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Overview:One determinant of the parties' ability to resist the median voter may be constituency size. We test this proposition with a measure of legislator ideology that is directly comparable to voter ideology, using referenda votes as bridging observations.Abstract:At the state and local level throughout the United States, there is considerable variation in the power of parties to control nominations, structure legislative voting, and compel non-median behavior from elected officials. Some of this variation stems from the range of institutional arrangements that govern parties. For example, more stringent rules on primary participation may result in the nomination of more extreme candidates (Fiorina 1974; Gerber and Morton 1998). Long periods out of power may also cause parties to unify while nominating more centrist candidates (Bawn et al 2006). Lee and Oppenheimer (1999) suggest a role for constituency size in determining partisanship. They find that senators from larger states tended to be policy activists, while those from smaller states tended toward more centrist behavior.In this paper, we investigate the role of constituency size in inducing party strength. Masket's (2007) study on this phenomenon was hampered by an important methodological barrier; any study that tries to determine whether legislators are more or less partisan than constituents must make very strong assumptions about the ideological scales of those two populations. Even if we accurately measure preferences with legislative votes and with electoral returns, the scales from both measures are arbitrary, and not the same.This is a common problem in the literature, to which we offer a possible solution. We propose to bridge the two populations using referenda, on which the legislature and the electorate both vote. They thus serve as bridging observations between the two distributions (e.g. Bailey 2007). We explore several critical features of this strategy. First, legislators can only vote yea or nay, but electoral districts can pass or fail a measure by any margin. We develop strategies for using that additional information without compromising the goal of comparability. Second, any further application of this strategy will suffer, since referenda are scarce. So we attempt to quantify the additional leverage gained by adding more bridging observations, and the dangers of having too few. This paper would be appropriate for panels on methodology, political parties, state politics, representation and nominations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the legislative party strategy and the separation of powers in the U.S. Explanation on the strategic dilemma confronting legislative party leaders; Observation on the factions within legislative parties; Information on the permanent campaign.

The old adage is that war is how the world teaches Americans geography. In some ways it is also how we teach our political leaders international relations. Strangely the direct linkage between international conflict and the American political agenda has been given relatively little attention by scholars. This paper hopes to begin to remedy this. We seek to demonstrate the effect of international conflict on the domestic agenda of American political institutions. Research indicates that individuals and institutions process information serially and not in a parallel fashion (Jones 1994; Jones 2003; Baumgartner and Jones 2005; Jones, Sulkin, and Larsen 2003). Leaders and institutions are subject to attention limits and attention to one policy area inevitably results in less attention to other policy areas. Using data from the Correlates of War Project's Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) dataset and the Policy Agendas Project data documenting the agenda of the major political institutions of the US, this paper examines the connection between the frequency and severity of international conflicts and the relative importance of international affairs within the US political agenda. Our findings demonstrate that political leaders are bad at making trade-offs, and domestic policy attention is influenced by the degree to which the US finds itself involved in international conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the factors that shape women's evolving political behavior. While most of the extant research on women in politics has focused on the impact of sex as a political variable, this paper seeks to explain the growing importance of party identification on the political behavior of female elected officials. Building on previous research that suggests that Democratic men may be more likely than Republican women to support pro-feminist/women's issues, this research seeks to examine the effect of party on the political behavior of women in office. By using longitudinal data on female elected officials, this paper addresses whether marked differences exists between the responsiveness of Democratic and Republican women to the interests of their political parties concerning issues traditionally defined as important to women. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert P. Steed (email: steedr@citadel.edu) will present this paper, if accepted. Abstract:Partisan change in the South over the past half century has been dramatic. Not surprisingly, research on the southern Republican Party has focused largely on those areas and electoral levels where growth has occurred. Much less attention has been given to those mountain areas of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee where the party historically enjoyed its main support. Traditionally, mountain Republican activists and organizations differed from their newly developing counterparts in urban/suburban areas of the South in terms of demographics, ideology, and party activity. Analysis of data from the Southern Grassroots Party Activists Survey I (conducted in 1991) suggests that these differences still exist as of the 1990s and still carry potential consequences for intra-party unity in the region (see Steed, Baker and Moreland 1995).The paper proposed here will extend our previous analysis into the early Twenty-first Century. Utilizing data from the Southern Grassroots Party Activists Survey II (conducted in 2001), the paper will compare mountain Republican activists with non-mountain Republican activists in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee with regard to personal and political backgrounds, activity patterns, ideological and issue orientations, and party perspectives and will examine whether or not there are continuing differences between these two groups of party officials with a view toward understanding the place of mountain Republicans within the southern Republican Party during a period of rapid partisan transformation. The paper will also address the larger issue of the nationalization of southern party politics as it relates to these mountain regions.The data for the paper come from the south-wide survey of local party officials (precinct officers and county chairs) funded by an NSF grant and directed by Charles Prysby and John Clark (for a description of the project, see Clark and Prysby 2004). References:Robert P. Steed, Tod A. Baker, and Laurence W. Moreland, "Forgotten but not Gone: Mountain Republicans and Contemporary Southern Party Politics," Journal of Political Science 23 (1995): 5-27.John A. Clark and Charles Prysby, Southern Political Party Activists: Patterns of Conflict and Change, 1991-2001, University Press of Kentucky, 2004). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wide variety of organizations attempt to influence the outcome of elections through canvassing, including candidate organizations, political parties, 527s, and interest groups. The experimental literature on voter participation confirms the intuition that face-to-face canvassing is the optimal mode of inducing voter turnout. However, that literature has done little to advance a theoretical understanding of why canvassing works, except to say that a personal approach is best. This paper seeks to contribute to the development of a theoretical understanding of how mobilization works. Do people respond differently to different types of canvassers (who vary on dimensions such as race, gender, being knowledgeable about the election, friendliness), or is personal contact the most important dimension? In this paper, I will present findings from a series of focus groups conducted around the United States in the summer of 2006 that will serve as the basis for future experimental work. In these groups voters will openly discuss their experiences with canvassing and will also react to a video simulation that will measure their implicit reactions to different types of canvassers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the oldest and most enduring debates in American Politics involves the endogeneity of party identification to the issue preferences of American citizens. More recent interest in the nature of party identification has shifted the terms of the debate from whether one view or the other dominates individual decision-making to a consideration of factors that condition the direction of causality (Carsey and Layman 2006, p. 645). Carsey and Layman's research points to the need for more theoretical consideration of which factors condition the relationship between policy preferences and partisanship. In this paper, I seek to examine the heterogeneity in the issue-basis of party identification by drawing on another classic literature concerning the uncertainty that citizens have about politics. The empirical analysis will employ an estimation technique used by Alvarez and Brehm (1995, 1997) in which heteroskedastic regression is used to directly model the error variance of the respondent's own issue placement, which is used as a measure of individual uncertainty. After controlling for an extensive list of demographic characteristics, I argue that the error variance encompasses not only lack of knowledge about the respondent's issue position, but also the use of cues and shortcuts from the social environment. Uncertainty in this broader sense of within group variation in issue placement is expected to condition the issue-basis of party identification. The estimated error variances from the first stage regression are then interacted with the respondent's issue placement in a second-stage ordered logit regression of party identification. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine legislative elections over 40 years, particularly in the South. Has the shift from one-party Democratic south to (increasingly) Republican south been one marked by competition or conversion of district seats? That is, as Democratic incumbents retired, did the districts switch from uncontested Democratic incumbents to uncontested Republican seats (conversion), or did the two parties contest the district for some period of time (contestation). In other words, what is the pattern of change in the South as Republicans began to replace Democratic dominance? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a study which explored the implications of party culture for modeling voting behavior in the U.S. The study considered member profile, party status and district data in analyzing the partisan contours of legislative behavior. It discovered that the responsiveness of members to personal, district and positional forces is influenced by party affiliation.

Utilizing six surveys of political attitudes and behavior for a local community in Ohio (from 1980 to 2005), the author demonstrates that gender based age cohorts change their reported party identity in different directions at different times, suggesting that socialization to political life may vary across time and with gender. It is further suggested that the concept of party identity may embrace multiple meanings and that gender/age cohort groups may attach different meanings to their avowal of attachment or lack of attachment to political parties, meanings that lead to different responses to ongoing political contexts and stimuli. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines several issues relating to contemporary campaign finance through the rubric of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA). The law provided for the end of unregulated soft money to political parties, and it is also aimed at increasing disclosure of campaign activities by political parties and interest groups. Between the 1996 and 2004 election cycle, total contributions by members of the U.S. Congress increased as party margins remained narrow and party leaders pressured members to contribute for the party.

Clinton (2006) finds that the revealed preferences of Republican House members are related to the preferences of their Republican constituents, but that the revealed preferences of Democratic House members are most strongly related to the preferences of their constituents that do not self-identify as Democrats. We suggest that Clinton's puzzling results are largely an artifact of his model and measures. The results change significantly when we replace Clinton's measure of constituency preferences based on self-identified ideology with a measure of constituency preferences constructed from responses to a dozen policy specific questions. More importantly, we suggest that the puzzling character of Clinton's results stem from a model that is inconsistent with the theoretical literature on the competing electoral pressures faced by every MC. We offer a model which is consistent with standard accounts of multiple constituencies. The results from our model are readily interpretable in terms of cross pressures on the MC from the median member of the geographic constituency and the median partisan.Clinton, Joshua. 2006. "Constituents and Roll Calls in the 106th House," Journal of Politics, Vol. 68(2): 397-409. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the vast majority of voting in Congress occurs during regular working hours, about three percent of the recorded votes each session over the last decade have occurred late into the evening. The purpose of this research is to examine this unique set of votes members of Congress cast while burning the midnight oil. While these late night votes represent only a small percentage of roll call votes, they are evidently important to members of Congress or at least their leaders who are extremely busy. Roll call votes scheduled late in the evening clearly interfere with members' regular schedules, and no member wants to spend their night on the hill after a long day of Washington work. Considering the disincentives for holding late night roll-call votes, why do they occur? While cynics might assume our Representatives are trying to hide votes, conducting these roll calls while most Americans are sleeping rather than attentively watching C-Span. An alternative view might suggest late night voting is simply another example of members of congress working tirelessly to serve their constituents. Specifically, we test three models of late night voting. First, the Strategic Rush Hypothesis assumes that there are a greater number of votes prior to a major recess (Yackee 2003), and we test if this holds true for late night voting as well. Second, the Cynical Model suggest party leaders schedule late night roll call votes in order to limit the influence of minority interests and conceal controversial legislation and roll-call votes from their constituents. Finally, the Overburdened Model suggests late night roll call votes are simply the result of a congressional schedule which is overburdened. Consequently, Congressional leaders are required to schedule some votes late into the evening in order to address the numerous and complex issues facing our country. In order to test which of these three hypotheses most accurately explain late night voting, we examine all roll-call votes which occurred between midnight and 7:00 AM during the 102nd - 109th Congresses. Our purpose is to determine if the issue domains are unique, whether these votes are more or less important, and whether they are more partisan than regular session votes. This should improve our understanding of this unique and important set of votes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on political party networks, especially the national party networks in Washington to better understand today's intensely partisan environment in the U.S. The principal players in the Washington party networks include elected officials, congressional staffers, fundraisers, lobbyists, interest group representatives, political consultants, think tank researchers and some figures in the mass media.