Michael H Crespin
Biographic Data
| ID | 4122798 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael H Crespin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael H |
| FAMILY NAME | Crespin |
| SIGNATURE | CRESPIN M H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oklahoma |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8137-6776 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 647 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Presidential Endorsements as Voter Cues: Evidence from the 2022 Midterm Elections
Strategic States: The Congressional Roots of Federal Grant Applications
While a large body of research explores the federal-level influences over distributive politics decisions, very little attention has been given to the active role state and local governments play in the geographic distribution of federal funds. Before presidents, legislators, and agency leaders can influence the selection of federal grants, state and local governments must expend time and resources to submit grant proposals. We focus on grant app…
Dueling incumbent primaries in U.S. House elections
Objective Reapportionment and the attendant process of redistricting cause instances where incumbents are faced with the decision to retire or run against a congressional colleague. We investigate two major questions surrounding the previously understudied population of dueling incumbent primaries: First, under what conditions is a dueling incumbent primary likely to manifest? Second, how are dueling incumbent primaries different from the typical…
Dueling Incumbent House Elections, 1843-2018
Throughout American history some members of Congress are beset with the unfortunate predicament of facing a fellow incumbent in their bids for reelection. One culprit is responsible for these atypical contests: redistricting. Using district and sub-district level data, this research note provides the first systematic coverage of all dueling incumbent general election U.S. House races from 1843 to 2018. We chronicle and analyze when we expect to s…
Gaining Access and Constituent Correspondence in the U.S. House of Representatives
In this article, we use legislative correspondence to determine who gains access to key staffers in a congressional office. To evaluate our theory of the office power hierarchy, we test hypotheses using an original dataset of more than 3,000 correspondence records from the office of former member of Congress James R. Jones. Our empirical analysis is supplemented by an e-mail interview with Representative Jones. We find that key senior staffers ar…
Jumping on the Trump Train or Ditching the Donald: Campaign Rhetoric and the 2016 Congressional Election
The 2016 general election presented an unusual challenge to Republican congressional candidates: whether to market one’s campaign as aligned with or against Donald Trump’s controversial candidacy. In this paper, we determine what district and member-level factors influence candidate endorsements of Trump for president. Second, we study if the endorsements hurt candidates on Election Day. We find that underlying political partisanship, as measured…
Land, Wood, Water, and Space: Senator Robert S. Kerr, Congress, and Selling the Space Race to the American Public
Objective We examine the contribution Sen. Robert S. Kerr (D‐OK) made in promoting NASA and space exploration to Oklahoma and the general public while serving as chair of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. Methods Using newspaper articles as well as speeches and press releases from the archival papers of Robert S. Kerr, we estimate a topic model to uncover the dimensions of debate concerning space. We also use the communicat…
Institutional Control of Redistricting and the Geography of Representation
A number of states have empowered independent redistricting commissions (IRCs) to redraw legislative districts each decade following the US Census. Reformers see IRCs, which have binding authority and political independence, as a solution to the practice of gerrymandering and have proposed using them throughout the United States. With less incentive to protect incumbents, do IRCs adhere more closely to traditional redistricting principles, such a…
Redistricting and Individual Contributions to Congressional Candidates
In this paper, we use redistricting to examine the relationship between representatives and a unique group of the public: individual campaign contributors. Our primary objective is to determine what happens to the contribution behavior of representatives and donors after district boundaries shift and the geographic ties between members and donors are undone. At the member level, we use a continuous measure of district change and examine twenty ye…
New Directions in Legislative Research: Lessons from Inside Congress
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
The Establishment of Party Policy Committees in the U.S. Senate: Coordination, Not Coercion
Objective We seek to determine if institutional changes designed to increase intraparty coordination influenced observed levels of party unity in the U.S. Senate. In particular, we test competing claims regarding the effects of establishing party policy committees following the adoption of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946. Methods First, we examine Congress at the vote level by looking at the overall proportion of votes that could be cl…
Earmarks and Subcommittee Government in the U.S. Congress
In recent years, considerable scholarly attention has focused on earmarks, the quintessential example of pork barrel politics. We assess the degree to which existing theories can explain the distribution of earmarks in the U.S. House of Representatives. First, drawing on informal interviews with individuals on Capitol Hill regarding the earmark process, we argue that assessing institutional and constituency-level factors that affect the earmark r…
The Political Geography of Distributive Politics
Distributive politics plays an integral role in theories of legislative politics because it represents a fundamental aspect of legislators' electoral connection to constituents. We argue that because distributive politics is at its core a constituency‐centered process, it is essential to take geography into account in both substantive and statistical terms. Our analysis, which employsGeographicWeightedRegression, reveals substantial spatial heter…
Reevaluating the Effects of Redistricting on Electoral Competition, 1972–2012
In this note, we revisit the work of Carson and Crespinto examine the effect of different redistricting plans on competitiveness in U.S. House elections. Similar to the previous results, our probit estimates on an expanded dataset that includes redistricting cycles from 1972 to 2012 reveal that commission and court-drawn districts experience more competition on average than those drawn by legislatures. These results provide additional support for…
Elections and the Politics of Pork in the U.S. Senate
Objectives We examine the connection between pork‐barrel projects and the election returns of members of the U.S. Congress. While previous researchers have uncovered little evidence of a direct link, we refine the perspective that pork has electoral implications by advancing the argument that its effects differ across geographic and partisan contexts. Methods Our empirical analysis focuses on the Senate—which has largely escaped attention—and uti…
Measuring variations in party unity voting: An assessment of agenda effects
Measures of party divisiveness have been widely used in scholarly literature for a variety of different purposes. However, conventional measures of party divisiveness, such as the percentage of party votes in a particular Congress, fail to consider important changes in the agenda from one Congress to the next. We introduce a measure that controls for such changes, drawing attention to the effect that agenda change has on observed party divisivene…
Research NotePork-Barrelling in Australian Politics: A Reconsideration of Leigh
This research note replicates Leigh's (2008) analysis of pork-barrelling in Australian politics and tests the validity of his findings using geographic techniques. Distributive politics is integral to nearly all theories of legislative politics because it is fundamental to the connection between legislators and constituents, and can be used to facilitate coalition-building. This note addresses an aspect of pork-barrelling that has been overlooked…
Constituency Congruency and Candidate Competition in Primary Elections for the U.S. House
Previous research has largely concluded that House elections have become less competitive in the modern era. Our research examines one area where we expect to observe more competition—namely, primary elections. In this article, we investigate when and where a state legislator will emerge to run in a congressional primary. All else equal, we expect that state legislators who can carry a large portion of their old state reelection constituency to t…
Constituency Congruency and Candidate Competition in U.S. House Elections
Research on candidate competition has focused on how much context matters in emergence decisions and election outcomes. If a candidate has previously held elected office, one additional consideration that may influence entry decisions is the relative degree of overlap between the candidate's current constituency and the “new” set of voters she is seeking to represent. Using GIS software, we derive a measure of the challenger's personal vote by fo…
Dimensions, Issues, and Bills: Appropriations Voting on the House Floor
One of the fundamental findings in the congressional literature is that one or sometimes two dimensions can successfully describe roll-call voting. In this paper we investigate if we can reach the same conclusions about low dimensionality when we divide the roll-call agenda into subsets of relatively homogeneous subject matter. We are primarily interested in the degree to which the same ordering of representatives is yielded across these differen…
If You Can’t Join ’Em, Beat ’Em: The Gender Gap in Individual Donations to Congressional Candidates
The authors revisit the gender gap in campaign finance and find an advantage for women candidates in earning donations from individual donors due to the activities of female donor networks and the changing congressional donor pool. Women supported by these networks, especially Democratic women, receive a boost in campaign fund-raising compared to their male counterparts, whereas women not supported by these networks receive significantly less. Th…
How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs
Previous methods of analyzing the substance of political attention have had to make several restrictive assumptions or been prohibitively costly when applied to large‐scale political texts. Here, we describe a topic model for legislative speech, a statistical learning model that uses word choices to infer topical categories covered in a set of speeches and to identify the topic of specific speeches. Our method estimates, rather than assumes, the …
Perception and Reality in Congressional Earmarks
Earmarks added to appropriations bills have generated a considerable amount of attention from the media, politicians, and fiscal watchdog groups. Taken as a whole, three truths" about earmarks are frequently discussed: 1) earmarks are the reason for large budget deficits, 2) using omnibus legislation instead of regular order leads to more earmarks, and 3) airdropped" earmarks added at the conference stage compound the problem of pork. In this pap…
Serving Two Masters: Redistricting and Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives
This article explores the consequences for representation after a redistricting by reexamining the finding that members of Congress will alter their voting behavior to fit their new district. Specifically, it applies partisan theories of congressional organization to test if members are changing their behavior on all or just some votes. The results indicate that representatives adjust their roll call behavior to fit their new districts on votes t…
Distributive and Partisan Politics in the U.S. Senate: An Exploration of Earmarks
How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs
Previous methods of analyzing the substance of political attention have had to make several restrictive assumptions or been prohibitively costly when applied to large‐scale political texts. Here, we describe a topic model for legislative speech, a statistical learning model that uses word choices to infer topical categories covered in a set of speeches and to identify the topic of specific speeches. Our method estimates, rather than assumes, the …
If You Can’t Join ’Em, Beat ’Em: The Gender Gap in Individual Donations to Congressional Candidates
The authors revisit the gender gap in campaign finance and find an advantage for women candidates in earning donations from individual donors due to the activities of female donor networks and the changing congressional donor pool. Women supported by these networks, especially Democratic women, receive a boost in campaign fund-raising compared to their male counterparts, whereas women not supported by these networks receive significantly less. Th…
The Media, the Campaign, and the Message
This article examines the 1996 press releases issued by Republican presidential nominee candidates during the invisible primary and the subsequent stories generated by these press releases in newspapers. We systematically examine how campaigns structure their messages, which messages are transmitted by the press to the voting public, and what factors influence the transmission of the campaign's message. We find that campaign organizations dissemi…
Dimensions, Issues, and Bills: Appropriations Voting on the House Floor
One of the fundamental findings in the congressional literature is that one or sometimes two dimensions can successfully describe roll-call voting. In this paper we investigate if we can reach the same conclusions about low dimensionality when we divide the roll-call agenda into subsets of relatively homogeneous subject matter. We are primarily interested in the degree to which the same ordering of representatives is yielded across these differen…
The Effect of State Redistricting Methods on Electoral Competition in United States House of Representatives Races
Legislative redistricting in the states is highly contentious due, at least in part, to its partisan implications. But does the method by which states draw legislative districts affect partisan competition in the elections that are held in these districts? We examine the effects of three methods used by states to draw district boundaries on competition in congressional elections. Specifically, we evaluate the effects on competition of legislative…
Redistricting and Party Polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives
The elevated levels of party polarization observed in the contemporary Congress have been attributed to a variety of factors. One of the more commonly recurring themes among observers of congressional politics is that changes in district boundaries resulting from the redistricting process are a root cause. Using a new data set linking congressional districts from 1962 to 2002, we offer a direct test of this claim. Our results show that although t…
Measuring variations in party unity voting: An assessment of agenda effects
Measures of party divisiveness have been widely used in scholarly literature for a variety of different purposes. However, conventional measures of party divisiveness, such as the percentage of party votes in a particular Congress, fail to consider important changes in the agenda from one Congress to the next. We introduce a measure that controls for such changes, drawing attention to the effect that agenda change has on observed party divisivene…
Parties as Procedural Coalitions in Congress: An Examination of Differing Career Tracks
We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predictions from the party cartel theory (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994, 2002). We gain leverage on the question of party influence in Congress by focusing on three types of House members: reelection seekers, higher-office seekers, and retiring members. We argue that retiring House members are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect …
Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal
This paper replicates the findings that appeared in the article “Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress,” published in theAmerican Journal of Political Science(44:316–325), in which Lawrence Rothenberg and Mitchell Sanders incorporated a new research design and, contrary to all previous studies, found evidence of ideological shirking in the U.S. House of Representatives. We investigate the robustness of their res…
Using Geographic Information Systems to Measure District Change, 2000–2002
In this article, I use geographic information systems to develop a continuous measure of district continuity and change following the 2000–02 congressional redistricting cycle. The new measure provides details of where the new population in a district came from and how the old population was distributed within new districts. This measure is then used to demonstrate the independent and interactive influence of district change on competition for co…
Serving Two Masters: Redistricting and Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives
This article explores the consequences for representation after a redistricting by reexamining the finding that members of Congress will alter their voting behavior to fit their new district. Specifically, it applies partisan theories of congressional organization to test if members are changing their behavior on all or just some votes. The results indicate that representatives adjust their roll call behavior to fit their new districts on votes t…
Reevaluating the Effects of Redistricting on Electoral Competition, 1972–2012
In this note, we revisit the work of Carson and Crespinto examine the effect of different redistricting plans on competitiveness in U.S. House elections. Similar to the previous results, our probit estimates on an expanded dataset that includes redistricting cycles from 1972 to 2012 reveal that commission and court-drawn districts experience more competition on average than those drawn by legislatures. These results provide additional support for…
Constituency Congruency and Candidate Competition in U.S. House Elections
Research on candidate competition has focused on how much context matters in emergence decisions and election outcomes. If a candidate has previously held elected office, one additional consideration that may influence entry decisions is the relative degree of overlap between the candidate's current constituency and the “new” set of voters she is seeking to represent. Using GIS software, we derive a measure of the challenger's personal vote by fo…
Institutional Control of Redistricting and the Geography of Representation
A number of states have empowered independent redistricting commissions (IRCs) to redraw legislative districts each decade following the US Census. Reformers see IRCs, which have binding authority and political independence, as a solution to the practice of gerrymandering and have proposed using them throughout the United States. With less incentive to protect incumbents, do IRCs adhere more closely to traditional redistricting principles, such a…
Earmarks and Subcommittee Government in the U.S. Congress
In recent years, considerable scholarly attention has focused on earmarks, the quintessential example of pork barrel politics. We assess the degree to which existing theories can explain the distribution of earmarks in the U.S. House of Representatives. First, drawing on informal interviews with individuals on Capitol Hill regarding the earmark process, we argue that assessing institutional and constituency-level factors that affect the earmark r…
Elections and the Politics of Pork in the U.S. Senate
Objectives We examine the connection between pork‐barrel projects and the election returns of members of the U.S. Congress. While previous researchers have uncovered little evidence of a direct link, we refine the perspective that pork has electoral implications by advancing the argument that its effects differ across geographic and partisan contexts. Methods Our empirical analysis focuses on the Senate—which has largely escaped attention—and uti…
The Calculus of Concession: Media Coverage and the Dynamics of Winnowing in Presidential Nominations
In this research we outline and evaluate a theory of the “calculus of concession”: when and why presidential primary candidates exit the race. Our explanation builds on prior studies of candidate attrition that traditionally emphasize money. However, we focus additional attention on the role of the press and its potential to influence a candidate’s exit decision. Data from the 2000 Republican presidential nomination campaign are used to test a We…
Redistricting and Individual Contributions to Congressional Candidates
In this paper, we use redistricting to examine the relationship between representatives and a unique group of the public: individual campaign contributors. Our primary objective is to determine what happens to the contribution behavior of representatives and donors after district boundaries shift and the geographic ties between members and donors are undone. At the member level, we use a continuous measure of district change and examine twenty ye…
Constituency Congruency and Candidate Competition in Primary Elections for the U.S. House
Previous research has largely concluded that House elections have become less competitive in the modern era. Our research examines one area where we expect to observe more competition—namely, primary elections. In this article, we investigate when and where a state legislator will emerge to run in a congressional primary. All else equal, we expect that state legislators who can carry a large portion of their old state reelection constituency to t…
Perception and Reality in Congressional Earmarks
Earmarks added to appropriations bills have generated a considerable amount of attention from the media, politicians, and fiscal watchdog groups. Taken as a whole, three truths" about earmarks are frequently discussed: 1) earmarks are the reason for large budget deficits, 2) using omnibus legislation instead of regular order leads to more earmarks, and 3) airdropped" earmarks added at the conference stage compound the problem of pork. In this pap…
Jumping on the Trump Train or Ditching the Donald: Campaign Rhetoric and the 2016 Congressional Election
The 2016 general election presented an unusual challenge to Republican congressional candidates: whether to market one’s campaign as aligned with or against Donald Trump’s controversial candidacy. In this paper, we determine what district and member-level factors influence candidate endorsements of Trump for president. Second, we study if the endorsements hurt candidates on Election Day. We find that underlying political partisanship, as measured…
The Political Geography of Distributive Politics
Distributive politics plays an integral role in theories of legislative politics because it represents a fundamental aspect of legislators' electoral connection to constituents. We argue that because distributive politics is at its core a constituency‐centered process, it is essential to take geography into account in both substantive and statistical terms. Our analysis, which employsGeographicWeightedRegression, reveals substantial spatial heter…
Ideology, Electoral Incentives, and Congressional Politics: The Republican House Class of 1994
Following the work of Downs and Mayhew, some theories of legislative politics assume that candidates are motivated only by electoral interests and their behavior is driven by the median voter in their district. Other theories, however, posit that legislator behavior is driven by additional factors such as member's policy interests or those of the primary constituency. It is our theoretical expectation that Downs was not incorrect but rather incom…
Gaining Access and Constituent Correspondence in the U.S. House of Representatives
In this article, we use legislative correspondence to determine who gains access to key staffers in a congressional office. To evaluate our theory of the office power hierarchy, we test hypotheses using an original dataset of more than 3,000 correspondence records from the office of former member of Congress James R. Jones. Our empirical analysis is supplemented by an e-mail interview with Representative Jones. We find that key senior staffers ar…
New Directions in Legislative Research: Lessons from Inside Congress
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
The Media, the Campaign, and the Message
This article examines the 1996 press releases issued by Republican presidential nominee candidates during the invisible primary and the subsequent stories generated by these press releases in newspapers. We systematically examine how campaigns structure their messages, which messages are transmitted by the press to the voting public, and what factors influence the transmission of the campaign's message. We find that campaign organizations dissemi…
The Effect of State Redistricting Methods on Electoral Competition in United States House of Representatives Races
Legislative redistricting in the states is highly contentious due, at least in part, to its partisan implications. But does the method by which states draw legislative districts affect partisan competition in the elections that are held in these districts? We examine the effects of three methods used by states to draw district boundaries on competition in congressional elections. Specifically, we evaluate the effects on competition of legislative…
Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal
This paper replicates the findings that appeared in the article “Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress,” published in theAmerican Journal of Political Science(44:316–325), in which Lawrence Rothenberg and Mitchell Sanders incorporated a new research design and, contrary to all previous studies, found evidence of ideological shirking in the U.S. House of Representatives. We investigate the robustness of their res…
The Calculus of Concession: Media Coverage and the Dynamics of Winnowing in Presidential Nominations
In this research we outline and evaluate a theory of the “calculus of concession”: when and why presidential primary candidates exit the race. Our explanation builds on prior studies of candidate attrition that traditionally emphasize money. However, we focus additional attention on the role of the press and its potential to influence a candidate’s exit decision. Data from the 2000 Republican presidential nomination campaign are used to test a We…
Using Geographic Information Systems to Measure District Change, 2000–2002
In this article, I use geographic information systems to develop a continuous measure of district continuity and change following the 2000–02 congressional redistricting cycle. The new measure provides details of where the new population in a district came from and how the old population was distributed within new districts. This measure is then used to demonstrate the independent and interactive influence of district change on competition for co…
Parties as Procedural Coalitions in Congress: An Examination of Differing Career Tracks
We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predictions from the party cartel theory (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994, 2002). We gain leverage on the question of party influence in Congress by focusing on three types of House members: reelection seekers, higher-office seekers, and retiring members. We argue that retiring House members are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect …
Turning Theory to Practice: A Political Scientist Tackles the Hill
When I first learned that I would be spending most of my final year in graduate school working on Capitol Hill as an APSA Congressional Fellow, I really did not know what to expect—other than that I needed to hurry up and finish my dissertation! Since most of my training was empirical in nature, with a smattering of formal theory here and there, the one thing I knew for certain was that I was in for a novel experience. After all, there are few su…
Ideology, Electoral Incentives, and Congressional Politics: The Republican House Class of 1994
Following the work of Downs and Mayhew, some theories of legislative politics assume that candidates are motivated only by electoral interests and their behavior is driven by the median voter in their district. Other theories, however, posit that legislator behavior is driven by additional factors such as member's policy interests or those of the primary constituency. It is our theoretical expectation that Downs was not incorrect but rather incom…
Redistricting and Party Polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives
The elevated levels of party polarization observed in the contemporary Congress have been attributed to a variety of factors. One of the more commonly recurring themes among observers of congressional politics is that changes in district boundaries resulting from the redistricting process are a root cause. Using a new data set linking congressional districts from 1962 to 2002, we offer a direct test of this claim. Our results show that although t…
Distributive and Partisan Politics in the U.S. Senate: An Exploration of Earmarks
Perception and Reality in Congressional Earmarks
Earmarks added to appropriations bills have generated a considerable amount of attention from the media, politicians, and fiscal watchdog groups. Taken as a whole, three truths" about earmarks are frequently discussed: 1) earmarks are the reason for large budget deficits, 2) using omnibus legislation instead of regular order leads to more earmarks, and 3) airdropped" earmarks added at the conference stage compound the problem of pork. In this pap…
Serving Two Masters: Redistricting and Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives
This article explores the consequences for representation after a redistricting by reexamining the finding that members of Congress will alter their voting behavior to fit their new district. Specifically, it applies partisan theories of congressional organization to test if members are changing their behavior on all or just some votes. The results indicate that representatives adjust their roll call behavior to fit their new districts on votes t…
Dimensions, Issues, and Bills: Appropriations Voting on the House Floor
One of the fundamental findings in the congressional literature is that one or sometimes two dimensions can successfully describe roll-call voting. In this paper we investigate if we can reach the same conclusions about low dimensionality when we divide the roll-call agenda into subsets of relatively homogeneous subject matter. We are primarily interested in the degree to which the same ordering of representatives is yielded across these differen…
If You Can’t Join ’Em, Beat ’Em: The Gender Gap in Individual Donations to Congressional Candidates
The authors revisit the gender gap in campaign finance and find an advantage for women candidates in earning donations from individual donors due to the activities of female donor networks and the changing congressional donor pool. Women supported by these networks, especially Democratic women, receive a boost in campaign fund-raising compared to their male counterparts, whereas women not supported by these networks receive significantly less. Th…
How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs
Previous methods of analyzing the substance of political attention have had to make several restrictive assumptions or been prohibitively costly when applied to large‐scale political texts. Here, we describe a topic model for legislative speech, a statistical learning model that uses word choices to infer topical categories covered in a set of speeches and to identify the topic of specific speeches. Our method estimates, rather than assumes, the …
Constituency Congruency and Candidate Competition in U.S. House Elections
Research on candidate competition has focused on how much context matters in emergence decisions and election outcomes. If a candidate has previously held elected office, one additional consideration that may influence entry decisions is the relative degree of overlap between the candidate's current constituency and the “new” set of voters she is seeking to represent. Using GIS software, we derive a measure of the challenger's personal vote by fo…
Constituency Congruency and Candidate Competition in Primary Elections for the U.S. House
Previous research has largely concluded that House elections have become less competitive in the modern era. Our research examines one area where we expect to observe more competition—namely, primary elections. In this article, we investigate when and where a state legislator will emerge to run in a congressional primary. All else equal, we expect that state legislators who can carry a large portion of their old state reelection constituency to t…
Elections and the Politics of Pork in the U.S. Senate
Objectives We examine the connection between pork‐barrel projects and the election returns of members of the U.S. Congress. While previous researchers have uncovered little evidence of a direct link, we refine the perspective that pork has electoral implications by advancing the argument that its effects differ across geographic and partisan contexts. Methods Our empirical analysis focuses on the Senate—which has largely escaped attention—and uti…
Measuring variations in party unity voting: An assessment of agenda effects
Measures of party divisiveness have been widely used in scholarly literature for a variety of different purposes. However, conventional measures of party divisiveness, such as the percentage of party votes in a particular Congress, fail to consider important changes in the agenda from one Congress to the next. We introduce a measure that controls for such changes, drawing attention to the effect that agenda change has on observed party divisivene…
Research NotePork-Barrelling in Australian Politics: A Reconsideration of Leigh
This research note replicates Leigh's (2008) analysis of pork-barrelling in Australian politics and tests the validity of his findings using geographic techniques. Distributive politics is integral to nearly all theories of legislative politics because it is fundamental to the connection between legislators and constituents, and can be used to facilitate coalition-building. This note addresses an aspect of pork-barrelling that has been overlooked…
Reevaluating the Effects of Redistricting on Electoral Competition, 1972–2012
In this note, we revisit the work of Carson and Crespinto examine the effect of different redistricting plans on competitiveness in U.S. House elections. Similar to the previous results, our probit estimates on an expanded dataset that includes redistricting cycles from 1972 to 2012 reveal that commission and court-drawn districts experience more competition on average than those drawn by legislatures. These results provide additional support for…
The Establishment of Party Policy Committees in the U.S. Senate: Coordination, Not Coercion
Objective We seek to determine if institutional changes designed to increase intraparty coordination influenced observed levels of party unity in the U.S. Senate. In particular, we test competing claims regarding the effects of establishing party policy committees following the adoption of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946. Methods First, we examine Congress at the vote level by looking at the overall proportion of votes that could be cl…
Earmarks and Subcommittee Government in the U.S. Congress
In recent years, considerable scholarly attention has focused on earmarks, the quintessential example of pork barrel politics. We assess the degree to which existing theories can explain the distribution of earmarks in the U.S. House of Representatives. First, drawing on informal interviews with individuals on Capitol Hill regarding the earmark process, we argue that assessing institutional and constituency-level factors that affect the earmark r…
The Political Geography of Distributive Politics
Distributive politics plays an integral role in theories of legislative politics because it represents a fundamental aspect of legislators' electoral connection to constituents. We argue that because distributive politics is at its core a constituency‐centered process, it is essential to take geography into account in both substantive and statistical terms. Our analysis, which employsGeographicWeightedRegression, reveals substantial spatial heter…
Redistricting and Individual Contributions to Congressional Candidates
In this paper, we use redistricting to examine the relationship between representatives and a unique group of the public: individual campaign contributors. Our primary objective is to determine what happens to the contribution behavior of representatives and donors after district boundaries shift and the geographic ties between members and donors are undone. At the member level, we use a continuous measure of district change and examine twenty ye…
Political science (34 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (32 works) · Law (30 works) · Politics (26 works) · Public Administration (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Economics (17 works) · Legislature (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works)