Eric Mcghee
Biographic Data
| ID | 1598533 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Mcghee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcghee |
| SIGNATURE | MCGHEE E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Public Policy Institute of California |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4524-9865 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 306 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Vote-by-mail policy and the 2020 presidential election
Mail voting became unusually controversial in the 2020 presidential election. Many observers, including former President Trump, believed that more accessible vote by mail would encourage higher turnout at the expense of Republicans. While the literature has tested some of these claims, it has not offered a more comprehensive causal assessment of vote-by-mail policy, nor has any study looked at these questions in the context of the extraordinary 2…
Districts for a New Decade—Partisan Outcomes and Racial Representation in the 2021–22 Redistricting Cycle
This article provides an overview of the new congressional and state legislative districts that were drawn around the country during the 2021–2022 redistricting cycle. We provide background on the redistricting landscape, most notably the changing federal role in both partisan and minority representation. We also discuss the process used to draw the new districts in each state. We then provide an empirical look at partisan fairness, competitivene…
Partisan Gerrymandering and Political Science
Recent years have seen a tremendous surge of public interest in partisan gerrymandering, including robust reform efforts and multiple high-profile court cases. Political scientists have played an important role in this debate, reaching an unusually high level of public engagement. Yet this public-facing period has to some extent obscured promising avenues for future research within the discipline. I review the history of political science and red…
Has the Top Two Primary Elected More Moderates
Party polarization is perhaps the most significant political trend of the past several decades of American politics. Many observers have pinned hopes on institutional reforms to reinvigorate the political center. The Top Two primary is one of the most interesting and closely-watched of these reforms: a radically open primary system that removes much of the formal role for parties in the primary election and even allows for two candidates of the s…
Reform in the Canadian Parliament and the US Congress: Institutional Choices and Member Power
A spate of recent work on the Canadian Parliament highlights the importance of constituency pressures in understanding the legislative behavior of individual Members of Parliament (MPs). In light of this renaissance, we reexamine decisions by Canadian Liberal Party MPs to defy Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his cabinet by supporting party-weakening reform in 2002. More specifically, we model votes on the question of selecting committee chairs t…
Evaluations of the 2014 Midterm Election Forecasts
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Kingmakers or Cheerleaders? Party Power and the Causal Effects of Endorsements
When parties make endorsements in primary elections, does the favored candidate receive a real boost in his or her vote share, or do parties simply pick the favorites who are already destined to win? To answer this question, we draw on two research designs aimed at isolating the causal effect of Democratic Party endorsements in California’s 2012 primary election. First, we conduct a survey experiment in which we randomly assign a party endorsemen…
Constitutional Design and 2014 Senate Election Outcomes
A common observation about the 2014 Senate elections is that one advantage the Republicans had was that the set of states holding elections tilted Republican in partisanship. In this article, we quantify that advantage and demonstrate that the constitutional requirements of equality for state representation in the Senate plus the division of seats into three classes were critical elements in the Republicans’ pickup of nine seats and retaking part…
Election Fundamentals and Polls Favor the Republicans
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Measuring Partisan Bias in Single‐Member District Electoral Systems
In recent decades, the literature has coalesced around either symmetry or responsiveness as measures of partisan bias in single‐member district systems. I argue neither accurately captures the traditional idea of an “efficient” gerrymander, where one party claims more seats without more votes. I suggest a better measure of efficiency and then use this new measure to reconsider a classic study of partisan gerrymandering. Contrary to the original s…
A Primary Cause of Partisanship? Nomination Systems and Legislator Ideology
Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a polarizing influence. Likewise, many reformers advocate opening party nominations to nonmembers as a way of increasing the number of moderate elected officials. Data and measurement constraints, however, have limited the range of empirical tests of this argument. We marry a unique new data set of state legislator ideal points to a detailed accounting of p…
What It Takes to Win: Questioning “Gender Neutral” Outcomes in U.S. House Elections
When women run for office, they win at the same rate as men. A significant body of research substantiating this claim has been touted by scholars and women's groups alike. “Gender neutral” outcomes, however, mask important sex differences in congressional candidacies. Indeed, extensive research has revealed a gender gap in political ambition: women are more hesitant to run for office and are more concerned about their credentials and viability th…
The Legislative Legacy of Congressional Campaigns by Tracy Sulkin
One Vote Out of Step? The Effects of Salient Roll Call Votes in the 2010 Election
We investigate the relationship between controversial roll call votes and support for Democratic incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Consistent with previous analyses, we find that supporters of health care reform paid a significant price at the polls. We go beyond these analyses by identifying a mechanism for this apparent effect: constituents perceived incumbents who supported health care reform as more ideologically distant (in this case…
Do Campaigns Drive Partisan Turnout
Party Registration and the Geography of Party Polarization
Are voters in the United States sorting into geographic "enclaves" of determined commitment to one party or the other, or do voting and public opinion patterns hide a fundamentally ambivalent electorate? The most common geographic measure of partisanship—the presidential vote—cannot identify strength of commitment to the parties because voters have no viable alternative to the major-party candidates. We use party registration statistics instead, …
The Role of Candidate Choice in the California Recall Election
Many have argued that the reelection and later recall of Governor Gray Davis in California serves as a perfect example of how primaries draw politics to the extremes by nominating candidates too liberal or conservative for the general electorate. Davis defeated a conservative Republican opponent in his reelection campaign, only to lose in the recall just one year later when there were no primaries to prevent a moderate Republican from running. We…
National Tides and Local Results in US House Elections
This article discusses whether candidates and campaigns in US House elections condition the influence of national political tides by magnifying their effects at the local level. Using election returns, it is shown that this interaction effect is quite small: a positive national tide increases votes for weak candidates almost as much as strong ones. However, competition and national tides in US House elections do interact to produce turnover: high…
Cohort Effects and the Incumbency Advantage
The literature on the incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections has focused mostly on political variables, such as competition and incumbent resources. For this article, I identify an important sociological variable: a cohort effect that separates older generations from younger ones. Younger generations have been more likely to vote for incumbents, and the difference has endured over time, even as the political environment itself has changed a…
Estimating Vote Choice: A New Look at the Generic Congressional Ballot
Voters typically pay little attention to the campaign for the House of Representatives in their district. This has complicated efforts to tap public opinion about these races because seemingly modest changes in the order or wording of questions can produce dramatically different responses (Box-Steffensmeier, Jacobson, and Grant 2000; Gow and Eubank 1984; Mann 1978; Mann and Wolfinger 1980; Wright 1993). 1 Incumbency causes particular problems. It…
Remaking the House and Senate: Personal Power, Ideology, and the 1970s Reforms
Although much has been written on the critical congressional reforms of the 1970s, few studies have analyzed support for reform systematically. In this article, we draw upon previously untapped sources of information that make an individual‐level, quantitative analysis possible. We analyze 20 indicators that measure support for a wide variety of reforms in both chambers. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent pattern: in virtually every case,…
The Local Roots of Federal Policy Change: Transportation in the 1990s
Although allegedly "all politics is local," studies of policy changes in the United States tend to emphasize national political cleavages, national issue-attention cycles, and inside-the-Beltway approaches to issue networks. We argue that more accurate and complete explanations of national policy changes require a broader consideration of problem definition and issue framing at the local level, as well as intergovernmental political pressures. Us…
What It Takes to Win: Questioning “Gender Neutral” Outcomes in U.S. House Elections
When women run for office, they win at the same rate as men. A significant body of research substantiating this claim has been touted by scholars and women's groups alike. “Gender neutral” outcomes, however, mask important sex differences in congressional candidacies. Indeed, extensive research has revealed a gender gap in political ambition: women are more hesitant to run for office and are more concerned about their credentials and viability th…
A Primary Cause of Partisanship? Nomination Systems and Legislator Ideology
Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a polarizing influence. Likewise, many reformers advocate opening party nominations to nonmembers as a way of increasing the number of moderate elected officials. Data and measurement constraints, however, have limited the range of empirical tests of this argument. We marry a unique new data set of state legislator ideal points to a detailed accounting of p…
One Vote Out of Step? The Effects of Salient Roll Call Votes in the 2010 Election
We investigate the relationship between controversial roll call votes and support for Democratic incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Consistent with previous analyses, we find that supporters of health care reform paid a significant price at the polls. We go beyond these analyses by identifying a mechanism for this apparent effect: constituents perceived incumbents who supported health care reform as more ideologically distant (in this case…
Kingmakers or Cheerleaders? Party Power and the Causal Effects of Endorsements
When parties make endorsements in primary elections, does the favored candidate receive a real boost in his or her vote share, or do parties simply pick the favorites who are already destined to win? To answer this question, we draw on two research designs aimed at isolating the causal effect of Democratic Party endorsements in California’s 2012 primary election. First, we conduct a survey experiment in which we randomly assign a party endorsemen…
Party Registration and the Geography of Party Polarization
Are voters in the United States sorting into geographic "enclaves" of determined commitment to one party or the other, or do voting and public opinion patterns hide a fundamentally ambivalent electorate? The most common geographic measure of partisanship—the presidential vote—cannot identify strength of commitment to the parties because voters have no viable alternative to the major-party candidates. We use party registration statistics instead, …
Measuring Partisan Bias in Single‐Member District Electoral Systems
In recent decades, the literature has coalesced around either symmetry or responsiveness as measures of partisan bias in single‐member district systems. I argue neither accurately captures the traditional idea of an “efficient” gerrymander, where one party claims more seats without more votes. I suggest a better measure of efficiency and then use this new measure to reconsider a classic study of partisan gerrymandering. Contrary to the original s…
Has the Top Two Primary Elected More Moderates
Party polarization is perhaps the most significant political trend of the past several decades of American politics. Many observers have pinned hopes on institutional reforms to reinvigorate the political center. The Top Two primary is one of the most interesting and closely-watched of these reforms: a radically open primary system that removes much of the formal role for parties in the primary election and even allows for two candidates of the s…
Partisan Gerrymandering and Political Science
Recent years have seen a tremendous surge of public interest in partisan gerrymandering, including robust reform efforts and multiple high-profile court cases. Political scientists have played an important role in this debate, reaching an unusually high level of public engagement. Yet this public-facing period has to some extent obscured promising avenues for future research within the discipline. I review the history of political science and red…
Do Campaigns Drive Partisan Turnout
Districts for a New Decade—Partisan Outcomes and Racial Representation in the 2021–22 Redistricting Cycle
This article provides an overview of the new congressional and state legislative districts that were drawn around the country during the 2021–2022 redistricting cycle. We provide background on the redistricting landscape, most notably the changing federal role in both partisan and minority representation. We also discuss the process used to draw the new districts in each state. We then provide an empirical look at partisan fairness, competitivene…
Remaking the House and Senate: Personal Power, Ideology, and the 1970s Reforms
Although much has been written on the critical congressional reforms of the 1970s, few studies have analyzed support for reform systematically. In this article, we draw upon previously untapped sources of information that make an individual‐level, quantitative analysis possible. We analyze 20 indicators that measure support for a wide variety of reforms in both chambers. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent pattern: in virtually every case,…
Vote-by-mail policy and the 2020 presidential election
Mail voting became unusually controversial in the 2020 presidential election. Many observers, including former President Trump, believed that more accessible vote by mail would encourage higher turnout at the expense of Republicans. While the literature has tested some of these claims, it has not offered a more comprehensive causal assessment of vote-by-mail policy, nor has any study looked at these questions in the context of the extraordinary 2…
The Local Roots of Federal Policy Change: Transportation in the 1990s
Although allegedly "all politics is local," studies of policy changes in the United States tend to emphasize national political cleavages, national issue-attention cycles, and inside-the-Beltway approaches to issue networks. We argue that more accurate and complete explanations of national policy changes require a broader consideration of problem definition and issue framing at the local level, as well as intergovernmental political pressures. Us…
Election Fundamentals and Polls Favor the Republicans
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
National Tides and Local Results in US House Elections
This article discusses whether candidates and campaigns in US House elections condition the influence of national political tides by magnifying their effects at the local level. Using election returns, it is shown that this interaction effect is quite small: a positive national tide increases votes for weak candidates almost as much as strong ones. However, competition and national tides in US House elections do interact to produce turnover: high…
Cohort Effects and the Incumbency Advantage
The literature on the incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections has focused mostly on political variables, such as competition and incumbent resources. For this article, I identify an important sociological variable: a cohort effect that separates older generations from younger ones. Younger generations have been more likely to vote for incumbents, and the difference has endured over time, even as the political environment itself has changed a…
Estimating Vote Choice: A New Look at the Generic Congressional Ballot
Voters typically pay little attention to the campaign for the House of Representatives in their district. This has complicated efforts to tap public opinion about these races because seemingly modest changes in the order or wording of questions can produce dramatically different responses (Box-Steffensmeier, Jacobson, and Grant 2000; Gow and Eubank 1984; Mann 1978; Mann and Wolfinger 1980; Wright 1993). 1 Incumbency causes particular problems. It…
The Local Roots of Federal Policy Change: Transportation in the 1990s
Although allegedly "all politics is local," studies of policy changes in the United States tend to emphasize national political cleavages, national issue-attention cycles, and inside-the-Beltway approaches to issue networks. We argue that more accurate and complete explanations of national policy changes require a broader consideration of problem definition and issue framing at the local level, as well as intergovernmental political pressures. Us…
Remaking the House and Senate: Personal Power, Ideology, and the 1970s Reforms
Although much has been written on the critical congressional reforms of the 1970s, few studies have analyzed support for reform systematically. In this article, we draw upon previously untapped sources of information that make an individual‐level, quantitative analysis possible. We analyze 20 indicators that measure support for a wide variety of reforms in both chambers. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent pattern: in virtually every case,…
Estimating Vote Choice: A New Look at the Generic Congressional Ballot
Voters typically pay little attention to the campaign for the House of Representatives in their district. This has complicated efforts to tap public opinion about these races because seemingly modest changes in the order or wording of questions can produce dramatically different responses (Box-Steffensmeier, Jacobson, and Grant 2000; Gow and Eubank 1984; Mann 1978; Mann and Wolfinger 1980; Wright 1993). 1 Incumbency causes particular problems. It…
The Role of Candidate Choice in the California Recall Election
Many have argued that the reelection and later recall of Governor Gray Davis in California serves as a perfect example of how primaries draw politics to the extremes by nominating candidates too liberal or conservative for the general electorate. Davis defeated a conservative Republican opponent in his reelection campaign, only to lose in the recall just one year later when there were no primaries to prevent a moderate Republican from running. We…
National Tides and Local Results in US House Elections
This article discusses whether candidates and campaigns in US House elections condition the influence of national political tides by magnifying their effects at the local level. Using election returns, it is shown that this interaction effect is quite small: a positive national tide increases votes for weak candidates almost as much as strong ones. However, competition and national tides in US House elections do interact to produce turnover: high…
Cohort Effects and the Incumbency Advantage
The literature on the incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections has focused mostly on political variables, such as competition and incumbent resources. For this article, I identify an important sociological variable: a cohort effect that separates older generations from younger ones. Younger generations have been more likely to vote for incumbents, and the difference has endured over time, even as the political environment itself has changed a…
Party Registration and the Geography of Party Polarization
Are voters in the United States sorting into geographic "enclaves" of determined commitment to one party or the other, or do voting and public opinion patterns hide a fundamentally ambivalent electorate? The most common geographic measure of partisanship—the presidential vote—cannot identify strength of commitment to the parties because voters have no viable alternative to the major-party candidates. We use party registration statistics instead, …
Do Campaigns Drive Partisan Turnout
The Legislative Legacy of Congressional Campaigns by Tracy Sulkin
One Vote Out of Step? The Effects of Salient Roll Call Votes in the 2010 Election
We investigate the relationship between controversial roll call votes and support for Democratic incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Consistent with previous analyses, we find that supporters of health care reform paid a significant price at the polls. We go beyond these analyses by identifying a mechanism for this apparent effect: constituents perceived incumbents who supported health care reform as more ideologically distant (in this case…
What It Takes to Win: Questioning “Gender Neutral” Outcomes in U.S. House Elections
When women run for office, they win at the same rate as men. A significant body of research substantiating this claim has been touted by scholars and women's groups alike. “Gender neutral” outcomes, however, mask important sex differences in congressional candidacies. Indeed, extensive research has revealed a gender gap in political ambition: women are more hesitant to run for office and are more concerned about their credentials and viability th…
Constitutional Design and 2014 Senate Election Outcomes
A common observation about the 2014 Senate elections is that one advantage the Republicans had was that the set of states holding elections tilted Republican in partisanship. In this article, we quantify that advantage and demonstrate that the constitutional requirements of equality for state representation in the Senate plus the division of seats into three classes were critical elements in the Republicans’ pickup of nine seats and retaking part…
Election Fundamentals and Polls Favor the Republicans
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Measuring Partisan Bias in Single‐Member District Electoral Systems
In recent decades, the literature has coalesced around either symmetry or responsiveness as measures of partisan bias in single‐member district systems. I argue neither accurately captures the traditional idea of an “efficient” gerrymander, where one party claims more seats without more votes. I suggest a better measure of efficiency and then use this new measure to reconsider a classic study of partisan gerrymandering. Contrary to the original s…
A Primary Cause of Partisanship? Nomination Systems and Legislator Ideology
Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a polarizing influence. Likewise, many reformers advocate opening party nominations to nonmembers as a way of increasing the number of moderate elected officials. Data and measurement constraints, however, have limited the range of empirical tests of this argument. We marry a unique new data set of state legislator ideal points to a detailed accounting of p…
Reform in the Canadian Parliament and the US Congress: Institutional Choices and Member Power
A spate of recent work on the Canadian Parliament highlights the importance of constituency pressures in understanding the legislative behavior of individual Members of Parliament (MPs). In light of this renaissance, we reexamine decisions by Canadian Liberal Party MPs to defy Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his cabinet by supporting party-weakening reform in 2002. More specifically, we model votes on the question of selecting committee chairs t…
Evaluations of the 2014 Midterm Election Forecasts
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Kingmakers or Cheerleaders? Party Power and the Causal Effects of Endorsements
When parties make endorsements in primary elections, does the favored candidate receive a real boost in his or her vote share, or do parties simply pick the favorites who are already destined to win? To answer this question, we draw on two research designs aimed at isolating the causal effect of Democratic Party endorsements in California’s 2012 primary election. First, we conduct a survey experiment in which we randomly assign a party endorsemen…
Has the Top Two Primary Elected More Moderates
Party polarization is perhaps the most significant political trend of the past several decades of American politics. Many observers have pinned hopes on institutional reforms to reinvigorate the political center. The Top Two primary is one of the most interesting and closely-watched of these reforms: a radically open primary system that removes much of the formal role for parties in the primary election and even allows for two candidates of the s…
Partisan Gerrymandering and Political Science
Recent years have seen a tremendous surge of public interest in partisan gerrymandering, including robust reform efforts and multiple high-profile court cases. Political scientists have played an important role in this debate, reaching an unusually high level of public engagement. Yet this public-facing period has to some extent obscured promising avenues for future research within the discipline. I review the history of political science and red…
Vote-by-mail policy and the 2020 presidential election
Mail voting became unusually controversial in the 2020 presidential election. Many observers, including former President Trump, believed that more accessible vote by mail would encourage higher turnout at the expense of Republicans. While the literature has tested some of these claims, it has not offered a more comprehensive causal assessment of vote-by-mail policy, nor has any study looked at these questions in the context of the extraordinary 2…
Districts for a New Decade—Partisan Outcomes and Racial Representation in the 2021–22 Redistricting Cycle
This article provides an overview of the new congressional and state legislative districts that were drawn around the country during the 2021–2022 redistricting cycle. We provide background on the redistricting landscape, most notably the changing federal role in both partisan and minority representation. We also discuss the process used to draw the new districts in each state. We then provide an empirical look at partisan fairness, competitivene…
Political science (22 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Economics (11 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Public Administration (9 works) · Democracy (8 works)