John Ferejohn
Biographic Data
| ID | 873776 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Ferejohn |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Ferejohn |
| SIGNATURE | FEREJOHN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1663 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Machiavelli and Emergency Powers: Lessons for Modern Democracies
Machiavelli argued that the Roman Republic benefited from having the capacity to deal with emergencies as part of the constitution. Roman dictators were ordinary magistrates vested with extraordinary powers who were legally appointed and legally regulated during their prescribed time in office. Can modern states use such an institution, suitably adjusted, to deal with emergencies today? Would such an institution be dangerous in modern conditions …
Active and Passive Citizens: A Defense of Majoritarian Democracy
Cognitive Political Economy: A Growing Partisan Divide in Economic Perceptions
Research suggests that American partisans are increasingly distinct in their beliefs. These strengthened partisan feelings extend to economic perceptions—as numerous scholars have shown, there is a substantial gap between the proportion of Democrats and the proportion of Republicans that believe the economy is improving. Here, we examine the extent to which these perceptions have polarized over the past two decades and the degree to which they st…
Cookbook Politics
Are we losing touch?’ Mainstream parties' failure to represent their voters on immigration and its electoral consequences
In many advanced democracies, mainstream political parties have been disrupted either by the rise of new (populist) parties or by hostile takeovers. In this article we argue that immigration attitudes have had a powerful impact on the strategic environment of political parties and leaders. We show, based on evidence from a comparative study conducted by YouGov in spring of 2015, that immigration attitudes had, by that time, driven a wedge between…
Constitutions in Times of Financial Crisis
Secrecy and Publicity in Votes and Debates
In the spirit of Jeremy Bentham's Political Tactics, this volume offers the first comprehensive discussion of the effects of secrecy and publicity on debates and votes in committees and assemblies. The contributors - sociologists, political scientists, historians, legal scholars - consider the micro-technology of voting (the devil is in the detail), the historical relations between the secret ballot and universal suffrage, the use and abolition o…
Response to Daniel Carpenter's review of A Republic of Statutes: The New American Constitution
We appreciate Dan Carpenter's thoughtful assessment of our book and are eager to respond to his reflections about the political theory of the republic of statutes. He is right that we did not discuss some highly entrenched statutory schemes that might well deserve small-c constitutional status as superstatutes. Although we do treat the Defense of Marriage Act as a superstatute in our chapter on the antihomosexual constitution and its disentrenchm…
Democracy, Accountability, and Representation
This book examines whether the mechanisms of accountability characteristic of democratic systems are sufficient to induce the representatives to act in the best interest of the represented. The first part of the volume focuses on the role of elections, distinguishing different ways in which they may cause representation. The second part is devoted to the role of checks and balances, between the government and the parliament as well as between the…
Political Representation
Political representation lies at the core of modern politics. Democracies, with their vast numbers of citizens, could not operate without representative institutions. Yet relations between the democratic ideal and the everyday practice of political representation have never been well defined and remain the subject of vigorous debate among historians, political theorists, lawyers, and citizens. In this volume, an eminent group of scholars move for…
Warlike Democracies
Classical republican theories are monadic in the sense of seeing in each political regime a set of typical operating characteristics. There is disagreement as to what those characteristics are and specifically whether republican governments are more likely to be aggressive or peace loving. We group these two views as (democratic) mobilization theory versus (republican) checks theory and argue, first, that each can help us understand the finer str…
The 2003 Apsa-JPSA Exchange
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Judicializing Politics, Politicizing Law
Since WWII there has been a profound shift in power away from legislatures and toward courts and other legal institutions around the world. It is no surprise that appointments to both the US Supreme Court and to other federal courts have become partisan political issues. Ferejohn argues that what is at stake, institutionally, is the allocation of legislative power--the power to establish general rules of prospective application.
Symposium on explanations and social ontology 1: Rational choice theory and social explanation
In the Common Mind , Pettit argues that rational choice theory cannot provide genuine causal accounts of action. A genuine causal explanation of intentional action must track how people actually deliberate to arrive at action. And, deliberation is necessarily enculturated or situated “. . . we take human agents to reason their way to action, using the concepts that are available to them in the currency of their culture” (p. 220). When deciding ho…
Judicialización de la política, politización de la ley
En este artículo, el autor analiza el profundo cambio que en la distribución del poder se ha suscitado a nivel mundial. Este cambio consiste en una transformación en el papel que juegan los tribunales y jueces en la judicialización de la política —la mayor participación de jueces y tribunales en asuntos políticos— y de los actores políticos en la politización de la ley —la creciente participación de la clase política en el terreno judicial. El au…
A teoria da escolha racional na ciência política: Conceitos De Racionalidade Em Teoria Política
O artigo sustenta que já existe uma conexão próxima na teoria política entre projetos normativos e positivos. Afirma que os autores que tradicionalmente trabalham com teoria política de forma normativa partiram de pressupostos de racionalidade, tanto porque pretendiam convencer uma audiência composta de indivíduos que presumivelmente seriam suscetíveis à razão, quanto porque uma teoria normativa trata de sujeitos inteligíveis, cujas ações podem s…
Accountability and Authority: Toward a Theory of Political Accountability
We take it for granted that modern government must be democratic in the sense of deriving its authority directly or indirectly from the people. But democratic governments differ greatly in producing policies that are responsive to the popular will. In part, this variation may be traced to the diverse representational structures of various democratic governments. Electoral institutions are employed not only to choose good public officials, but as …
The Politics of Imperfection: The Amendment of Constitutions
The Politics of Imperfection: The Amendment of Constitutions
Endogeneity, Exogeneity, Time, and Space in Political Representation: A Review Article
Unification, universalism, and rational choice theory
Green and Shapiro's critique of rational choice theory underestimates the value of unification and the necessity of universalism in science. The central place of intentionality in social life makes both unification and universalism feasible norms in social science. However, "universalism" in social science may be partial, in that the independence hypothesis—that the causal mechanism governing action is context independent—may hold only locally in…
Rational Choice and Social Theory
L'A. tente de determiner les causes d'une action: la motivation est-elle purement individuelle et rationnelle, d'ordre psychologique, ou est-elle d'ordre externe, produit de determinations sociales? L'A. montre que l'alternative n'est pas radicale
A positive theory of statutory interpretation
Linking Constituency Opinion and Senate Voting Scores: A Hybrid Explanation
This paper attempts to explain better the linkages between constituency opinion and the voting records of senators. A hybrid explanation-the modified twoconstituency thesis-is presented here, and the analyses provide evidence in support of the explanation. Senators' voting scores are most strongly related to the weighted position of their party's constituents. The extent to which senators' voting scores diverge from the preferences of constituent…
Bargaining in Legislatures
Bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided. Legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature. Although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria, it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislat…
Bargaining in Legislatures
Bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided. Legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature. Although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria, it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislat…
Incumbent performance and electoral control
The Constituency Service Basis of the Personal Vote for U.S. Representatives and British Members of Parliament
Under the guise of the “incumbency advantage,” American research of the past decade has devoted heavy emphasis to what may be termed the “personal vote” in congressional elections. Is this phenomenon purely American, or is it susceptible to comparative treatment? This article contrasts the personal vote in the 1980 U.S. House elections with that in the 1979 British general election. The analysis utilizes data from surveys conducted by the Center …
The Paradox of Not Voting: A Decision Theoretic Analysis
Various analysts have noted that the decision to vote in mass elections is difficult to justify from the standpoint of an expected utility maximization model. Put simply, the probability that a citizen's vote will affect the outcome is so small that the expected gains from voting are outweighed by the costs in time and effort. Such analyses treat rational behavior as synonymous with expected utility maximization. In this paper we show that an alt…
Closeness Counts Only in Horseshoes and Dancing
During the period in which our article (APSR vol. 68 [June 1974]) circulated in manuscript form it provoked an unusual amount of collegial reaction. Of course, we were quite prepared for a reaction from those who use decision-theoretic models in their research-they were our intended audience. More surprisingly, we also received comments from less directly involved bystanders-a medieval historian for example. All this correspondence indicates to u…
Presidential Coattails in Historical Perspective
Two methods are used to measure presidential coattails in House elections in various electoral periods since 1868. In the direct model, House votes are determined directly by presidential votes plus extraneous and local effects. This allows separate measurements of the seats-votes relationship (swing ratio) and of the behavioral connection between presidential and congressional voting. In the simultaneous determination model, votes for both offic…
On the Decline of Competition in Congressional Elections
Several authors have observed a decline in the number of competitive congressional districts during the past two decades. Various explanations have been proposed for this change. Among these are theories attributing major causal significance to changing methods of drawing district boundaries, and increasing control of campaign resources by incumbents. These theories are examined critically and arguments are advanced for their rejection. The princ…
Coattail Voting in Recent Presidential Elections
This article presents a method for analyzing the extent and strength of coattail voting in presidential elections. This method allows the authors to estimate the magnitude of coattail voting and then to decompose this estimate into more "basic" elements. Estimates are given for presidential elections beginning with 1956.The determination of the coattail vote and its decomposition depend on the theory of the voting decision that is assumed. In thi…
Linking Constituency Opinion and Senate Voting Scores: A Hybrid Explanation
This paper attempts to explain better the linkages between constituency opinion and the voting records of senators. A hybrid explanation-the modified twoconstituency thesis-is presented here, and the analyses provide evidence in support of the explanation. Senators' voting scores are most strongly related to the weighted position of their party's constituents. The extent to which senators' voting scores diverge from the preferences of constituent…
The Budget Process and the Size of the Budget
The new congressional budget process provides- members of Congress with a new set \nof institutional mechanisms for making budget decisions. This article addresses the question \nof whether or under what conditions rigid application of the new budget process \n(modeled as, first, selection of the size of the budget and, second, its division) produces \nsmaller budgets than a piecemeal appropriations process in which the size of the budget is \nde…
The House Is Not a Home: British MPs in Their Constituencies
The British parliamentary system supposedly denies MPs the electoral incentive and the staff resources to engage in constituency service in the style of members of the U.S. Congress. Backbench MPs presumably aspire to ministerial office and therefore concentrate their activity on the work of the House. Case studies of 17 MPs, however, reveal that the constituency orientations of MPs are more varied than the conventional wisdom suggests, that some…
Sophisticated Voting and Agenda Independence in the Distributive Politics Setting
This paper characterizes outcomes in a distributive, or pork barrel, setting. We assume each legislator has a list of projects for which funding is sought. Each project provides benefits that are concentrated in each district but imposes costs that must be borne by all districts. A bill consists of some subset of the projects proposed by all the legislators. We show that even when there is no Condorcet winner among the possible bills, there can b…
Party Identification in the United States and Great Britain
Political scientists for some time have questioned the value of party identification in the British context. The most popular objection has been that party identification appears to be less stable and less independent from the vote in Great Britain than in the United States. We attempt to demonstrate that the first objection is based on strong assumptions about how to deal with minor party identifiers and independents while the second can be disp…
Unification, universalism, and rational choice theory
Green and Shapiro's critique of rational choice theory underestimates the value of unification and the necessity of universalism in science. The central place of intentionality in social life makes both unification and universalism feasible norms in social science. However, "universalism" in social science may be partial, in that the independence hypothesis—that the causal mechanism governing action is context independent—may hold only locally in…
The Politics of Imperfection: The Amendment of Constitutions
Who Wins in Conference Committee
The Constituency Component: A Comparison of Service in Great Britain and the United States
The policymaking component of representation in the United States and Great Britain has been closely studied and compared, but the constituency component—the handling of constituent complaints and the protection of constituency interests—is less well understood. This article considers two questions about the constituency component of representation: how much and what kinds of casework services do MPs as opposed to members of Congress provide, and…
Uncertainty and the Formal Theory of Political Campaigns
Many empirical investigations indicate that information is scarce and therefore costly to holders and seekers of public office. Indeed, some studies suggest that imperfect information may account for important aspects of the behavior of politicians. Nevertheless, there is as yet no theoretical investigation of political decision making that illustrates the impact of costly information or behavior.In this paper the authors develop a model of elect…
Warlike Democracies
Classical republican theories are monadic in the sense of seeing in each political regime a set of typical operating characteristics. There is disagreement as to what those characteristics are and specifically whether republican governments are more likely to be aggressive or peace loving. We group these two views as (democratic) mobilization theory versus (republican) checks theory and argue, first, that each can help us understand the finer str…
The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence
Modern legislators are increasingly motivated to serve their constituents in personal ways. Representatives act like ultimate ombudsmen: they keep in close touch with their constituents and try to cultivate a relationship with them based on service and accessibility. The Personal Vote describes the behavior of representatives in the United States and Great Britain and the response of their constituents as well. It shows how congressmen and member…
Are we losing touch?’ Mainstream parties' failure to represent their voters on immigration and its electoral consequences
In many advanced democracies, mainstream political parties have been disrupted either by the rise of new (populist) parties or by hostile takeovers. In this article we argue that immigration attitudes have had a powerful impact on the strategic environment of political parties and leaders. We show, based on evidence from a comparative study conducted by YouGov in spring of 2015, that immigration attitudes had, by that time, driven a wedge between…
Cognitive Political Economy: A Growing Partisan Divide in Economic Perceptions
Research suggests that American partisans are increasingly distinct in their beliefs. These strengthened partisan feelings extend to economic perceptions—as numerous scholars have shown, there is a substantial gap between the proportion of Democrats and the proportion of Republicans that believe the economy is improving. Here, we examine the extent to which these perceptions have polarized over the past two decades and the degree to which they st…
The Politics of Imperfection: The Amendment of Constitutions
A Note on “Voting or a Price System in a Competitive Market Structure”
The purpose of this note is to contribute to the analysis of various sorts of institutions for distributing goods to members of a society. The paper examines what happens when a society is faced with distributing ordinary private goods to its members. It can utilize three different sorts of institutions: a voting system, a price system, or a fixed proportions sharing rule. We suggest that a fixed proportions sharing rule generally will be found p…
The Paradox of Not Voting: A Decision Theoretic Analysis
Various analysts have noted that the decision to vote in mass elections is difficult to justify from the standpoint of an expected utility maximization model. Put simply, the probability that a citizen's vote will affect the outcome is so small that the expected gains from voting are outweighed by the costs in time and effort. Such analyses treat rational behavior as synonymous with expected utility maximization. In this paper we show that an alt…
Pork Barrel Politics: Rivers and Harbors Legislation, 1947-1968
Pork Barrel Politics: Rivers and Harbors Legislation, 1947-1968
Who Wins in Conference Committee
Closeness Counts Only in Horseshoes and Dancing
During the period in which our article (APSR vol. 68 [June 1974]) circulated in manuscript form it provoked an unusual amount of collegial reaction. Of course, we were quite prepared for a reaction from those who use decision-theoretic models in their research-they were our intended audience. More surprisingly, we also received comments from less directly involved bystanders-a medieval historian for example. All this correspondence indicates to u…
Some new impossibility theorems
Congressional Change and Theoretical Frameworks
On the Decline of Competition in Congressional Elections
Several authors have observed a decline in the number of competitive congressional districts during the past two decades. Various explanations have been proposed for this change. Among these are theories attributing major causal significance to changing methods of drawing district boundaries, and increasing control of campaign resources by incumbents. These theories are examined critically and arguments are advanced for their rejection. The princ…
Uncertainty and the Formal Theory of Political Campaigns
Many empirical investigations indicate that information is scarce and therefore costly to holders and seekers of public office. Indeed, some studies suggest that imperfect information may account for important aspects of the behavior of politicians. Nevertheless, there is as yet no theoretical investigation of political decision making that illustrates the impact of costly information or behavior.In this paper the authors develop a model of elect…
The House Is Not a Home: British MPs in Their Constituencies
The British parliamentary system supposedly denies MPs the electoral incentive and the staff resources to engage in constituency service in the style of members of the U.S. Congress. Backbench MPs presumably aspire to ministerial office and therefore concentrate their activity on the work of the House. Case studies of 17 MPs, however, reveal that the constituency orientations of MPs are more varied than the conventional wisdom suggests, that some…
Party Identification in the United States and Great Britain
Political scientists for some time have questioned the value of party identification in the British context. The most popular objection has been that party identification appears to be less stable and less independent from the vote in Great Britain than in the United States. We attempt to demonstrate that the first objection is based on strong assumptions about how to deal with minor party identifiers and independents while the second can be disp…
Continuos social decision procedures
The Constituency Component: A Comparison of Service in Great Britain and the United States
The policymaking component of representation in the United States and Great Britain has been closely studied and compared, but the constituency component—the handling of constituent complaints and the protection of constituency interests—is less well understood. This article considers two questions about the constituency component of representation: how much and what kinds of casework services do MPs as opposed to members of Congress provide, and…
Coattail Voting in Recent Presidential Elections
This article presents a method for analyzing the extent and strength of coattail voting in presidential elections. This method allows the authors to estimate the magnitude of coattail voting and then to decompose this estimate into more "basic" elements. Estimates are given for presidential elections beginning with 1956.The determination of the coattail vote and its decomposition depend on the theory of the voting decision that is assumed. In thi…
The Constituency Service Basis of the Personal Vote for U.S. Representatives and British Members of Parliament
Under the guise of the “incumbency advantage,” American research of the past decade has devoted heavy emphasis to what may be termed the “personal vote” in congressional elections. Is this phenomenon purely American, or is it susceptible to comparative treatment? This article contrasts the personal vote in the 1980 U.S. House elections with that in the 1979 British general election. The analysis utilizes data from surveys conducted by the Center …
Presidential Coattails in Historical Perspective
Two methods are used to measure presidential coattails in House elections in various electoral periods since 1868. In the direct model, House votes are determined directly by presidential votes plus extraneous and local effects. This allows separate measurements of the seats-votes relationship (swing ratio) and of the behavioral connection between presidential and congressional voting. In the simultaneous determination model, votes for both offic…
Democracy and Social Choice
Incumbent performance and electoral control
The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence
Modern legislators are increasingly motivated to serve their constituents in personal ways. Representatives act like ultimate ombudsmen: they keep in close touch with their constituents and try to cultivate a relationship with them based on service and accessibility. The Personal Vote describes the behavior of representatives in the United States and Great Britain and the response of their constituents as well. It shows how congressmen and member…
Sophisticated Voting and Agenda Independence in the Distributive Politics Setting
This paper characterizes outcomes in a distributive, or pork barrel, setting. We assume each legislator has a list of projects for which funding is sought. Each project provides benefits that are concentrated in each district but imposes costs that must be borne by all districts. A bill consists of some subset of the projects proposed by all the legislators. We show that even when there is no Condorcet winner among the possible bills, there can b…
The Budget Process and the Size of the Budget
The new congressional budget process provides- members of Congress with a new set \nof institutional mechanisms for making budget decisions. This article addresses the question \nof whether or under what conditions rigid application of the new budget process \n(modeled as, first, selection of the size of the budget and, second, its division) produces \nsmaller budgets than a piecemeal appropriations process in which the size of the budget is \nde…
Legislators and Their Districts: A Review Article
Bargaining in Legislatures
Bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided. Legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature. Although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria, it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislat…
Linking Constituency Opinion and Senate Voting Scores: A Hybrid Explanation
This paper attempts to explain better the linkages between constituency opinion and the voting records of senators. A hybrid explanation-the modified twoconstituency thesis-is presented here, and the analyses provide evidence in support of the explanation. Senators' voting scores are most strongly related to the weighted position of their party's constituents. The extent to which senators' voting scores diverge from the preferences of constituent…
Political science (43 works) · Law (33 works) · Politics (29 works) · Economics (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (15 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Public Administration (12 works) · Voting (11 works)