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This study presents a rhetorical analysis of the popular songs selected by the major party candidates for their campaigns during the U.S. presidential elections from 1972–2016. Our analysis reveals...

When one political party gains control of American national governing institutions, it increases the prospects of enacting its policy agenda. Faced with this partisan misalignment, the authors expect state governments controlled by the national out-party to respond to the national partisan context with more state policy activism. The study examines changes in state policy liberalism from 1974 to 2019, and finds that both Republican- and Democratic-controlled states have pushed policy further in their preferred ideological directions when the opposing party has greater partisan control over the national policy agenda in Washington. It also identifies differences between the two parties. While the effect of Republican control modestly increases as Democrats gain power at the national level, Democratic-controlled states have shown dramatically larger shifts in policy liberalism during periods of Republican national control. This arrangement, however, appears to be a contemporary one, emerging in the more polarized political environment since the mid-1990s.

I study the allocation of spending, and the impact of politics on regional growth in Greece, using a large dataset that covers the period between 1959 and 2010. I find that electoral districts that vote for the majority party and are represented by majority MPs receive more spending from the central government, and grow faster. Districts do not seem to enjoy any additional benefits when their elected representatives also occupy positions in the executive branch of the government.

The United Kingdom political landscape has historically been dominated by the two main political parties: Labour and the Conservatives. However, by the 2010 General Election, their vote share had dropped to 65%. The 2010 election also saw a new development enter the UK political landscape—televised leaders’ debates, which featured the leaders of the three largest political parties. Discussions before the 2015 General Election resulted in a decision to repeat the debate experiment, but this time, partly due to changes in projected vote shares, seven leaders were invited to the main debate. Using content analysis of the debate, this research questions the presentation of the debate as a deliberative event. Participatory parity was not achieved in the debate—far from it. Instead, the debate served to reinforce extant power differentials between the leaders of parties of differing political standings.

The first presidential debate of 2016 was historic along a number of dimensions, including the first woman general election candidate and the first general election candidate in history with no political or military experience. Given the presence of the first woman nominee of a major party, along with dramatic gender differences in support for the candidates, we focus on the role of gender in shaping people’s emotional responses to candidate messaging during the debate. Through the use of a controlled experiment, we measure changes in attitudes after exposure to the debate. In addition, we utilize facial expression software to explore real-time reaction to the candidates during the debate. Leveraging data generated during the debate by the facial expression software and as well as responses to pretest and post-test questionnaires, we find that men and women respond differently to candidates’ messaging during the debate and these emotional responses influence post-debate evaluations.

This chapter turns to the regularized factions and factional struggles inside the other main party in American politics: the National Republicans, the Whigs, and then, for most of American history, the Republicans. Factions there look reliably different from the Democratic version in Chapter 3, though bringing a second major party into the picture does highlight interparty similarities and not just differences. Sometimes, Democratic and Republican nominating politics are responding to two very different internal situations and factional struggles. Other times, Democratic and Republican nominating politics are responding to the same external context, albeit in different ways. And sometimes, Democratic and Republican nominating struggles are actually a response to a counterpart politics in the other party.

We develop a theory of candidate nomination processes predicated upon the notion that members of the majority party in a legislature collaboratively influence policy. Because of this team aspect, voters care both about their local candidates’ positions, and the positions of their parties which are determined by the positions of all their elected representatives in the legislature. We show that candidates may be unable to escape the burden of their party association, and that the primary voters in both parties exploit the median voters’ national preferences to nominate the most extreme electable candidates. We also show that gerrymandering affects the equilibrium platforms not only in those districts that become more extreme, but also in those

Against a backdrop of substantial and persistent disruption in Australian federal politics, this article examines the uses of Twitter in campaigning in the 2013 and 2016 federal elections. We comprehensively tracked the tweets posted by, and directed at, all candidates during the final 2 weeks of these campaigns, and compare patterns in candidate and audience activity across the two elections. This documents considerable shifts in campaigning strategies, electorate responses, and central themes of the debate from 2013 to 2016; we show that these shifts are in line with the changing electoral fortunes of Australia’s major party blocs during an exceptionally tumultuous period in federal politics.

This study investigated the use of party and ideological labels and candidate names in major party candidate tweets (N = 94,310) during the 2016 presidential preprimary and primary campaigns to understand the extent to which candidates focused on intraparty and interparty themes as a part of their marketing strategies. The results show that the candidates and their campaigns did not engage in heavy partisan labeling to cultivate their social media identities. Outsider candidates were not more likely to use party or ideological labels in their tweets than insider candidates were. The candidates focused on self-advocacy in their tweets.

This study examines the effects of televised presidential debates across different geopolitical contexts in American campaigns and elections, and echoes the series of studies that the authors examined in the previous election cycles. The geopolitical color of states filters newly incoming political information, and their partisan color enhances the tone of political messages in voters` perception within their geopolitical boundaries. The current study confirmed that voters in blue states became more distinctively favorable toward a Democrat candidate over a Republican candidate in proportion to the accumulated debate exposure, and vice versa for red states. In purple states, the distinctive favorability between two major party candidates became more apparent, and the changes were inversely related with increased debate exposures.

In this article, I present results from a conditional logit model of vice presidential selection that predicts the selection of vice presidential candidates for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016. Examining contested major party vice presidential nominations from 1960 through 2012, the model finds media exposure, political experience, military service, age, and demographic (gender/racial/ethnic) diversity to be significant factors in the selection process. In the end, the model correctly predicts 15 of the 21 (71.%) contested major party nominations during this period. For 2016 the model correctly and convincingly predicts Mike Pence as Donald Trump’s selection, but incorrectly predicts Cory Booker as Hillary Clinton’s pick. This reduces the overall percentage of correct predictions from 1960 to 2016 to 69.6% (16 of 23), but the approach taken here still represents a more appropriate way for social scientists to think about what factors drive vice presidential selection.

Past years have seen continuing experimentation in the use of social media for political campaigning. By the time of the 2013 Australian federal election, social media of various forms had become comparatively mainstream in Australia and were widely used by members and candidates: more than 350 candidates operated Twitter accounts during the campaign, for instance. This article explores the key patterns both in how politicians and their parties campaigned on Twitter during the 2013 federal election campaign and in how the public responded to and engaged with these campaigns. It documents significant, systematic differences between the major party blocs and interprets these as reflecting the Coalition’s ‘small target’ strategy and Labor’s last-ditch attempts to ‘save the furniture’, respectively.

All major legislation in the House necessitates a special rule from the Rules Committee before it can be brought to the chamber floor. These rules often strictly limit floor amendments to bills considered by the House. Scholars of political parties have argued that the House majority party can bias policy output away from the floor median through its usage of restrictive rules. In this article, we argue that in order to secure the passage of restrictive rules, the majority often makes concessions to centrist legislators through the amending process. We examine this theory using a newly collected data set that includes all amendments considered by the Rules Committee during the construction of structured rules in the 109th, 110th, and 111th Congresses (2005–2010). Our results are mixed, but they do suggest that moderate members of the majority party often receive concessions via amendments for their support of the majority party's agenda-setting regime.

There is considerable concern about the role that social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, play in promoting misperceptions during political campaigns. These technologies are widely used, and inaccurate information flowing across them has a high profile. This research uses three-wave panel surveys conducted with representative samples of Americans during both the 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential elections to assess whether use of social media for political information promoted endorsement of falsehoods about major party candidates or important campaign issues. Fixed effects regression helps ensure that observed effects are not due to individual differences. Results indicate that social media use had a small but significant influence on misperceptions about President Obama in the 2012 election, and that this effect was most pronounced among strong partisans. Social media had no effect on belief accuracy about the Republican candidate in that election. The 2016 survey focused on campaign issues. There is no evidence that social media use influenced belief accuracy about these topics in aggregate, but Facebook users were unique. Social media use by this group reduced issue misperceptions relative to those who only used other social media. These results demonstrate that social media can alter citizens' willingness to endorse falsehoods during an election, but that the effects are often small.

This article joins the growing tide of research that studies party effects in the United States Senate. Previous work has shown that certain procedural tools disproportionately advantage the majority party at the expense of the minority. We build on this research by exploiting a new dataset that allows us to study motions to table amendments from the 91st to the 111th Congress. By examining the success of these motions, analyzing the voting calculus of individual senators on procedural and substantive votes, and simulating the aggregate impact of this tool, we provide some of the strongest evidence to date that political parties (and the majority party in particular) influence the legislative process and policy outcomes in the Senate. Our findings stand in stark contrast to the traditional vision of the Senate as an individualistic body.

The Whig and Tory parties played an important role in British politics in the decades following the Glorious Revolution. This article introduces new data on the political affiliation of all Members of Parliament in England and Wales between 1690 and 1747. The data have numerous applications for research. The focus here is on majority party representation and the electoral politics of constituencies. I show that the Whigs had stronger representation in municipal boroughs with small and narrow electorates, whereas the Tories were stronger in county constituencies and in boroughs with large and more democratic electorates. The Whigs were stronger in the Southeast region and the Tories in Wales and the West Midlands. After the Whig leader, Robert Walpole, became prime minister in 1721 the Whigs lost some presence in their traditional strongholds including counties where the Dissenter population was large. Finally, I incorporate data on electoral contests and show that the majority party generally lost strength in constituencies following contests.

Scholars of political parties and elections around the globe have devoted extensive study toward understanding how party polarization affects the criteria voters use to determine their party preferences in elections. In American politics, previous empirical research suggests that congressional job performance ratings do not affect public attitudes toward parties and therefore have no significant ramifications for the electoral fortunes of parties. Building on the existing literature from American and comparative traditions, I demonstrate that congressional performance evaluations can be important for American parties and elections, but this depends on the extent of party polarization in Congress. First, when congressional parties are more distinct, congressional performance evaluations have a greater effect on the relative favorability of the majority party brand: when citizens like how Congress is performing under the leadership of the majority party, this boosts the favorability of that party overall. Second, because partisan polarization increases the effect of congressional performance evaluations on party brand favorability, partisan polarization also increases the role played by congressional performance evaluations in a variety of elections outside of Congress. These results inform our understanding of public opinion, parties, and elections, both in the U.S. and from a comparative perspective.

This report documents the 2013 Meath East by-election through the lens of social media. It makes the point that social media can be used as a tool to examine political campaigns. Candidates use social media including Twitter and Facebook to market, to mobilise and to engage with their supporters and the general public. Utilising all the major party candidates’ Twitter and Facebook activity during the 2013 Meath East by-election campaign, this report finds that candidates vary greatly in their use of social media but almost all place a greater emphasis on marketing and mobilising over engaging. In addition, it examines the extent to which social media can deliver a preference vote bonus, finding a significant (but small) effect.

As political parties and party systems across the democratic world are being roiled by insurgent challengers, political scientists need to think more systematically about insurgents and the politics they make. In this article I propose a new analytic framework for the study of electoral insurgents and their systemic impact on politics. Varying along dimensions of regime- and party-orientation, I argue that insurgencies unfold in four distinct patterns: reconstructive; co-optive; reorienting; and reactive. I make the case for one particular type by comparing two reconstructive insurgencies during the postwar period in which the structure, rules, and procedures of an existing major party were challenged and reformed: the New Politics movement inside the Democratic Party; and the New Left in the British Labour Party. In both cases, reconstructive insurgents had durable effects on party development by altering the rules of the game and shifting the organizational terrain on which subsequent political contests unfolded. These cumulative changes institutionalized a reformist dynamic in both parties that has routinely drawn organizational issues into intraparty contests, undermining the legitimacy of the parties over time. Thinking systematically about the politics insurgents make offers a new way of understanding the role of social movements and political entrepreneurs in party development.

This paper analyzes the US presidential election of 2016, examining the patterns of industrial structure and party competition in both the major party primaries and the general election. It attempts to identify the new, historically specific factors that led to the upheavals, especially the steady growth of a “dual economy” that locks more and more Americans out of the middle class. It draws extensively on a newly assembled, more comprehensive database to identify the specific political forces that coalesced around each candidate, including the various stages of the Trump campaign.

Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional district is a battleground area within a battleground state. In the past, the district has been very competitive, rotating between Democratic and Republican representatives every few election cycles. In recent years, the district has leaned Republican, though it is still usually seen as “up for grabs” by both major political parties. Thus, Congressional elections in the district are typically characterized by high levels of campaign spending and advertising. The 2016 election in Wisconsin’s 8th District attracted a great deal of attention due to the fact that the incumbent opted not to run for reelection. This open-seat election involved two major party candidates—Tom Nelson, the Democratic candidate, and Mike Gallagher, the Republican. Although many people predicted that it would be a close election, Gallagher ended up winning 63% of the vote to Nelson’s 37%, a 26-point margin of victory.

This chapter focuses on the expanding boundaries of African Americans in the quest for elective office. The ambitions of the first and second waves or generations of blacks elected in the 1960s through the 1980s were limited to Congress, big city mayoralties and lower-level state executive offices, such as lieutenant governor. After the election of the second wave of black elected officials in 1989, African American political scientists employed the concept of deracialization to explain what some saw as a new phenomenon in black politics. Alan Gerber summarized the character of the black structure of ambition as follows: African American members of Congress rarely seek higher office, prospects for winning statewide are discouraging, and no African American has moved from the House to the Senate or to the governor's mansion. The chapter examines the new structure of ambition for black politicians, with five case studies of African Americans, who won major party nominations for governor and US Senate in 2006.

In the summer of 1996, the Republicans who had trium- phantly captured Congress two years earlier were in dis- array. Their effort to leverage a partial government shutdown into substantial budget cuts had left the party politically damaged and anxious to show that it could govern responsibly. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's immediate goal was to avoid another budget confronta- tion and quickly pass 13 individual spending bills that would provide funding to run the government in the upcoming fiscal year. Instead, the narrow Republican majority in the Senate faced an onslaught of Democratic amendments aimed at scoring "pre-election" points by forcing Republicans to cast difficult votes on guns, terror- ism, health care and drugs (Washington Post, September 13, 1996, A20). Progress on the bills ground to a halt.Fed up with the political battering they were taking, Majority Leader Lott and Speaker Newt Gingrich announced that the Senate would abandon its effort to pass spending bills on an individual basis. Instead, both chambers would package them together into an omnibus spending bill:It is clear that Senate Democrats are using delaying tactics and political stunts designed more for the upcoming elections than for the completion of the people's business . . .Given the Democrat strategy to tie up the Senate floor, House and Senate leaders have decided that the defense appropriations conference report will be the vehicle for final consideration of all uncompleted appropriations issues. The remaining issues will be resolved through bipartisan negotiations between congressional leaders and the White House. (Congressional Press Releases, September 19, 1996)Packaging the remaining spending bills together in conference meant that two of the bills would not reach the floor on an individual basis and the Senate would have no opportunity to offer amendments to them. The Republican majority's further aim was to bring the omnibus itself to the floor as a non-amendable conference report to pre- clude amendments when it was debated. After additional haggling with the Democrats, an omnibus package con- taining six spending bills was brought to the Senate floor and passed without amendment. The plan worked, but at a cost. President Clinton and congressional Democrats received so much of what they wanted in the final omni- bus package that 14 Republican senators voted against it. Republicans shielded their members from further votes on amendments and passed the budget but were unable to pursue their broader policy goals.OverviewThere is an active debate over the nature and extent of the majority party's influence in the Senate (Den Hartog and Monroe 2011; Fenno 1989; Gailmard and Jenkins 2007; Monroe and Roberts 2008; Sinclair 2012a; Smith 2005). In this article, I describe the "limited influence" theory of majority party power in the Senate. I show that the major- ity party has an important but constrained ability to influ- ence legislative outcomes in the appropriations process that it uses when it is weakly positioned in the chamber and has difficulty managing the floor. It can manipulate the appropriations process by opting to pass some or all of the 12 annual appropriations bills as a package rather than individually. Its influence meets electoral goals by protecting the party's reputation but falls short of an abil- ity to secure preferred policy outcomes.I test three expectations associated with the limited influence theory. First, the Senate majority party is likely to avoid bringing individual spending bills to a vote and to create an omnibus package instead when it is small, divided, and ideologically distant from the minority. Second, the majority's decision to create an omnibus package rather than consider bills on an individual basis reduces the total amount of amending in the appropria- tions process. Third, omnibus bills are used to build broad bipartisan coalitions rather than to push policy toward the majority median. …

Scholars have advanced a wide range of theories regarding the role of Senate confirmation in judicial appointments. In this article, I directly test the predictions of these models using a novel measure of the ideology of judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. The main results indicate that the filibuster and majority party have predominated in appointment politics. Prompted by recent events, I also conduct a simulation-based exercise to examine the ideological composition of the judiciary under a confirmation regime in which the filibuster is not present. This exercise suggests that the Senate filibuster induces moderation in judicial appointments; the elimination of the filibuster is likely to result in a more contentious, if less dilatory, confirmation process and a more polarized judiciary.

With the emergence of newly legislated 527 groups and their barrage of television attack ads against each major party candidate, the landscape of the U.S. presidential election changed markedly in 2004. Although these special interest groups—named after the amendment to the U.S. Federal Tax Code that authorized them—seem to function as political action committees, the lack of federal regulation allows 527 groups more latitude in ad content and opaqueness of ad sponsorship. The extant literature on the increasing effectiveness of negative political advertising suggests the relative efficacy of the promotional tactics used by 527 groups. After a discussion of the select 527 group ads run during 2004, the future regulation of 527 groups is broached.

A legislative “breakpoint,” the Cannon Revolt profoundly transformed congressional operation, spurring a series of reforms that ultimately led to the disintegration of traditional modes of partisan authority and the creation of new patterns of governance. In this article, I argue that the Cannon Revolt affords an opportunity to examine a crucial, but poorly understood, dynamic in congressional politics. Whereas spatial theories of Congress typically hold that legislators located at the floor median are decisive actors in chamber politics, the archival account presented here suggests that these legislators require the scaffolding of an intraparty organization to secure pivotal status. As I demonstrate, intraparty organization enabled a ragtag group of Republican reformers opposed to Cannon's “czar rule” to draft and unite behind a common proposal for parliamentary reform, and to build the cross-party coalition that scholars agree was critical to its passage. In this account, the influence of the so-called “Insurgent” Republicans hinged on their collective capacity to hang together in sufficient numbers to hold the balance of power in the chamber—in effect, organizing all potentially pivotal votes into one bloc essential to sustaining the majority party coalition.

The extensive congressional politics literature on House member retirement has yet to consider an important and unique subgroup of members – congressional widows. Using a semi-parametric Cox Model, this paper examines the duration of widows’ careers in the United States House of Representatives. Of particular concern are the relationships between years in office and age, education, region, prior political experience, committee positions, career ceilings, majority/minority status, and majority party size. We find that age, region, and majority party size are most relevant to understanding lengths of widows’ careers. In doing so, we contribute to the literature on political widows, gender in politics, as well as more general scholarship centered on congressional careers.

France has a several centuries-long history of political posters, starting as early as the French Revolution, and for most of their history, posters have been one of the most popular and far reaching communication means. This chapter focuses on poster campaigns in the twenty-first century. To better understand their role in the general campaign, the chapter reviews the current legal regulations. It then discusses the evolution of poster content throughout the centuries and presents new evidence of contemporary poster campaigns using data from the 2007 electoral year. In a nutshell, the presence of posters in the streets is a credible signal of party and candidate campaign strength. The candidate gender can play a role in the content of posters, and this visual information may be particularly important for male candidates’ chances of victory. The final section summarizes the main points and highlights some new research directions.

“There is an impressive party discipline that dominates individual members who are part of that political party.” – Female Deputy, Jujuy, 2009 Party discipline is key to understanding legislative dynamics. In Chapter 2, I argued that women have incentives to collaborate more frequently than men with female colleagues to exert their influence on the legislative process. Nonetheless, not all women have the same opportunities to collaborate. In particular, some institutional contexts – such as the extreme party discipline described in the quote above – permit party leaders to constrain legislative behavior and disincentivize legislators from behaving independently of their political parties. In the case of Jujuy, a deputy describes one such environment in which political parties exercise absolute control over legislative behavior. “In the majority party, there are four or five who lead and direct the issues. The rest have to support them. They can present projects, but [party leaders] don't encourage it.” Given that women are typically absent from leadership, they likely wield very little influence in the chamber. Women may even be discouraged from introducing new issues to the legislative agenda or collaborating with female legislators in their own political parties. Instead, they are expected to toe the party line and provide unwavering support for party leaders. As the deputy from Jujuy sees it, “[Party leaders] end up eliminating the possibility for debates that enrich and cultivate different views – even debates within [their own parties].” Moreover, when political institutions give party leaders substantial control over legislators’ behavior, party leaders have very little tolerance for behavior that may be viewed as disloyal. In such environments, party leaders do not allow any disagreement from rank-and-file members. “Legislators can be very angry or even opposed to their part[ies], but the party discipline is very strong. There are legislators who are part of the majority party who have not opened their mouth[s]; they don't speak.” She indicates that legislators do not openly challenge party leaders. When legislators disagree with party leaders, their only option is to abstain from the discussion. In Chapter 2, I explained that strong party constraints of this nature limit women's legislative collaboration. Nonetheless, such uncompromising party discipline is not constant across all Argentine settings; rather, there is considerable variation both between and within legislative chambers.

In this article results are presented from a conditional logit model of vice presidential selection that correctly predicts Mitt Romney selecting Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate in 2012. The model, which correctly predicts 14 of the 20 contested major party vice presidential nominations from 1960 through 2008, suggests that media exposure, political experience, having served in the military, age, and gender/racial/ethnic diversity are significant factors in selecting a vice presidential candidate in the modern era.

The reasons for the under-development of the Russian party system remain contested, yet significant changes took place in the 2000s. The system became more regulated and streamlined. There were far fewer parties, but the rights of those that survived were consolidated. Above all, the regime identified itself with a single major party, United Russia, although the relationship between the regime and the party was problematical. Russia practises a heavily presidential model of executive dominance, but the polity is characterised by a dominant power system. This system was careful to preserve its autonomy, and thus guarded against the emergence of a dominant party system. The regime party and its allies acted less as instruments of representation than as tools to achieve political mobilisation, and by the same token the role of political opposition was marginalised. However, the dual state character of the political order allowed contradictions to develop that made possible the strengthening of the constituti...

Distributive politics represents one of the most important and controversial aspects of legislative policymaking. In the U.S. Congress, controversies over distributive politics are most evident in the area of legislative earmarking. In this article, we employ a unique set of data matching earmarks to their legislative sponsors to assess the leading explanations of distributive politics. We find that members of the majority party do considerably better than equally situated members of the minority. Moreover, party leaders target earmarks to those holding pivotal agenda-setting positions and to electorally vulnerable members. These findings have direct implications for both the extensive political science literature on distributive politics and the practical politics of earmarking reform.

British elections exhibit two patterns contrary to expectations deriving from Duverger and Downs: centrist third parties (Liberals and their successors) win a large vote share; and the two major parties often espouse highly divergent policies. This article explores relations between the Liberal vote and left–right scores of the Labour and Conservative manifestos in the light of two hypotheses: the vacated centre posits that Liberals receive more votes when major parties diverge; the occupied centre proposes a lagged effect in which major parties diverge farther after Liberals do well in the preceding election. Data from elections since 1945 confirm the vacated-centre hypothesis, with Liberals benefiting about equally when the major parties diverge to the left and right, respectively. The results also support the occupied-centre hypothesis for Conservative party positions, but not for Labour’s. After considering explanations for this asymmetry, we identify historical events associated with turning points that our data reveal in post-war British politics.

The parallel 2008 campaigns for President of the United States and Prime Minister of Canada provided a unique opportunity for a comparison of the issues raised in the campaigns of two neighboring countries with many similarities. After exploring the roles of information policy in recent political campaigns, this article compares the information policy and technology issues emphasized in the platforms and positions of the major party candidates in the 2008 races, both between the candidates of each nation and across the border. The article also compares the uses of information technologies by the campaigns to organize and disseminate their messages. As information policy issues are central aspects of the political agenda in technologically advanced nations and those nations that wish to become technologically advanced, the ways in which the issues are raised in political campaigns can be quite instructive about current approaches to and future directions in information policy.

The role of the U.S. House Rules Committee is consequential for theories of congressional parties, yet its role during the “conservative coalition” era is not well understood. We systematically analyzed the politics surrounding all special rules considered in Democratic Congresses from 1937 to 1952. We found that Rules repeatedly used its agenda power to push to the floor conservative initiatives that were opposed by the Democratic administration, the Rules Committee chair, and most northern Democrats, especially in Congresses that followed Republican election gains. The 44 conservative initiatives we identified include many of the most important policy issues considered during the period. Our findings challenge the idea that the majority party has consistently enjoyed a veto over which initiatives reach the floor, and they underscore the limits of roll-call-vote analysis in assessments of agenda control.

Although female candidates have achieved parity on some dimensions, political institutions remain deeply gendered in how they structure the parameters of electoral competition. We rely on a new data set of gubernatorial races from the 1990s to address the theoretical and empirical challenges created by the interaction of gender, media content, and electoral institutions. Based on an analysis of 1,365 newspaper articles for 27 contests in which a woman held a major party nomination, we uncover evidence of continuing bias in media coverage. Yet significant coefficients on candidate sex tell only part of the story. Gendered contextual factors linked to the contest and state in which candidates compete, as well as the newspapers that cover their races, also affect women's experiences on the campaign trail. The major finding, however, is the presence of a powerful baseline effect favoring male candidates that is deeply embedded in U.S. politics. All else equal, women gubernatorial candidates suffer a substantial vote deficit that results from non-observable influences. The results support the emerging consensus among feminist theorists that greater focus on the political context is likely to produce bigger scholarly payoffs than is continued attention to observable differences between male and female candidates.

This study focuses on the extent to which U.S. campaigns are adapting traditional campaign strategies to the Web and/or developing innovative strategies that employ some of the particular affordances of Web technologies and on how well campaign characteristics, such as incumbency and major party affiliation, and/or race characteristics, such as statewide office and competitiveness, explain the level of a campaign's adaptation of or innovation with Web technologies. Adapting traditional campaigning proved to be far more common than developing innovative strategies. The findings suggest that additional aspects of campaigns' structure and organizational processes need to be studied in order to understand campaigns' Web technology adoption strategies.

The purpose of this article is to present an overarching analysis of key trends in presidential politics over the past 28 years, 1980 to 2008. The three trends that will be looked at are: the ending of party dealignment but the still continuing inability of either the Democrats or the Republicans to build an enduring majority party coalition, even after some lopsided elections; a geographic realignment that made the south solidly Republican and the northeast and pacific coast states solidly Democratic; and the volatility that took place in loyalties of major politically relevant social and demographic groups. Most of the longitudinal analysis rests on data and analysis from articles on each of these eight elections that appeared in Political Science Quarterly,1

The move by the two major parties to balance their national conventions by gender was based partially upon the assumption that women delegates would best represent women's opinions. However, a cross-sectional analysis of mass and elite opinion in the Democratic party reveals that on most issues, there is greater proximity between the views of male leaders and female followers, than between female leaders and female followers. Notable exceptions include issues of Sexual Harassment, Urban Unrest, Inflation, and the Environment. Longitudinally, the data suggest women serving as delegates from 1972 to 1992 were consistently more liberal than their male counterparts, and considerably more liberal than party followers of both sexes. In contrast, female Republican delegates held views closer to their party's rank-and-file than did male Republican delegates who were more conservative. The gender gap in political views among the leaders of both parties is not as pronounced among party followers.

The salience of judicial appointments in contemporary American politics has precipitated a surge of scholarly interest in the dynamics of advice and consent in the U.S. Senate. In this article, we compare alternative pivotal politics models of the judicial nominations process, each capturing a different set of potential veto players in the Senate. We use these spatial models to guide empirical analysis of rejection patterns in confirmation contests for the lower federal courts. Using data on the outcomes of all nominations to the U.S. Courts of Appeals and the U.S. District Courts between 1975 and 2006, we show that models incorporating the preferences of the majority party median and the filibuster pivots best account for confirmation patterns we observe at the appellate and trial court levels, while advice and consent for trial courts has more recently been influenced by home-state senators.

We consider how state political environments can alter the party identification and political behavior of individuals. Using panel data well-suited to assess the influence of migration on individual-level phenomena, we find that migrants alter their party identifications toward the majority party of their new states. Applying the estimates from this analysis to the 2000 presidential election suggests that individual-level change can alter presidential election outcomes in states if migration patterns meet certain conditions.

We test for whether political parties can exert precise control over the outcomes of legislative elections. We apply two tests for whether the party that previously held a majority is discontinuously likely to win enough seats to barely retain its majority. We apply these tests to high-stakes state elections that determine which party controls Congressional redistricting. Our tests show large discontinuities in both pre-election characteristics and the probability density of the election outcome at the threshold that determines control of the legislature. By channeling campaign funds to incumbent state legislators, the majority party almost guarantees it retains its majority.

Between 2010 and 2015, a period of significant political change in Greece, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), a minor party, achieved and consolidated major party status. This article explores the role of political strategy in SYRIZA’s electoral success. It argues that, contrary to accepted wisdom, targeting a ‘niche’ constituency or protesting against the establishment will not suffice for a minor party to make an electoral breakthrough. SYRIZA’s case demonstrates that unless a minor party is ready to claim that it is willing and able to take on government responsibility, electoral advancement will not be forthcoming. The success of SYRIZA’s strategy can be attributed to favourable electoral demand factors and apt heresthetic manipulation of issue dimensions.

The previous chapters of the book analyzed Bangladesh’s governance problems in the light of the international experience, and proposed several political and administrative reforms for overcoming these problems. This, last, chapter discusses the prospects of these reforms of getting adopted and implemented.

What role do parties play in determining which interests committees represent? In this article, I compare committee organization and representativeness in Nebraska's nonpartisan legislature with those in the partisan senates of Kansas and Iowa. I demonstrate that when parties do not organize legislative conflict, committees are less representative of the full chamber. I argue, however, that committee representativeness does not necessarily result from parties actively working to create representative committees. Rather, when legislative conflict has a definitive partisan structure and the committees are always controlled by the majority party, representative committees will result as a simple by-product of the partisan structure and organization.

We present evidence suggesting that the majority party in the U.S. Senate exercises significant negative agenda control. Furthermore, this majority party negative agenda control in the Senate is very similar, in empirical terms, to negative agenda control exercised by the majority party in the U.S. House of Representatives. This evidence comes from comparisons of majority party roll rates across legislative vehicles (S bills, confirmation votes, and conference reports) and across chambers of Congress. Majority party roll rates respond to disagreement with other political actors as if the Senate majority party does restrict agenda access. Moreover, the response of majority party roll rates to disagreement with other political actors is very similar across the two chambers. Given that explanations of majority party negative agenda control in the House are often predicated on chamber-specific factors with no clear analogues in the Senate, the results reveal a striking cross-chamber similarity.

American social movements are often bitterly divided about whether their objectives are achieved better by working with one of the major political parties or by operating independently. These divisions are consequential for how social movements and political parties respond to one another. First, differing partisan attitudes shape the structure of activist networks, leading activists to join organizations with others who share their party loyalties or disloyalties. Second, partisan attitudes affect how activists participate in the movement, with strong partisans more likely to embrace institutional tactics, such as lobbying. Third, partisanship affects activists' access to the institutions of government, such as Congress. Relying on surveys of antiwar activists attending large-scale public demonstrations in 2004 and 2005 and a Capitol Hill Lobby Day in September 2005, the authors argue that some activists integrate into major party networks through the “party in the street,” an arena of significant party-movement interaction.

Objective. Analyze the long-term, coalition-building versus short-term, fundraising strategies in leadership appointments by party leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives. Methods. Estimate a logistic regression model of leadership appointments in the U.S. House from 1990 to 2002. Results. The expensive battle for majority party control that followed the 1994 House elections prompted leaders to balance descriptive representational concerns with fundraising ability in making appointments to the extended leadership organization. This represents a shift from the pre-1994 period, when—absent an intense battle for control of the House—leaders gave greater weight to descriptive representation in making appointments. Conclusions. Congressional party leaders make appointments in part in response to the external political environment and their appointment strategies adapt as the environment changes.

From the 24th through the 28th Congresses, the House of Representatives operated under versions of a “gag rule” that blocked petitions dealing with abolition and related matters. This article presents the gag rule as not only a historically important window into slavery deliberations in Congress but also a case study in majority party restrictions of minority rights—and in the boundaries that constituency politics can place on majority power. Through analysis of vote choices and voting changes over time, I demonstrate that the gag rule's partisan origins gave way as northern members voted against party and with specific constituency pressures as well as general sectional sentiment. The gag rule shows the power of electoral considerations and constituency in the early U.S. House, and it also illustrates the force that constituency can have over majority procedural maneuvering.

Despite a substantial increase in the number of racial and ethnic minority lawmakers across the United States, scholars have been unable to demonstrate that diversification of representative bodies increases minority group influence over policy decisions outside of small local governing boards. These null findings, however, are primarily due to underspecified empirical designs that do not account for the conditioning effects of racialized political contexts and majority party coalition membership. Using state-level data on welfare benefit levels and a survey of black state legislators, this study shows that black descriptive representation exerts policy influence outside of local governing bodies, but that a highly racialized political context and party control condition the nature and degree of policy influence.