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In a recent APSR article, Hajnal (2009) explores the question of who loses in American democracy, and finds that African-American voters are significantly more likely than white voters to vote for a losing candidate in recent U.S. elections. This finding is extremely troublesome, as it suggests that African Americans' voices are systematically being shut out of the political process. We revisit this question and show that Hajnal's analyses are too broad in their scope, and that they do not account for the sampling procedures unique to each national exit poll. When we disaggregate his results on the basis of each election year, weight the data according to each exit poll's probability sampling weight, cluster standard errors to take account of the first-stage precinct-wide sampling frame, and examine a longer time period, we arrive at different conclusions. We find a surprising number of elections where minority voters are more likely than whites to vote for a winning candidate. However, we also find many elections where minority voters lose, and we find that Hajnal overestimates the extent to which Latinos and Asian Americans win in some U.S. elections. We conclude that the picture of "who loses" in American democracy may not be as bleak as Hajnal suggests for African Americans, but may be somewhat less positive than he suggests for Latinos and Asian Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does district competitiveness cause members of Congress to change their rollcall voting behavior? Ansolabehere et al. (2001) find that congressional races where the candidates fought tough primaries tend are less polarized than if both candidates won uncompetitive primaries. However, Burden (2004) shows the exact opposite: competitive primaries drive Republican and Democratic candidates further apart on the ideological spectrum. Thus, the effect of primary competitiveness on ideological extremism is still misunderstood. With general election competitiveness, there is a larger consensus showing that competitiveness has a moderating effect on candidate ideology.Whereas prior research treats competitiveness in these two electoral settings as separate entities, we model "district competitiveness" as the product of primary and general election competitiveness. We hypothesize that competitive primaries absent competitive general elections will push candidates away from the middle. Similarly, competitive general elections absent competitive primaries should pull candidates towards the middle. Most interesting theoretically are those cases in which a) neither primary nor general election is competitive, or b) both primary and general election are competitive. We intend to show that the dynamics underlying district competitiveness are more complicated than previously shown and might explain the discrepancies in the literature. We further expect open and closed primaries to pull candidates in different directions.We analyze election data from 1990-2004 and examine every congressional race during that time period in a selected number of states. Our paper should be of particular interest to those who argue that uncompetitive elections are a primary cause of polarization in Congress. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role of rapporteurs in the European Parliament (EP). A review of literature about rapporteurs within the EP is presented, along with an outline of theoretical explanations as they relate to rapporteurs within theories of legislatures. The article examines the ideology of the rapporteur with respect to the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection during the 4th legislative term of the EP.

Why do some legislators present ideologically inconsistent voting records to constituents while other legislators are voting in a more consistent manner? We present an uncertainty-based theory of legislative search and ideologically inconsistent voting. We argue that legislators who face a substantial change in constituency composition—through either redistricting or substantial population change—are likely to react by voting in a less consistent and more ambiguous manner than legislators from districts with little constituency change. The ideologically inconsistent roll-call records are rational attempts by the legislator to search for the position of critical supporters on various issues whose preferences are unknown to the legislator.Specifically, we estimate models of ideological inconsistency on all U.S. House members from 1970 to 2006. We measure a legislator's voting record inconsistency by examining the frequency that a legislator's overall ideological position in a given Congress (e.g., NOMINATE scores) does not correctly predict his/her roll calls in Congress. We expect legislators from rapidly changing districts to be more inconsistent than members from more stable constituencies. Furthermore, we expect that legislators whose district boundaries were significantly altered will react to this uncertainty by casting votes that are less ideologically consistent than members whose district boundaries were left unaltered. The effect of redistricting should diminish over the 10-year cycle, as legislators update their beliefs and become more certain about the preferences of their constituents. The effect of redistricting should also be contingent on the processes that lead to the creation of the new districts (e.g., partisan, bi-partisan, court-imposed). Specifically, we predict opposition legislators "targeted" by redistricting to react by voting inconsistently in the new district (conditional on surviving their reelection attempt).This paper extends the theory elaborated by Grose and Yoshinaka (2006). The theoretical framework and empirical results should be of specific interest to students of Congress, legislative roll-call voting, congressional elections, and redistricting, and of a more general interest to students of representation and principal-agent models with uncertainty. Our paper provides a theoretical framework that can explain legislative behavior that is sometimes referred to as "erratic" or "maverick" behavior. Instead, our theory explains this behavior as a legislator's best response to a changing environment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]