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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]

The role of ideology in partisan politics cannot be explained without understanding the roots of ideology itself. I propose a path by which ideological divisions disrupted the party equilibrium of the 1950s and remade parties in ideological terms by the early 1990s. Testing this theory requires an understanding of ideology independent of partisan institutions. I apply an item response model to a sample of articles in leading ideological journals to extract a latent trait of ideology. A hierarchical model of ideal points takes advantage of the known relationship between writers for the same journal to overcome the lack of data on individual writers. The model is applied to data from 1990 and 1970. The space defined is strongly one dimensional, even in the absence of the agenda factors present in a legislature. Future work will extend the analysis back to 1870. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do parties create ideologies to rationalize their electoral coalitions? Or do ideologies shape parties, even against the re-election incentives of party leaders? In other words, how should we understand the relationship between ideology and party? These questions require a measure of ideology that is distinct from the partisan behavior of elected politicians. This paper develops such a model, coding the positions taken by intellectual thinkers around 1850. I find that ideological writers divided into two camps on slavery and on the other major issues of the day at a time when slavery cross-cut the two main camps in Congress. This division matches the one that develops in Congress a decade later, suggesting that the parties responded not just to electoral incentives, but also to this elite division. Ideology was accepted, even though it undermined longstanding attempts to hold together intersectional alliances and brought on a division that led to the Civil War. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the effects of media coverage and media market structure on political representation in the U.S. Visibility of a tendency toward blind partisanship in districts; Reasons for the failure of media coverage to respond to median opinion in their districts; Alternative models of representation.