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Although the literature on congressional change has established that both the House and Senate have become increasingly polarized along party lines over time, this conclusion is limited primarily to patterns of voting behavior. An exploration of another legislative practice, bill cosponsorship, reveals that while partisan polarization in the House has increased over time, the same is not necessarily true for the Senate. Using data on bill cosponsorship for the 93rd through 110th Congresses, this paper presents two conclusions. First, over time, House members have become more exclusive in their cosponsorship decisions, associating primarily with members of their own party. Second, and in contrast to this, the cosponsorship ties among senators have become more bipartisan; in recent years, more senators have adopted ?50-50 networks,? or cosponsorship networks composed of equal numbers of members from both parties. These results suggest that the increasing partisan polarization for which this era has become known may not be as prevalent as we have thought. Rather, when we scratch below the surface of roll call behavior and explore the informal relationship-building activities of legislators, we find that differences in the institutional structures of the House and Senate, such as membership size and length of term, may create different behavioral outcomes in each chamber. This paper contributes to our understanding of congressional development by examining the polarization story from a new angle and recognizing that the House and Senate are two unique institutions, each requiring its own theoretical framework to be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do partisan media affect polarization and partisanship? The rise of Fox News, MSNBC, and hyper-partisan outlets online gives this question fresh salience, but in this paper, we argue that the question is actually not new: prior to the broadcast era, newspapers dominated American mass communication. Many of these were identified as supporting one party over the other in their news coverage. While scholars have studied the composition and impact of the partisan press during their 19th-century height, the political impact of the gradual decline of these partisan papers remains relatively under-examined. The unnoted vitality and endurance of partisan newspapers (which constituted a majority of American newspapers until the 1960s) represents a huge hole in our understanding of how parties communicate. As a consequence of this omission, scholars have ignored a potentially vital contributing factor to changing patterns of partisan voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two arguments about theories of congressional parties and organization are made in this paper. First, theory must focus more directly on the often-competing factions within the majority party. Other analyses emphasize the polarization between the parties—the intra-party cohesiveness and inter-party differences—but this paper proposes that factions within the majority party usually compete for control of the party and the House and often produce winners and losers. Second, while other analyses treat negative and positive forms of agenda power as distinguishable and subject to different dynamics, I argue that (1) the two forms of agenda manipulation are essential for agenda control and are likely to develop together and (2) legislators' preferences for the agenda power allocated to their parties are dependent on their factional location. In short, we should reorient the discussion of congressional organization and agenda power. Factional politics within legislative parties should be central to our accounts of the distribution of power in Congress. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American electorate can be seen as two contrasting electorates -- one partisan (Democrats vs. Republicans), the other non-partisan. Partisans are more politically attentive/involved, strongly inclined to view candidates and campaign through their partisan “lenses,” and more partisan in voting behavior than nonpartisans. This paper will examine how these two electorates have changed between 1992 and 2004. Its data primarily come from two national surveys, conducted as part of the Comparative National Election Project (CNEP) in the two “book-end” years, which focused uniquely on information sources in the election campaigns. ANES data will complement the CNEP data, especially between 1992 and 2004, to establish whether these years were unrepresentative outliers. Some observers suggest, while others deny, that the American electorate has polarized during this time. The paper will examine polarization from the perspective of information sources as well as behavior. Preliminary analysis suggests that partisans, in contrast to nonpartisans, were exposed by 2004 to more homogeneously partisan information through the availability of TV and (especially) radio talk shows and their more partisan social networks. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use an original set of roll call data from several state legislatures to evaluate existing theories of legislative polarization. Congressional theory presents party polarization as a function of legislative rules changes, changes in party strategy, electoral realignment, legislator replacement or redistricting. Although these theories provide leverage on the issue of polarization, the inferences that we can draw are somewhat limited because they are all generated from one series of data. Rather, to determine whether the causes of polarization are endogenous or exogenous to Congress, we need to test for polarization in different institutions but similar contexts. The American state legislatures provide such an opportunity, as shifts among the electorate are similar, while changes to legislative rules and redistricting differ. The findings from this paper provide a refinement of legislative theory while doing so in a novel way: using data from the legislatures of the American states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party polarization among members of Congress has been increasing in recent years. While the evidence for this increasing polarization is substantial, the reasons for it have remained elusive. This paper proposes that partisan redistricting is one cause of polarization in the House of Representatives. While this explanation is not new, the theory developed in this paper uses median voter theory to explain how district level polarization can increase, while at the same time national levels of polarization among the voting public do not. Median voter theory provides an explanation of how the composition of voters within partisan redistricted districts incentivize House Members to become more ideologically extreme. Thus, partisan redistricting causes Members to change their behavior within the House in order to appease their more ideologically extreme constituency. A quantitative analysis is performed on Congressional districts using a statistical matching technique designed to demonstrate a statistically significant difference in ideological extremity among those Members within districts that have been gerrymandered as opposed to Members in non-gerrymandered districts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research examining party polarization in Congress has concentrated on documenting the sources of polarization, but little work has been done regarding the consequences of polarization. This paper takes a step towards remedying this oversight by examining the affects of party polarization on the size and content of the legislative agenda. Using time series analysis, the study examined the affects of partisan polarization on the legislative agenda. As the parties in Congress become more ideologically distinct the majority party has more incentive to control the agenda. Additionally, members of the minority party should look to place more significant bills on the agenda to try to force the majority party into a negative voting record. Therefore, it is expected that higher polarization will lead to a larger number of significant issues being placed on the congressional agenda and to an increased effort by the majority party to control the floor agenda. This paper examined the number of significant issues on the agenda and percentage of bills on the House floor introduced by majority members. Time series models using data from the 80th (1947-48) through the 107th (2000-01) found evidence that polarization leads to an increase of majority party bills on the floor agenda, but found no evidence for any effect on the overall size of the significant issue agenda. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential sources of the polarization observed in Congress have been attributed to a variety of factors. In this paper, we seek to more directly link patterns of polarization in the U.S. House to underlying changes in representatives? constituencies resulting from redistricting. As districts become more liberal or conservative over time, we should expect members representing these districts to alter their behavior to reflect these trends. Using a new dataset linking congressional districts over time, we examine whether changes within districts contribute to polarization in the U.S. House. We show that while there is an overall increasing trend of polarization, districts that have undergone significant changes as a result of redistricting have become even more polarized. This finding has direct implications for analyses examining aggregate levels of polarization in Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One view of American politics many scholars share is that of government divided along partisan and ideological lines. In question is the extent of the division, as well as the cause and the degree to which it interferes with efficient decision making. Amidst the divided government literature the concept of polarization has arisen to describe what is perceived to be extreme partisan or ideological division. Polarization conjures up images of individuals or groups in diametrical opposition or antagonistic situations, a state that should be of interest to anyone concerned about effective decision making and governance. Although much of the research on divided government and polarization examines Congress and the executive, some effort is made to extend the argument to the judicial branch. This paper examines the effort and applies empirical tests to determine whether claims of polarization on the Supreme Court can be further supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Character analysis provides a means of studying political debates. By identifying the types of persons evoked by speakers and writers, it is possible to glean information about key features of a given speech or written passage, as well as about debates as wholes. In this paper, we put forward a methodology for identifying characters evoked by proponents and opponents of particular bills or resolutions put forward in the United States Senate, notably on foreign policy, on the welfare system, and on immigration. Preliminary analysis shows that the methodology is feasible and that the degree of polarization between opposing sides is high regardless of the closeness of the eventual vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few electoral cycles, the two major American political parties have both pursued strategies of polarization. At the same time, opinion polls have shown the American electorate to be generally centrist in its policy preferences. Under the current economic models of voter behavior, these two developments present a paradox. More precisely, the current economic models of voter behavior, as exemplified by Anthony Downs, would predict both parties to adopt policy positions directed towards the distributional center of the electorate, and not toward the outskirts of the distribution as observed. While this paradox might simply be interpreted as a failure of the economic model to describe voter behavior, denying the relevance of that model--in which thoughtful decisions are presumed to be based on preferences--would seem imprudent. Alternatively, there is an economic model of behavior that would resolve this paradox. In particular, we might consider the marketing model of branding, in which a producer creates a brand based on its opposition to another brand and identifies features disliked by consumers to repel those consumers from the opposing brand. In a duopoly, such repelled consumers have no other option than to fall to the opposing brand. This paper presents such a model as it might be applied to the two major American political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political identity sorting that has been observed to occur during the past 50 years has caused the nation as a whole to hold more overlapping political identities, which has strengthened the activism, bias and anger that result from strong and highly aligned identities, even though issue positions have remained moderate. In this paper I offer a clear definition of polarization and a theory-based explanation of the mechanism by which polarization has increased over the last few decades. Specifically, I view polarization in terms of political behavior, not issue positions, and I believe that it has been increasing over the last 50 years as a result of political identity sorting. This theory is informed by work in social psychology that makes concrete predictions about the psychological results of group membership. Using this theoretical background, I argue that political identity and the alignment of political identities is able to drive political participation, political bias, and political anger, even when issue positions are moderate. The more strongly aligned the political identities, the stronger the effect of identity on behavior. I support these hypotheses using data drawn from a nationally-representative sample collected by Polimetrix from a National Science Foundation grant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing consensus that the United States is undergoing a period of political polarization, particularly among elites. The causes of this polarization remain underresearched. We argue that changes in the international distribution of power influence America's polarization. To demonstrate the argument, this paper analyzes changes in power and polarization quantitatively and qualitatively from 1945 to 2005. A key finding is that greater relative power on the world stage increases polarization and some of its correlates. The argument also gauges the extent of international influence on domestic polarization and makes novel predictions on when and why polarization will end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three related questions concerning polarization among the states in nine U.S. presidential elections, 1976-2008. First, what trends can be observed in the number of polarized and battleground states? Second, are polarization trends related to regional shifts? Third, has polarization benefitted either party in the Electoral College?Polarization of each state is measured according its deviation from the two-party national election results for each election. A "polarized" state is operationally defined as more than 10% from the national vote for any election, with "battleground states" operationally defined as within 4% of the national vote.The data indicate a clear trend toward greater polarization and fewer battleground states, marked in particular by the 1992 and 2000 elections. The 2008 election did not interrupt this trend.The most profound regional trend is found in nine southern states, where Republican presidential candidates have gained an overwhelming advantage, with seven states at least 10% more Republican than the nation in 2008. By way of contrast, in 1984 no southern state gave Republicans a 5% advantage.Techniques similar to Abramson, et al. (2006) are used to evaluate Electoral College advantages by creating "hypothetical" tie elections. The adjusted data suggest a trend away from a strong Republican Electoral College advantage. This is related to "supermajorities" Republicans have accumulated in the south, which represent "wasted" votes for Electoral College competition. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how the degree of polarization between the two major political parties is affecting the importance of objective economic conditions for voters in the United States. I find that as the Democratic and Republican parties have grown more ideologically distinct over the last 40 years, individuals have grown increasingly immune to economic growth when casting votes in congressional and presidential elections. The declining importance of objective macroeconomic conditions appears to be driven by a concomitant rise in the significance of racial and social issues among voters with weak partisan ties. These results are confirmed in analysis of aggregate election outcomes for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1890-2008: greater party polarization is associated with a weaker relationship between economic growth and the percentage of seats gained or lost by the president's party. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do domestic migrants in the U.S. tend to choose destinations with matching political preferences? This straightforward question is difficult to address with traditional survey and census data, for several reasons: precise data about migration in political surveys is rare, while datasets with more migration detail do not contain responses to political opinion. This paper analyzes migration using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study of 2006. The addresses of respondents were then matched against the US Postal Service’s public change of address database, which includes updated addresses for respondents. In this way, the dataset provides very precise detail about recent migrations, in addition to the significant number of political opinion and demographic questions in the survey. The study focuses on residents who moved far enough to have changed U.S. Congressional district between from 2006 to 2007; these comprised approximately 1400 of the 33,000 CCES respondents. I then propose and test a formal model of geographic sorting, analyzed with a hierarchical random effects model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper which focuses on the political parties' tendency of using their agenda-setting powers to work around pivotal voters and meet their own goals. It refers to legislative history of the annual appropriations bills in the U.S. Congress during 1976-2009, and shows the leaders' practice of approving spending bills in omnibus packages rather than individually. It uses spatial models to show changes in partisan polarization with changes in pivotal voters' location.

This paper analyzes polarization and alienation as competing predictors of trust in government. I define "alienation" as a citizen's perceived ideological proximity to each major political party. I define "polarization" as the ideological distance a citizen perceives between the parties, without regard to the citizen's ideological self-placement. Using the cumulative ANES, I find strong support for alienation effects but not for polarization effects; when it comes to predicting trust, ideological positions of the parties only matter relative to citizens' personal ideological placements. I find this relationship is robust across both time and measures of trust. In addition, I suggest that alienation is misspecified in the literature as a citizens' ideological distance from the closest political party only. Instead, ideological distance from both major parties should matter when it comes to explaining trust in the American context. My results confirm these expectations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses party registration data from the states that provide it to estimate the separate effects of residential self-selection and shifting party coalitions on district polarization in US House Elections. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extraordinary moments of political change originate in the struggle for control over a major party's political agenda. Yet in spite of intra-party competition's role in structuring the political order, most research explaining conflict displacement focuses on inter-party competition. This paper develops a study of partisan change among non-South white ethnics that demonstrates the mass-level partisan effects of elite-level factional changes within the Democratic party. I show that around the turn of the 20th century the party faction with which most white ethnics were affiliated suffered declining influence within the party, and that as a result the issues emphasized in Democratic presidential campaigns rarely appealed to this coalitional group's partisan attitudes. The eventual mass-level partisan change that developed among white ethnics proceeded when the Democrat's liberal faction secured its grasp on the party's agenda. Partisan polarization on race -- a simple, salient issue -- served as the proximate stimulus for partisan attitude change among white ethnics. In fact, the vast majority of partisan conversion among non-South racial conservatives occurred among white ethnics, suggesting that the struggle for power within the Democratic party was a necessary pre-condition for the rise in partisan polarization after 1964. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I construct networks between Members of Congress using roll-call data and identify the community structure of these networks using the concept of modularity. Modularity maximization provides two key measures. First, the maximum modularity value provides a conceptually clear measure of Congressional polarization, derived from the data without making assumptions about legislator utilities, as NOMINATE based measures do. Second, the community detection algorithm used to maximize modularity yields a unique community structure for each Congress that may be quantitatively compared to alternate community structures using the modularity concept. Analysis of maximum modularities over the history of the United States Congress reveals high levels of partisan polarization to be the historical norm, with the period from the 75th to 95th Congresses being the notable exception. Comparison of the modularity measure to NOMINATE based measures of polarization reveal interesting substantive differences, especially during periods of declining party importance and partisan fractionalization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how partisan polarization is changing the behavior and legislative output of members of Congress. One way to understand the consequences of polarization in Congress is by studying changes in the process of passing appropriations bills over time. While the political parties are drifting farther apart and the floor is becoming more contentious, the need to pass spending bills is an annually recurring event. Each year, the 13 (now fewer) bills funding the operation of the federal government must be written, debated, and passed. If not, the government will shut down. The regularity of these bills and the procedures by which they are passed make them a perfect vehicle for studying member behavior over time and how changes in preferences affect the legislative process.I present evidence from a dataset outlining 30 years of legislative history for each of the 13 appropriations bills. I find that the major consequence of the polarization of the two political parties is that it has created a more contentious floor environment in which it has grown increasingly difficult to pass spending bills. Partisan disputes now prevent many spending bills from receiving a floor vote, particularly in the Senate. Since it is not an option to shut down the government, Congress has resorted to new measures to ensure passage of the bills. First, it has routinely packaged the bills together as omnibus appropriation bills in order to broaden their base of support. Second, it has increased the number of earmarks it gives to members in order to provide an additional incentive to vote for the bills. Omnibus bills are not necessarily more tilted toward the majority party preference than spending bills in the past, since the final product must be negotiated with the president. However, during periods of unified government, omnibus bills do provide an opportunity for "partisan steamrolls" in which the majority party can enact its preferences into law. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether immigration is an issue that evolves, beginning in the 1990s. It is argued that whenever the immigrant population can be associated with high costs, then policy entrepreneurs will start the evolution process by dwelling on the cost symbol. This idea is tested by comparing partisan polarization for the entire United States, for the seven states that incurred a net deficit in spending on immigrants, and for California alone. As hypothesized, polarization increases the most in California, though not in a way that suggests issue evolution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no abstract for this paper ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congress by its very nature is a deliberative institution created to mediate societal conflicts and address the policy concerns posed by such conflicts (Madison, Federalist # 10; Dahl, 1967; Cooper, 1970). The challenge for Congress is to embrace these responsibilities without becoming so overwhelmed with internal institutional conflict that its policy processes break down or so regularized and insulated in its policy processes that it fails to see and confront pressing social concerns. Thus a central congressional dilemma: Because conflict is inherent to Congress and threatening to its operation, it is tempted to avoid institutional meltdown by embracing highly constrained and regularized policy procedures. Yet an embrace of excessive constraints can isolate the Congress, inhibit conflict mediation, and allow policy problems to fester. How then does Congress generate the landmark laws that address its central mediational and policy-making tasks (Mayhew, 1991; Binder 2003)? The thesis of this paper is that the capacity of Congress to enact landmark legislation depends significantly on the character and regulation of conflict within the institution. Substantial and sustained landmark productivity requires a Congress that fosters real policy contestation (Dahl, 1967, 1971) characterized by serious conflict and even occasional incivilities, so that difficult policy problems can be brought to its attention (Jones and Baugartner, 2005; Schattsneider, 1960). Such contestation limits the isolation of Congress and connects it with social reality. But Congress then must maintain internal conflict within moderated parameters that avoid institutional meltdown and enable deliberative policy-making to proceed (Cooper, 1970, Part IV; Maass, 1983; Bessette, 1994). In this formulation, too much institutional conflict can inhibit landmark productivity -- but so can too little conflict (Simmel, 1955/1908). Too much conflict, we argue, will occur in polarized Congresses when high party polarization interacts with high inter-party incivility. Too little conflict is witnessed in depolarized Congresses (those below the historic mean level of party polarization) when low party polarization interacts with excessive intra-party civility. Both settings inhibit landmark productivity. In contrast, moderate levels of interactive conflict between party polarization and member incivility foster landmark productivity in both depolarized and polarized Congresses. Institutional conflict thus has countervailing effects, increasing gridlock in polarized Congresses and decreasing it in depolarized ones. To explore the explanatory value of our 'conflict theory' of landmark productivity we examine the statistical relationship between institutional conflict and landmark legislation by Congress from 1891 to 1994. This period begins with the first Congress to occur after the initial passage of the Reed Rules in the House of Representatives and ends with the 103rd Congress, which is the last Congress for which we have complete data. In our analysis: a.We use DW-Nominate scores developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1997) to measure party polarization. b.We determine the rise and fall of incivility within Congress according to the percentage of articles published by the New Your Times and the Washington Post on the Congress between 1891 and 1994 that discuss incidents of congressional incivility... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there has been a long-running debate about polarization in values or attitudes between people defined by socio-demographic characteristics, recent presidential elections have lead many in the public sphere to assume that there is increased polarization in values based on geography. In this paper we operationalize various claims of geographic polarization in values made in public discourse and from existing sociological literatures. Using the cumulative General Social Survey and diss-aggregating the respondents by various geographic units, we conclude that there has been an increase in geographic polarization in values. However, it is not the polarization that either the existing sociological literature would predict (city vs. suburbs), nor the received political wisdom ("red states" vs. "blue states.") Rather, there is a growing divide in values between locales in the U.S. that are more diverse and those that are less diverse. Of the various ways of conceptualizing diversity, the religiously diverse locales and the less religious diverse locales are polarizing on the greatest number of social attitudes and converging in the least. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the conference paper "False Starts in U.S. Foreign Aid Policy: Domestic Polarization and Global Alienation" shown during the "Annual meeting of the International Studies Association" in Honolulu, Hawaii. It deals with the domestic challenge over U.S. foreign aid by assessing the institutional landscape in which foreign-aid programs operate. It reviews central assumptions of institutional theory and determine characteristics that are used to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Millennium Challenge Corp. (MCC).

Over the past two decades, partisanship in the U.S. Congress has grown in media coverage and as a source of academic dispute. Partisanship can take the form of partisan homogenization, where the two parties are more coherent internally in their preferences, or partisan polarization, where the ideological distance between the two parties has grown. The most prominent evidence for this rise-in-partisanship phenomena includes roll call voting, first-dimension DW-NOMINATE scores, presidential support scores and adjusted ADA scores. My paper evaluates some of the most prominent theories of partisanship by comparing them to the personal impressions of a survey of staffers in the U.S. House of Representatives. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that mass polarization may begin with population groups that consider cultural policy issues such as abortion and gay and lesbian rights more salient than others, resulting in a mini issue evolution in which members of the political elites in the U.S. polarize on the issue and group members increasingly identify with one party or the other. The paper also aims to determine if the two U.S. political parties are experiencing an issue evolution with respect to cultural policy issues.

This paper will determine the extent to which health insurance has an impact on health, net of that of more conventional measures of socioeconomic status (SES), namely education and income, using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. As previous research indicates, a satisfactory answer to this question requires estimates of the effects of health insurance on health that are less affected by selection biases. This will be achieved by framing this question within the counterfactual account of causality and using fixed effects models with sibling clusters to corroborate -- or refute -- the results of a conventional OLS regression. Fixed effects models postulate that, by using one sibling virtually as a "control" for another one, it is possible to estimate the effects of current factors net of common family background and genetic predispositions (Guo and Van Wey 1999). Results show that, despite the inclusion of control variables antedating the measure of health insurance coverage, public insurance has in the conventional regression a strong negative association with health. However, as hypothesized, this negative relationship declines in magnitude and becomes non significant in the fixed effects regression with sibling clusters. Conversely, the effects of years uninsured, which were non significant in the OLS regression, increase in magnitude and become highly significant in the fixed effects regression. Private insurance had no significant effect on health beyond that of adult SES in either model. These results suggest that being uninsured has a strong negative impact on health, while public and private insurance may have no impact beyond that of adult SES. However, this relationship can only be observed with methods that specifically address the selection bias in health insurance allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]