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Although we prefer to think of congressional turnover as being electorally driven and based on the choices of voters, in recent decades retirements/resignations have been a larger contributor to change in the composition of both chambers of Congress than have electoral defeats of incumbents. In this article, we consider the impact of retirements (and other forms of non-electoral exits) on the 2018 congressional midterms, focusing primarily on the House of Representatives. After reviewing the relevant (and limited) literature, we provide a descriptive overview of congressional retirements (including the unusual retirement of a comparatively young speaker of the House and almost two dozen GOP committee and subcommittee chairs) then examine the extent of voluntary retirements in this electoral cycle against historical patterns, and explore the effects of different retirements (i.e., progressive ambition versus retirement from public life). Using multivariate models, we examine which factors correlate significantly with retirement decisions, test for a partisan differential in retirement rates, and compare the rates at which the parties are capable of replacing retirees with co-partisans. Our analysis allows us to consider the ongoing importance of members' career decisions for the composition of and the partisan balance of power in the U. S. Congress. Within the context of 2018 specifically, these career decisions had substantial implications for partisan control of the House, experience and leadership within the House Republican conference, and entrance of female members into Congress and toward higher office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolving roles of women in Congress have received appreciable attention from legislative scholars. In this research note, we seek to couple research on departures from Congress and women in Congress by examining what happens in Senate seats vacated by electoral defeat, death, resignation, and retirement. Using data from 1919 through 2019, we analyze the circumstances under which women are appointed Senate successors and particularly on the ability of female senators to be replaced by other women once they leave office. This article builds on previous work on women's accession to high political office, particularly "political widowhood," but to the best of our knowledge is the first to focus on female successors in the US Senate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although retirements account for a significant percentage of turnover in a good many legislatures around the world, they have received little scholarly attention outside of legislative institutions of advanced democracies, particularly the United States Congress. In this paper, we address this shortcoming in the literature by exploring retirement dynamics in Turkey, a transitional democracy and an ideologically polarised political system. Using a unique dataset of parliamentarians who served in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNAT) between 2007 and 2015, we show significantly higher rates of non-electoral departure among members of opposition parties and especially among those representing Kurdish regions of the country. We supplement this analysis in two ways to delve further into potential factors behind retirement decisions. First, we examine data on government answers to parliamentary questions in the period 2007–2015. Second, we analyse a survey of Turkish parliamentarians serving in the early 2000s regarding career plans. These data permit us to examine the roles of system inclusiveness and parliamentary socialisation on decisions not to stand for reelection. Our results imply that perceived legislative influence may help explain some of the variation in retirement decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most recent addition to the U.S. Constitution is also one of the first proposed amendments. The 27th Amendment restricts change to congressional salaries until after the next election. First drafted by James Madison and approved by Congress in 1789, the proposal was among a package of 12 items sent to the states. Ten of those proposed amendments were ratified and became known as the Bill of Rights. The others languished with only occasional attention by constitutional scholars. In the early 1980s, an undergraduate student at the University of Texas wrote a term paper arguing for adoption of the limits on congressional pay raises. After receiving a C grade from his teaching assistant and instructor, the student rejected the opinions of his teachers and independently pursued the adoption of Madison's proposal. Gregory Watson single-handedly mounted a letter-writing and lobbying campaign that caused state legislators to redirect their attention to the proposed amendment. In 1992, following a most unusual ratification process—including certification by the Archivist of the United States—the measure became the 27th Amendment. In this article, we trace the history of the amendment, demonstrate that its impact has been more symbolic than substantive, and argue that Congress needs to reassert its authority over the amendment process in line with the letter and spirit of Article V. The 27th Amendment has a peculiar constitutional history, and there are lessons we should learn from that experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 2005, with the passage of the Civil Marriage Act, Canada became the third country to extend full rights to same-sex marriages. This article explores passage of the CMA, focusing on parliamentary voting behavior on the free vote used in the House of Commons. Using multivariate empirical analysis we find unusually strong evidence of constituency characteristics influencing the voting behavior of MPs, a rare outcome given the existing scholarly literature on free votes. In a concluding section, we discuss what these findings imply about the increasingly important debate in Canada about parliamentary accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we extend recent work on exposure to campaign advertisements, comparing the effects of television ads, radio ads, and campaign-related e-mails using an unusual panel data set that provides information on multiple media sources. Our findings, which control for the endogeneity problem that has plagued much work in political communications, confirm that media exposure does affect citizen attitudes. We also find additional evidence that the medium matters, with exposure to television ads tending to undermine system-supporting attitudes, whereas exposure to radio ads has an overall positive effect; contrary to expectations, the “new medium” of campaign e-mails had no discernible effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern South is a thriving region that is increasingly like the rest of the United States; however, that has not always been the case. Indeed, the political history of the American South is one that has been focused on the integration of this historically underdeveloped region into the remainder of American society, economically (especially in terms of labor markets), politically, judicially, and socially. And, even as the South has become increasingly similar to the rest of the country, it remains an especially important region for the balance of national political power. In this essay, I describe a class I teach on Southern Politics, explaining how I have organized it around topics critical to an understanding of American political development, and I describe the innovative pedagogical perspective I bring to the class (rooting the course in the labor economics of slavery and the "peculiar institution's" long-term consequences). I also discuss in some detail the importance of this class for American students as they try to understand America's development as a nation and the lessons that can be learned by international students from the South's experiences, providing some qualitative evidence of the course's impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from a 1996 pre-election survey, the causes and consequences of public approval of Republican congressional leaders in the 1990s are examined. Specifically, this article explores the extent of opinion formation regarding House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and then attempts to account for the sources of these attitudes using multivariate models. Comparing and contrasting these findings as appropriate with what is known regarding public attitudes toward other political entities, the article reveals in particular that economic evaluations work differently for congressional leaders than for either the president or Congress as an institution. In a second section, the electoral ramifications of public attitudes toward Speaker Gingrich in the1996 elections are examined, determining that even in the presence of a host of powerful controls public evaluations of the speaker exercised a significant influence on respondents' vote choice, not just in congressional races also far down-ticket, a finding that supports a party-oriented model of legislative organisation. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the ability of these results to be generalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effective operation of the American judicial system requires the public's confidence and support. High-profile events, most notably the Rodney King incident and O.J. Simpson trials, have called into question the confidence that black and white Americans have in the courts. Contemporary cases (e.g., Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson) may continue the trend. While there is abundant anecdotal evidence, rigorous empirical analysis has been limited to studies of the U.S. Supreme Court. In this article, we explore black-white differences in assessments of a state judicial system. Our findings suggest that while black and white citizens agree on many `matters, there are strong differences related to the overall fairness, and the impartiality of important actors, in the judicial system. That these discrepancies remain even after controlling for other important factors suggests that there are significant, racially based differences in how blacks and whites evaluate the dispensation of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the confirmation vote by the United States Senate for the appointment of Justice Clarence Thomas using factors of ideological, demographic, and electoral measures of constituent pressures. Significance of racial and ideology variables; Development of mathematical models to analyze variable results; Future implications on the selection process for minority government figures.

Tests the hypothesis that members of the United States Congress are socialized into certain attitudes concerning interbranch comity or rivalry early during their tenures in office. Use of a multivariate regression model; Members of Congress' `socialized to opposition' mentality; Congress members as more amenable to leadership from presidents of their own party.

In this study, we enter the on‐going debate on committee outliers by addressing two important points. First, we dispute the conventional wisdom that committee outliers are best identified and evaluated using traditional tests of statistical significance. Contesting the appropriateness of such tests, we contend that any observed difference between chamber behaviour and floor behaviour may be substantively significant and use raw mean differences between Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores to examine differences between the full House of Representatives and its committees. Second, we attempt to integrate the committee outlier literature into the broader literature on the historical development of the House by using data from 20 Congresses over four decades (1951–90). This longitudinal analysis indicates that there have been interesting dynamic changes in the prevalence of committee outliers across time and committee types in patterns that are consistent with both the principal‐agent framework and the more general literature on congressional change and reform. Many of these important changes are not obvious when relying solely on traditional tests of statistical significance to examine committee outliers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research on parliamentary free voting, which has been confined exclusively to national parliaments and almost exclusively to the British House of Commons, has found relatively little constituency impact on members’ voting decisions, even on the most contentious issues of social policy. Since sub‐national parliaments tend to be smaller, less professionalised, and (arguably) ‘closer to the people’, it is possible that a more significant ‘constituency connection’ might be observed in these legislative arenas. This study extends the literature on this topic by empirically examining the fate of a recent homosexual rights bill in the Ontario Legislative Assembly. Contrary to expectations, none of the constituency characteristics used in logistical regression models generates a significant MLE coefficient, suggesting that Canadian provincial legislators may be even less sensitive to constituency preferences than their national counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]