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The ability to veto legislation is the most important formal power of the presidency in the legislative process, and presidents' veto behavior has thus attracted a great deal of theoretical interest. Game-theoretic models of congressional—presidential interactions explain vetoes by incorporating incomplete information over the distribution of presidential or congressional types. In this article, I examine two prominent such theories, as well as a simple "noisy" extension of a complete information theory. I show that each makes strong predictions not only about vetoes themselves but also about the resulting override votes; given that overrides are so closely connected with vetoes, any valid theory of the latter must be able to successfully explain the former. I test these predictions empirically and show that support for each of these theories in presidential veto and override data from 1973 to 2008 is quite weak. This negative result suggests that current models of the veto are incomplete; I sketch some possibilities for extension in the conclusion.

AbstractHow does news about the economy influence voting decisions? We isolate the effect of the information environment from the effect of change in the underlying economic conditions themselves by taking advantage of left‐digit bias. We show that unemployment figures crossing a round‐number "milestone" cause a discontinuous increase in the amount of media coverage devoted to unemployment conditions, and we use this discontinuity to estimate the effect of attention to unemployment news on voting, holding constant the actual economic conditions on the ground. Milestone effects on incumbent U.S. governor vote shares are large and notably asymmetric: Bad milestone events hurt roughly twice as much as good milestone events help.

The level of journalistic resources dedicated to coverage of local politics is in a long-term decline in the US news media, with readership shifting to national outlets. We investigate whether this trend is demand- or supply-driven, exploiting a recent wave of local television station acquisitions by a conglomerate owner. Using extensive data on local news programming and viewership, we find that the ownership change led to (1) substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, (2) a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage, and (3) a small decrease in viewership, all relative to the changes at other news programs airing in the same media markets. These results suggest a substantial supply-side role in the trends toward nationalization and polarization of politics news, with negative implications for accountability of local elected officials and mass polarization.

Advertising expenditures in congressional campaigns are made not directly by campaigns themselves but indirectly though intermediary firms. Using a new dataset of revenues and costs of these firms, we study the markups that these firms charge candidates. We find that markups are higher for inexperienced candidates relative to experienced candidates, and PACs relative to candidates. We also find significant differences across the major parties: firms working for Republicans charge higher prices, exert less effort, and induce less responsiveness in their clients' advertising expenditures to electoral circumstances than do their Democratic counterparts. We connect this observation to the distribution of ideology among individual consulting firm employees, arguing that these higher rents incentivize consultants to work against their intrinsic ideological motivations. The internal organization of firms reflects an attempt to mitigate this conflict of interest; firms are composed of ideologically homogeneous employees, and are more likely to work for ideologically proximate clients.

We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positions do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and voting, nor with local satellite viewership. We estimate that Fox News increases Republican vote shares by 0.3 points among viewers induced into watching 2.5 additional minutes per week by variation in position. We then estimate a model of voters who select into watching slanted news, and whose ideologies evolve as a result. We use the model to assess the growth over time of Fox News influence, to quantitatively assess media-driven polarization, and to simulate alternative ideological slanting of news channels. (JEL D72, L82)

It is often said that the only constant is change itself. As time passes, the population grows, new technologies are invented, and the skills, demographics, and norms of the populace evolve. These changes, whether in isolation or in aggregate, influence the effectiveness of policy. In particular, policies designed for today's world are unlikely to provide a perfect fit tomorrow. We develop a notion of policy decay that captures this impact formally. We introduce policy decay into a paradigmatic model of legislative policymaking and show that it leads to a starkly different perspective on legislative politics. Our results upend the classic notion of gridlock and bear implications more broadly for the practice of politics. We show how a changing world impacts the power of agenda control, how it drives the dynamic path of legislation, how it reveals a novel conception of policy expertise, and how it, ultimately, provides a foundational logic to the design of bureaucracy.

We investigate whether the hiring relationships of candidates and political consulting firms better resembles the predictions of the "adversarial" or "allied" models of consultant‐party interaction. We find that the highest‐quality consultants are not allocated to the most competitive races, consultant‐candidate relationships persist even as candidates' electoral prospects change, and firms who work for challengers face a higher risk of market exit than firms working for incumbents. The market focuses entirely on win‐loss records and ignores the information on consultant performance available in candidates' vote shares. These findings depict a market driven by individual candidate, rather than aggregate party, goals.