Winning Coalition Formation in the U.S. Senate: The Effects of Legislative Decision Rules and Agenda Change

Recent empirical work has brought a renewed attention to the effect congressional rules of procedure have on the size of winning coalitions. Specifically, scholars have posited that legislative success hinges on the support of legislators identified by institutionally defined decision rules. Under these theories, supermajority decision rules in the U.S. Senate lead to larger, more inclusive coalitions on final passage. In this article, I reevaluate these claims by controlling for changes in the legislative agenda and the roll‐call voting record. I find that the aggregate size of winning coalitions is highly responsive to the underlying legislative agenda, the size of the Senate's majority party, and the manner in which researchers treat unrecorded votes. Further, my findings suggest that any connection between changes in the Senate's voting rules and the size of winning coalitions is spurious. Eric Schickler and Gregory J. Wawro have authored a response to this article, and Anthony J. Madonna has authored a rejoinder to this response. Both are available as Supporting Information .     

US Policy and the Nuclear Weapons Ambitions of the “Axis of Evil” Countries*

This article examines US policy as it pertains to the nuclear weapons objectives of what the Bush administration identified as the countries making up the “axis of evil,” pre-war Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Having drawn the same conclusion as that appearing in the 2000 report of the Project for the New American Century, which alleged the involvement of these countries in illicit activities relating to nuclear weapons, the Bush administration initiated an overtly hostile and accusatory policy toward each of these nations after 9/11.Undeterred by the paucity of evidence and the failure to find a nuclear weapons program (or any weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq, the Bush administration has remained relentlessly focused on the nuclear weapons ambitions of North Korea and Iran, all the while ignoring or minimizing diplomatic efforts that are not hegemonic and confrontational. This paper stresses that for the past several years the Bush administration has not hesitated in using questionable and uncertain information relating to the nuclear weapons objectives of the “axis of evil” countries, even though it has demonstrated no interest in eliminating US nuclear weapons as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligates it to do.     

General election forecasting in Britain: A comparison of three simple models

The advent of three-party politics in Britain with the February 1974 general election has introduced an uncertainty into electoral and parliamentary politics unprecedented in the post-war period. In these circumstances, election forecasting has assumed a special interest and significance for academics, politicians, political commentators, and the like. This article presents and assesses the performance of three forecasting instruments, the ‘incremental’, ‘opinion polling’ and ‘economic’ models. They are estimated over the period 1951–1983 and are then used to predict the share of the vote won by the governing, opposition and Alliance parties in the 1987 general election. All are successful in the sense that they forecast the continuation of the Conservative party's electoral dominance. with Labour and the Alliance a poor second and third. Only the economic model, however, generates a reasonable forecast of the gap separating the major parties and it is used to predict the distribution of parliamentary seats between them. It is seen to be substantially more accurate for the government than for the opposition, which is itself a reflection of the uncertainty introduced into British politics by the emergence of a significant third party in recent elections.