Suchergebnisse

AbstractInterest group literature suggests reformer advocacy groups, seeking policy change and innovation, are more likely to secure policy victory in local government. Entrenched advocacy groups, favoring current policies, are better suited to win policy battles at the state level. Consequently, entrenched groups have pushed state legislatures to limit local governments' decision authorities through preemption across a wide range of public‐interest issues including tobacco use, gun control, marriage rights, and climate change. Yet few studies have considered how competing advocacy groups strategically frame their agenda in preemption debates. We draw on the "scope of conflict" literature to show that opposing camps vary in their issue definition, relational strategies, and institutional frames. For example, while entrenched advocates focus on the main issue under debate, reformer advocates link multiple issues together. Our study case is preemption legislation that prohibits local governments from banning energy fuels like natural gas in new buildings. We use computational text analysis and descriptive inference to analyze state committee testimony of 117 advocacy groups. Results raise important questions about the effectiveness of conflict expansion strategies in venues like committee systems and provide considerations for reformer advocates in their efforts to secure state support and build clean energy campaigns.

Recent work on American presidential elections suggests that voters engage in anticipatory balancing, which occurs when voters split their ticket in order to moderate collective policy outcomes by forcing agreement among institutions controlled by opposing parties. We use the 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate runoffs, which determined whether Democrats would have unified control of the federal government given preceding November victories by President-elect Biden and House Democrats, to evaluate support for anticipatory balancing. Leveraging an original survey of Georgia voters, we find no evidence of balancing within the general electorate and among partisans across differing model specifications. We use qualitative content analysis of voter electoral runoff intentions to support our findings and contextualize the lack of evidence for balancing withan original analysis showing the unprecedented partisan nature of contemporary Senate elections since direct-election began in 1914.

AbstractRecent work has pioneered the use of expert surveys to estimate cross-national party positions in a common ideological space. In this paper, we report findings from an original dataset designed to evaluate bridging strategies between European and American party placements. Specifically, we compare the use of "anchoring vignettes" (fictional party platforms) with an alternative approach that asks comparativist scholars who live in the US (whom we call transatlantic or TA experts) to place parties and parties in their country of expertise on a series of issues scales. The results provide an optimistic assessment of the ability of TA experts to serve as valid bridges across the Atlantic. The resulting cross-comparable estimates of party positions show instances of both convergence and divergence between American and European party systems, including parallels between systems on the cross-cutting issue of international economic integration.

For decades, datasets on national-level elections have contributed to knowledge on what shapes national party systems. More recently, datasets on elections at the district level have advanced research on subnational party competition. Yet, to our knowledge, no publicly accessible dataset with observations of the party system at both national and district levels exists, limiting the ease with which cross-level comparisons can be made. To fill this gap, we release two corresponding datasets, the National Level Party Systems dataset and the District Level Party Systems dataset, where the unit of analysis is the party system within either the national or district jurisdiction. More than 50 elections in the two datasets are overlapping, meaning they include observations for a single election at both the district and national levels. In addition to conventional measures such as the effective number of parties, we also include underutilized variables, such as the size of the largest party, list type, and the vote shares for presidential candidates in corresponding elections.

Abstract
Research on political control over government bureaucracy has primarily focused on direct exercises of power such as appointments, funding, agency design, and procedural rules. In this analysis, we extend this literature to consider politicians who leverage their institutional standing to influence the decisions of local field officials over whom they have no explicit authority. Using the case of the US Forest Service (USFS), we investigate whether field-level decisions are associated with the political preferences of individual congressional representatives. Our sample encompasses 7,681 resource extraction actions initiated and analyzed by 107 USFS field offices between 2005 and 2018. Using hierarchical Bayesian regression, we show that under periods of economic growth and stability, field offices situated in the districts of congressional representatives who oppose environmental regulation initiate more extractive actions (timber harvest, oil and gas drilling, grazing) and conduct less rigorous environmental reviews than field offices in the districts of representatives who favor environmental regulation. By extending existing theories about interactions between politicians and bureaucrats to consider informal means of influence, this work speaks to (1) the role of local political interests in shaping agency-wide policy outcomes and (2) the importance of considering informal and implicit means of influence that operate in concert with explicit control mechanisms to shape bureaucratic behavior.

Key party goals serve to advance a policy brand and maximize seats in the legislature. This book offers a theory of how political parties assign their elected members -- their "personnel" -- to specialized legislative committees to serve collective organizational goals, developing the notion of "party personnel strategies".

This paper introduces eight country‐level datasets with >50,000 observations that can be used to analyze novel comparative questions concerning party personnel strategies—how parties recruit candidates and allocate members across party, legislative, and cabinet positions. We make these datasets public to inspire comparative research, especially from an electoral systems perspective; electoral systems shape constituency representation and influence how parties recruit candidates and organize members in legislative and government bodies. In this paper, we first briefly review the relevant literature on electoral nomination and post‐election appointment and then describe our motivations for constructing multi‐country datasets that can be used to further comparative research. To illustrate the possibilities in these new datasets, we show how recruitment and placement of parliamentarians with particular personal characteristics correlates with their placement onto specific committees and cabinet posts. A conclusion identifies other areas of research that might benefit from using the party personnel datasets.

Foundations of Canadian Political Behaviour aims to place contemporary Canadian electoral politics in comparative perspective, particularly with respect to its peers among the established democracies of western Europe and North America. The book pays tribute to political scientist Richard Johnston and his diverse contributions to the study of Canadian politics and electoral politics in general. Presenting original empirical research by leading Canadian and international scholars, the volume is organized around the three themes that animate Johnston's nearly five decades of scholarship: the impact of electoral and party systems on political conflict, change and persistence in the social foundations of party competition, and the role of election campaigns in voting behaviour. Chapters utilize diverse approaches, including quantitative analysis of survey data and electoral statistics, experimentation, systematic analysis of media content, historical narrative, and critical conceptual analyses. The book is anchored in general theoretical concerns; half of the chapters centre on Canadian cases, while half highlight key comparators including the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom