the ITC when they have numerous firms and constituents in their district who benefit from trade restrictions, particularly when they receive sizeable financial contributions from them. Notably, self‐proclaimed free‐traders are just as likely to seek protection for their constituents as are trade opponents. Away from Capitol Hill, then, trade policymaking exhibits few partisan and ideological influences and serves as a means for members to expand political support. [Correction added on 21 August 2018, after first online publication: Abstract was added to article]     

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.     

Congressional Leadership 1965–96: A New Look at the Extremism versus Centrality Debate

Abstract An examination of the differences between the ideological positions of leaders and other members in the U.S. House of Representatives (1965–96) demonstrates that Republican leaders tend to be significantly to the right of the median Republican member and Democratic leaders tend to be significantly to the left of the median Democratic member. Furthermore, leaders from both parties tend to be ideologically located near the mode of their party's ideological distribution. These empirical results have implications for issues such as party polarization, conditional party government, and the possibility of separating out party and ideology.     

Corruption,Party Leaders,and Candidate Selection: Evidence from Italy

Research indicates that voters are not particularly effective at removing corrupt politicians from office, in part because voters make decisions on the basis of many competing factors. Party leaders are much more single-minded than voters and will choose to deselect implicated legislators if it means maintaining a positive party reputation and improving the odds of winning a legislative majority. We examine renominations to Italy’s legislature in two periods marked by corruption. We compare these renomination patterns with those from the prior legislature, when corruption lacked political salience. Our analysis shows that incumbent renominations are negatively associated with the number of press mentions that link the incumbent to corruption—but only when corruption is salient to the public. Our study highlights the importance of party leaders in forcing malfeasant legislators out of office—and reducing corruption—and redirects attention from voters to political elites as a critical channel in enforcing democratic accountability.     

Agenda Control,Majority Party Power,and the House Committee on Rules, 1937–52

The role of the U.S. House Rules Committee is consequential for theories of congressional parties, yet its role during the “conservative coalition” era is not well understood. We systematically analyzed the politics surrounding all special rules considered in Democratic Congresses from 1937 to 1952. We found that Rules repeatedly used its agenda power to push to the floor conservative initiatives that were opposed by the Democratic administration, the Rules Committee chair, and most northern Democrats, especially in Congresses that followed Republican election gains. The 44 conservative initiatives we identified include many of the most important policy issues considered during the period. Our findings challenge the idea that the majority party has consistently enjoyed a veto over which initiatives reach the floor, and they underscore the limits of roll‐call‐vote analysis in assessments of agenda control.     

Female and Minority Judicial Nominees: President's Delight and Senators' Dismay?

Female and minority judicial nominations take longer and are less likely to be confirmed, yet presidents eagerly seek such nominations. I account for this puzzle by building a model in which senators face costs for opposing female and minority nominees. I predict that such nominations are more likely when the gridlock interval is large. Using appellate nominations from 1977 to 2004, I find that Republican presidents are more likely to pursue these nominations during periods of high gridlock. Furthermore, accounting for the gridlock interval erases the differences in confirmation duration and success between female/minority nominees and white male nominees.     

Campaign fund-raising abuses and money laundering in recent U.S. elections: Criminal networks in action

This study describes some of the campaign fundraising abuses perpetuated by Republican and Democratic operatives in connection with recent U.S. elections. Efforts to conceal the source of campaign contributions or to evade contribution and spending limits involved a variety of money laundering techniques including the use of shell companies, straw donors, and the funnelling of money through political action committees and non profit tax-exempt organizations. In addition to the brazen sale of political access, some of the more serious infractions involved the infusion of foreign money into the Republican and Democratic National Committees as well as the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign. The author concludes the crimes that were committed are explained best as organized criminality manifested as complex networks of patron-client relationships.     

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.     

Why So Few (Republican) Women? Explaining the Partisan Imbalance of Women in the U.S. Congress

This article examines why the percentage of Democratic women in Congress has increased dramatically since the 1980s while the percentage of Republican women has barely grown. The central claim is that ideological conformity with the party influences the decision to run for office, and I suggest that partisan polarization has discouraged ideological moderates in the pipeline from pursuing a congressional career. The findings have gendered implications because, first, Republican women in the pipeline have historically been to the left of their male counterparts, and second, there is a dearth of conservative women in the pipeline.     

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.     

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 Internet as a New Factor in State and Public Development

On 14 March, when the State Duma introduced a bill that would have instituted a moratorium on executions, it almost had to dissolve itself—not completely, of course, for a quorum was maintained, but almost. Before the bill was put up for discussion, the LDPR [Liberal Democratic Party of Russia] faction (50 people) left (on private business), and during the final vote 193 deputies abstained; whether they went for a walk or simply stayed in their seats but did not press the button is unknown, but they refused to deal with one of the questions that is most important for Russia's future (there were 176 votes "against" and 75 "for" the bill).     

The Election of African American State Legislators in the Modern South

This study is the most comprehensive analysis of the election of black state legislators in the American South. We start with the election of Leroy Johnson to the Georgia Senate in 1962, the first African American to win a state legislative seat in the modern South. We also document the election of all subsequent African Americans who were the first to enter their southern state legislative chambers. Next, we assess the factors influencing the election of southern black state legislators from the 1970s through 2015. Because of notable long-term changes to the southern electorate and alterations in the racial composition of legislative districts, there has been substantial variation in the likelihood of electing black lawmakers. Our final analysis highlights the undeniable reality and broader significance that the increasing share of southern African American state legislators has occurred at the same time that Republican representation has grown at a greater rate.     

Rediscovering the public/private divide in EU private law

This article explores the role of the public/private divide within EU private law. It shows that although EU private law cuts across the boundaries of public and private law, the conceptual distinction between these well‐established categories does matter within it and may lead to better law‐making in the EU more generally. The legal grammar of a particular EU harmonisation measure—which can be more “public” or “private”—may have important implications for the position of private parties at national level, for the CJEU's likely activism in this context, and ultimately for the measure's ability to realise its policy goals. Therefore, instead of ignoring the existing differences between public and private law, EU law should explicitly adopt the public/private law language in its discourse, without, however, introducing any sharp divide between these two areas.     

List of Contributors

In this paper we extend earlier work on the effects of disparate retirement rates on the partisan composition of the contemporary House of Representatives (1954–2006). Gilmour and Rothstein had posited that the Grand Old Party's (GOP) ‘permanent minority’ status in the House between 1954 and 1994 was the principal cause of this differential. Contrary to expectations, we find that even after their takeover of the House in 1995, Republican Members of Congress (MCs) continued to leave the chamber voluntarily at higher rates than their Democratic colleagues, both to retire completely from public life and to seek higher office. Ceteris paribus, even as the GOP made considerable offsetting gains in its ability to re-elect incumbents and to retain open seats, this continued disparity significantly attenuated the size of their legislative majority and contributed to their ousting as the majority party in the elections of 2006. We conclude the paper with some speculations regarding the reasons for the persistence of relatively high rates of Republican retirements.     

Partisan Effects of Legislative Term Limits

Term limits remain a popular policy reform and have generated a great deal of scholarship as a result. Although many predicted that term limits would benefit the Republican party, the literature finds no marked partisan effects, possibly because termed‐out legislators have largely been replaced by copartisans. This article demonstrates that term limits have indeed had partisan effects—just not on electoral outcomes. Term limits have caused a significant reallocation of institutional power from Democrats to Republicans (as measured by contributions from access‐oriented interest groups), in large part because they have removed more senior Democrats than Republicans. The partisan effects of term limits therefore point to the institutional value of seniority.