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The title of Laurel Harbridge's book Is Bipartisanship Dead? poses an important question, even if the answer is ultimately ambiguous. Although Harbridge persuasively concludes that "bipartisanship is not dead" (170), this book provides plenty of reason to worry about its health.

This study demonstrates that unconditional blocking of bills opposed by a majority of the majority party--as implied by the party cartel model and advocated by former Speaker Dennis Hastert--can produce conditions in which the majority party loses popular support and loses elections. The theoretical analysis and empirical results imply that the use of negative agenda power to block bills is circumscribed by this risk of electoral defeat. As a result, the opportunity for effective negative agenda control is conditional on majority party issue advantage, party polarization, and the distribution of status quo locations. In particular, majority party roll rates should sometimes be nonzero, blocking increases the odds of majority party defeat in House of Representatives elections, and policy change is most likely on issues with status quo that the model suggests are the riskiest to block.

Identifying policy status quo locations is a precondition for testing key predictions of many spatial models of legislative politics, but such measures have proved to be extremely difficult to construct. This study applies a novel technique that measures policy locations in relation to legislators' preferences. The resulting status quo estimates allow for a direct test of the policy consequences predicted by pivotal politics and party cartel theories of legislative politics. The empirical tests indicate that parties interact with pivotal politics to contribute to policy gridlock and shape policy change. By bringing pressure to bear on pivotal politics "pivots" and by blocking policy changes that would "roll" the party, parties increase the range of policies subject to gridlock in the American political system.

Principal agent theory implies that legislators will delegate power to a leader only when they need the leader's help and the leader can be expected to provide satisfactory help if granted power. This study is the first to evaluate the implied interaction between legislators' need for help and the degree to which legislators and leaders have similar preferences. By analyzing the Speaker's powers in the U.S. states, I arrived at three key conclusions. First, institutional leadership power responds to the interaction between preference alignment and policymaking challenges. Traditionally expected effects only appear when both alignment and challenges are relatively high. Second, professionalization causes weaker leadership powers. Finally, electoral competition correlates with stronger appointment, committee, and resource powers, but weaker procedural powers.

Political scientists often suppose that the informational model of legislative organization predicts an absence of committee outliers. In fact, the model predicts that committee outliers will be more common when the floor is more uncertain than its committees. Data limitations have largely prevented testing this uncertainty‐outlier prediction, until now. For this article, I investigated whether or not the informational model correctly predicts under what scenarios outliers will be more frequent. As predicted, more uncertainty is associated with more committee outliers in U.S. state legislatures. Legislatures in which the floor is less informed than the committees are more likely to have committee outliers.

The truel, or three way duel, has distinct properties from duels: the weakest contestant often has a very good chance to win. This paper explores application of the logic of truels to election campaigns involving negative advertising. We show that negative campaigning that pits the leading candidates against each other can create circumstances in which the third (or worse) place candidate wins in one or more of the Nash equilibria of the game. We then study whether the simulated existence of an opportunity for Nash equilibrium victory by third place candidates predicts such outcomes in U.S. state-wide elections.