Voter response to congressional campaigns: new?techniques for analyzing aggregate electoral behavior

Scholarship on congressional elections typically analyzes either the sum or the division of the major party vote at the district level. Our main innovation is to model the votes received by each candidate as a separate dependent variable, utilizing statistical methods developed to analyze multiparty elections. Because we are dealing with a substantive area in which endogeneity problems are rampant, we synthesize an instrumental variables approach with a “compositional data” model. This approach allows one to study the mobilizing and persuasive effects of congressional campaigns at the aggregate level.     

Family Business or Social Problem? The Cost of Unreported Domestic Violence

Social interest in problems such as domestic violence is typically motivated by concerns regarding equity, rather than efficiency. However, we document that taking steps to reduce domestic violence by reporting it yields substantial benefits to external parties. Specifically, we find that although children exposed to as‐yet‐unreported domestic violence reduce the achievement of their classroom peers, these costs disappear completely once the parent reports the violence to the court. This suggests that the public has an interest in helping families to overcome their problems in general and to report domestic violence in particular. It also suggests that social and judicial interventions may help combat negative peer effects in schools.     

Proportional Representation and the Framers

Techniques for conducting elections developed since 1800 have raised a question about the soundness of the American framers’ majoritarianism. John Stuart Mill notably argued that the framers’ desire to reward merit, as opposed to party loyalty, would be better served by a system of proportional representation that gave deserving minorities a voice. This article considers the likelihood that a system such as Mill proposed would have the results he hoped for; it concludes that such a system is more likely to worsen problems with the existing system of representation than to solve them.