Suchergebnisse

The American mass public abstractly supports the federal judiciary, but supports concrete alterations to the institution (e.g., term limits). We argue that some efforts to alter the institution are not exclusively punitive, but relate to broader, non-judicial orientations toward government. Using nationally representative data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we find that attitudes toward representation and which types of people ought to hold power underlie support for judicial elections. Specifically, perceived representation, believing men to be better suited to politics than women, and holding racist attitudes are related to support for appointments over elections, even when controlling for diffuse support, perceived judicial politicization, and other relevant measures regarding the judiciary. We argue such individuals wish to maintain the appointment system which has yielded perceived benefits. Additionally, political sophistication exacerbates these effects. Rather than just a way to alter courts for delivering displeasing policy, support for some judicial changes may relate to efforts to democratize, and thereby diversify, courts.

We expand on previous literature on party competition in the American states by examining competition for both state and national offices. We find significant differences in Democratic Party electoral advantage within states, along with across-state variation in changes in these differences over time. We attribute these results to movement in the partisanship and ideology of the states' citizenry. As consistency in these core political attitudes increases, parties are able to campaign and govern on messages that are more consistent across electoral levels. The result is greater consistency in party electoral performance across state and national offices.

Research on party competition in the United States suffers because existing measures do not allow for an examination of national-level competition in the states. We view this as a significant oversight, and argue that party competition in the United States must be evaluated within a federal context. Toward that end, we develop measures of partisan electoral advantage and competition based on margin of victory in state and national offices for the legislature and executive. These measures allow us to examine, for the first time, patterns of competition for both state and national offices within and across the states. The patterns seen in the data are interesting and preliminary insights promising. We believe the measure developed here will permit a more expansive and theoretically interesting examination of party competition, and that these descriptive analyses point to a wide variety of interesting future pursuits.