The Responsible Party Government Model in House and Senate Elections

Responsible party government theory requires that voters hold parties electorally accountable for their performance in control of government. Existing literature suggests that voters do this only to a limited extent—holding the presidential party's candidates responsible for government performance on Election Day. While this method of voting may hold the executive accountable for his performance, it is not really an effective way to hold the party in control of Congress accountable for its performance. The method falls short particularly when Congress is controlled by a different party than the president, but also whenever a Congress controlled by the same party pursues policies different from the president's. Using surveys of voters leaving the polls in the 1990, 1994, and 1998 midterm congressional elections, this study tests whether voters' evaluations of Congress's job performance also affect their support for majority party candidates in House and Senate elections, during both unified and divided government .     

Manufactured Responsiveness: The Impact of State Electoral Laws on Unified Party Control of the Presidency and House of Representatives, 1840–1940

The modern history of divided government in America suggests that the framers succeeded in creating a government unresponsive to popular passions. Yet in the nineteenth century the party winning the presidency almost always captured control of the House of Representatives. Why and how could nineteenth century national elections be so responsive that they resemble parliamentary outcomes? We identify electoral institutions present in the states that directly linked congressional elections to presidential coattails. Specifically, we estimate the impact of state ballot laws and the strategic design of congressional districts on presidential coattail voting from 1840 to 1940. We find that presidential elections, as mediated by state electoral laws, strongly account for unified party control of the House and the presidency throughout the nineteenth century.     

Federal Political Fragmentation in Mexico's 2015 Elections

The 2015 congressional, gubernatorial and mayoral elections in Mexico display the continuation of political changes that started 15 years ago. The most notorious change in 2015 is the electoral success of non-mainstream parties, which have increased their vote share vis-à-vis the mainstream parties, the Party of National Action (PAN), the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), and the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD). These mainstream parties lost important vote shares, although the PRI has shown itself to be more resilient to electoral volatility than the other parties. The increase of volatility in Mexico favours the alternation of the parties in power; however, it also increases political fragmentation. This article argues that in a context of growing electoral volatility and political fragmentation, presidential authority is weakened, giving rise to the dispersion of power to other levels of government. Furthermore, the article suggests that party volatility presents important territorial variation in Mexico.     

The Party's Primary Preferences: Race,Gender, and Party Support of Congressional Primary Candidates

Party support has a strong influence on candidate success in the primary. What remains unexplored is whether party actions during the primary are biased along racial and gender lines. Using candidate demographic data at the congressional level and measures of party support for primary candidates, we test whether parties discriminate against women and minority candidates in congressional primaries and also whether parties are strategic in their support of minority candidates in certain primaries. Our findings show parties are not biased against minority candidates and also that white women candidates receive more support from the Democratic Party than do other types of candidates. Our findings also suggest that parties do not appear to strategically support minority candidates in districts with larger populations of minorities. Lastly, we also find no significant differences in the effects of party support on the likelihood of success in the primary by candidate race or gender.     

Divided Government,Legislative Productivity,and Policy Change in the USA and France

The concept of “divided government” is more complicated than scholars have allowed. In the USA, truly unified government, where the president enjoys a filibuster‐proof majority in the Senate as well as a majority in the House, is rare. In France, truly unified government has been more common, but divided government has also occurred several times. Democratic governance requires that parties address important issues and they do so regardless of the patterns of institutional control. Nevertheless, policy changes or important laws are affected by the higher level of institutional friction associated with divided government. Looking at both the USA and France, we find that periods of unified government show higher levels of production of important laws in the USA, but we find no difference for overall legislative productivity.     

Sources of Split-ticket Voting in the 1988 American Elections

Divided partisan control of the American national government is not a new phenomenon. Of the 41 presidents from Washington to Bush, 20 saw the House of Representatives under the control of the opposing party. While divided control of government is nothing new, however, its recent causes are. Before 1955, divided control was due to election reversals in the off year - easily interpretable in terms of negative retrospective judgements or switched policy choices on the part of the electorate. After 1955, on the other hand, four of the seven presidents were elected with a House of Representatives controlled by the opposing party. By analysing data collected during the 1988 national elections, we distinguish between congressional and presidential ticket-splitting and find their causes to be complex. It is caused, in part, by congressional incumbency and ballot formats, but wider social forces are also responsible for ticket-splitting.     

The Congress and fiscal policy

Although the common belief is that the Congress has paid little attention to fiscal policy, the same kinds of political-economic models which have been used to explain presidential budgetary policy may be used equally well to explain congressional budgetary behavior. The Congress' fiscal policy appears to be systematically sensitive to both economic and political factors. Changes in the unemployment rate have a major impact on congressional budgetary policy. As for political factors, the President's lead is followed most closely on revenue proposals and not at all on the expenditure side. The electoral cycle, in particular the off-year congressional election year, is also important; inducing larger deficits and smaller increases in revenues. When the influences on congressional fiscal behavior are compared with those on presidential behavior, the sources of the generally more expansionary congressional fiscal policy are identified. Congressional budget deficits increase in response to increased rates of unemployment but are insensitive to increases in inflation. In contrast, presidential budgets are heavily influenced by inflation and the growth in personal income — increases in each resulting in smaller proposed deficits — as well as by unemployment rates. In years in which both unemployment and inflation are increasing, the combination of the two (assuming a one percentage point change in each) implies an increase in the congressional deficit of $6.7 billion but a decrease in the president's proposed deficit of $2.5 billion. The implications of this study are a challenge to the literature which makes the President the central actor in macro-economic policy.     

Legislative Capacity and Executive Unilateralism

This article develops a theory of presidential unilateralism in which both ideological divergence with Congress and legislative capacity influence the president's use of executive orders. We argue that when Congress is less capable of constraining the executive, the president will issue more executive orders during periods of divided government. Conversely, in periods of high legislative capacity, the president is less likely to issue executive orders when faced with an opposed Congress. Based on an examination of institutional changes, we identify years prior to the mid‐1940s as characterized by low congressional capacity and the subsequent period as characterized by high capacity. Testing the theory between 1905 and 2013, we find strong support for these predictions and demonstrate that legislative capacity conditions the role of ideological disagreement in shaping presidential action. Overall, this article deepens our current understanding of the dynamics of separation‐of‐powers politics and the limits of executive power.     

Competing Principals, Political Institutions, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting

Almost all legislators are subordinate to party leadership within their assemblies. Institutional factors shape whether, and to what degree, legislators are also subject to pressure from other principals whose demands may conflict with those of party leaders. This article presents a set of hypotheses on the nature of competing pressures driven by formal political institutions and tests the hypotheses against a new dataset of legislative votes from across 19 different countries. Voting unity is lower where legislators are elected under rules that provide for intraparty competition than where party lists are closed, marginally lower in federal than unitary systems, and the effects on party unity of being in government differ in parliamentary versus presidential systems. In the former, governing parties are more unified than the opposition, win more, and suffer fewer losses due to disunity. In systems with elected presidents, governing parties experience no such boosts in floor unity, and their legislative losses are more apt to result from cross-voting.     

The Continuity of Change: Public Budgeting and Finance Reforms over 70 Years

Fiscal management in the national government remains just as important to public administration in 2007 as it was in 1937. Arthur E. Buck and Harvey C. Mansfield's critique of the fragmentation among congressional, bureaucratic, and presidential interests in budgeting and accountability is a classic for those who argue for stronger presidential power and capacity within American government. This analysis draws the field's attention to what we can learn about the politics of management reform from the successes and limitations of this landmark study—lessons that will serve the field well as it confronts new issues and reform agendas in the future.     

Recipes for Pork and Other Delicious Offerings for the New Administration

Is pork produced by feeble budgetary processes? By fixing weak budgetary procedures, can wasteful spending and opportunities for corruption be reduced? This essay looks at three varieties of pork: earmarked, ad hoc, and presidential. What can be done to curb the excesses of each one? By examining the problem of congressional earmarking, this timely article proposes a new process for controlling “earmarked” pork by supporting a new (constitutional) presidential line‐item veto/reprogramming. “Ad hoc pork,” generated by emergency or stimulus bills, is also analyzed. Its downsides can be fixed, according to the essay, by creating a preapproved roadmap for the appropriations process, thereby enhancing the quality of spending oversight. Finally, “presidential pork” derives from chief executives rewarding congressional allies and from government agencies allocating program resources so as to engender support from congressional members. This third variety of pork can be controlled if agencies improve their operational transparency plus strengthen their procedures for selecting projects. What happens when you put good people in a bad place, good apples in a bad barrel? Do the apples change the barrel, or does the barrel change the apples? —Philip Zimbardo, 2008     

Who's Responsible for the Economy? The Formation and Consequences of Responsibility Attributions

The concept of responsibility lies at the heart of theories of democratic accountability. This article represents the first attempt to explicitly model attributions of presidential versus congressional responsibility for the economy. The article investigates the extent to which contextual and individual-level factors influence citizens' attributions of responsibility for the economy and how, in turn, such judgments shape their political evaluations. Employing a multinomial probit model of attributional choice, I find that responsibility judgments are shaped to varying degrees by economic ideology, perceptions of institutional context, and partisanship, although the effects of partisanship are not uniform across political parties. The results demonstrate that responsibility attributions are politically consequential and moderate the effects of economic perceptions on presidential and congressional approval. Finally, the results suggest that the effects of responsibility attributions in the sanctioning process are not invariant across the target of institutional evaluation .     

Realigning forces in the United States elections of 1984

Major shifts in party identification, presidential and congressional vote occurred in the United States between 1956 and 1984. National survey evidence demonstrates that a marked transformation in the social bases of partisan choice also took place during this period. Four alternative theories are offered as plausible explanations for these trends. The best fitting explanation involves judgments about the past performance of the parties and candidates. The analysis suggests that the outcome of the 1984 election was not simply a reflection of Reagan's personal popularity. The election was heavily influenced by changes in the social bases of party support, thus raising broader implications for the party system.     

Policy making in divided government: A pivotal actors model with party discipline

This article presents a formal model of policy decision-making in an institutional framework of separation of powers in which the main actors are pivotal political parties with voting discipline. The basic model previously developed from pivotal politics theory for the analysis of the United States lawmaking is here modified to account for policy outcomes and institutional performances in other presidential regimes, especially in Latin America. Legislators' party indiscipline at voting and multi-partism appear as favorable conditions to reduce the size of the equilibrium set containing collectively inefficient outcomes, while a two-party system with strong party discipline is most prone to produce ‘gridlock', that is, stability of socially inefficient policies. The article provides a framework for analysis which can induce significant revisions of empirical data, especially regarding the effects of situations of (newly defined) unified and divided government, different decision rules, the number of parties and their discipline. These implications should be testable and may inspire future analytical and empirical work.     

Retrospective voting and party support at elections: credit and blame for government and opposition

Retrospective voting is arguably one of the most important mechanisms of representative democracy, and whether or not the public holds the government accountable for its policy performance has been extensively studied. In this paper, we test whether retrospective voting extends to parties in the opposition, that is whether and how parties’ past performance evaluations affect their vote, regardless of whether they were in government or in opposition. Taking advantage of a rich set of questions embedded in a representative German national elections panel, we update our knowledge on the retrospective voting mechanism by modeling retrospective voting at the party level. The findings indicate that the incumbent status is not the only criterion for retrospective voting, ultimately suggesting that both government and opposition parties can expect credit and blame for their conduct and this should provide some impetus for responsive performance of all parties.     

Is government good for Greens? Comparing the electoral effects of government participation in Western and East-Central Europe

Abstract.  Examining the record of Green parties that have been involved in government at national level, two distinct pictures emerge. While the electoral fortunes of Green parties in East-Central Europe sharply declined after their stint in government, Green parties in Western Europe on the whole have not fared badly, with most experiencing gains in support. This article seeks to address the variety of factors that could account for different Green electoral fortunes. Among the approaches considered are economic voting, environmental issue salience, portfolio allocation, policy impact and strategic voting. While economic and environmental background factors clearly were important in the East-Central European cases, they are less useful in explaining variation between the West European experiences. The ability of Greens to improve their perceived policy competence and the profile of their leading politicians has helped them benefit from a period in office. Most crucially, Greens can benefit from strategic voting where a Green vote comes to represent support for the government as a whole. The main conclusion is that there are two paths to post-incumbency success: either Greens try to remain distant from taking full government responsibility, thus deflecting any electoral costs of incumbency, or they embrace government and the chance of demonstrating their competence fully to survive or fall with the government as a whole.     

An Analysis of Presidential Preferences in the Distribution of Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities

Critics regarded the selection of urban empowerment zones and enterprise communities by Secretary Cisneros in 1994 as sympathetic to President Clinton's considerations. However, the secretary countered that cities were chosen based on their ability to revitalize their communities successfully, as outlined in their applications. To determine whether the secretary responded to top-down presidential preferences, data from the complete list of applications is used to test four hypotheses derived from principal—agent theory. The results of the logistic regression models do not validate the significance of the presidential variables (for instance, presidential support score for each city's congressional delegation, marginal districts, and 1992 state vote for President Clinton). Rather, many of the nonpresidential variables (community participation, size of the empowerment zone or enterprise community, and poverty) were significant in supporting the secretary's contention.     

Political Marketing Management of Parliament Under the Presidential Government System: A Lesson Learned from the Indonesia House of Representative Post–New Order Soeharto

Modern political marketing management of parties, government, and parliament have gradually taken place within and across democratic countries ruled under either the parliamentary government or presidential government systems. Little attention, however, has been directed to the extent to which modern political marketing management of parliament has taken place within countries run under the presidential system of government, especially Indonesia. As led by hypothetical-inductive approach, this work has been specifically directed to explore (1) the dynamic exchanges and interactions; (2) the nature and structure of political market arenas; (3) types of political products; and (4) models of political marketing management of the Indonesian parliament/the Indonesian House of Representatives. This work explores the extent to which institutional marketing management strategies have been advanced by the Indonesian Parliament/the Indonesian House of Representatives since Post–New Order Soeharto up to the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) government era (2004 to 2014).     

Parties and Partisanship: A 40-Year Retrospective

The study of political parties and voter partisanship has come full circle in 4 decades. During the 1960s and 1970s numerous scholars advanced the thesis of party decline, contending that party organizations had disintegrated, party influence in government had plummeted, and voter partisanship had eroded. The 1980s and 1990s saw a turnaround in scholarly judgments, however, as first party organizations, then party in government, and finally voter partisanship appeared to strengthen. This article reviews the evidence for the downs and ups of parties, suggesting that the evidence of party resurgence is more equivocal than often realized. The parties subfield currently lacks the theory and theoretical sensitivity that enables us to interpret ambiguous empirical evidence. This contrasts with the congressional subfield where the issues now confronting the parties subfield were recognized a decade ago.     

REMOBILIZING THE AMERICAN ELECTORATE

Registration barriers have been under sustained assault since the Ken- nedy Administration, yet participation in elections continues to decline. By the 1980s turnout in presidential and congressional elections was below what it was in 1960. The demographic correlates of participation–age, education and roots within the community–have also grown stronger, predicting to an increased turnout. Registration procedures are important and substantial changes in such practices are recommended. Without the reforms of the last generation, it is probable that turnout would have decreased even more substantially. However, the principal barriers to full participation are the quality and content of contemporary American politics. Non-participation is a threat to democratic government, yet the disintegration of the center in politics, the failure to exercise leadership or to offer relevant candidacies and policy alternatives, the weakening of the political parties, the unresponsiveness of political institutions, the trivialization of politics through the media have all contributed to public cynicism and disinterest. The need is to find new and more responsive alternatives for public involvement in governance.