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The idea that voters blame or credit the President for the state of the economy when making electoral decisions is well-established. But recent developments in American party politics-in particular, growing party polarization-suggest that the strength and importance of economic voting should vary across political contexts. In this paper, we draw from theories of economic voting, cognitive biases in information processing, and party polarization, to develop a simple model of the relationship between polarization and economic voting. We expect that both objective and subjective economic information should become less important to how voters act as parties polarization, as polarization leads voters to stronger reliance on simple party identity when making electoral decisions. Empirical analysis of individual-level vote choices support our theoretical claims, proving evidence that the economy matters less to the vote when parties are highly polarized than when they are not. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding party polarization and election outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we synthesize and extend theoretical accounts of the solicitor general's (SG) influence on the votes of Supreme Court justices. In particular, we argue that the level of politicization exhibited by the SG can affect both the foundation of political support the SG enjoys from ideologically proximate justices and the strength of "outlier signals" offered in particular cases. When the SG exhibits increased politicization, outlier signals are likely to be especially useful to ideologically distant justices and, therefore, predictive of their behavior. When the SG is less politicized, outlier signal briefs should be more equivalent to mainstream briefs, and, therefore, relatively less informative. Analyzing justices' votes in civil liberties and civil rights cases, we find empirical support for our theoretical claims. In particular, we find that the effects of politicization in the Office of the Solicitor General and outlier signals contained in individual case briefs are conditional on one another and on the degree of ideological divergence between each justice and the SG. This study offers a more complete account of the ways that political dynamics shape executive branch litigation and linkages between the president and the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive body of feminist theory holds that women perceive the world and make choices through a fundamentally different set of values than men. Consequently, political scientists have strong theoretical reasons to suspect that women will act differently than men in political contexts. Empirically, this supposition has found strong support in the broad evidence of a “gender gap,” persistent differences in the political opinions and behaviors of men and women in the mass public. Taken as a whole, this body of theory and empirical research strongly suggests that women may behave differently than men in elite political contexts as well. At the same time, beginning with David Mayhew (1974), many congressional scholars have argued that a strong desire to secure reelection, an “electoral connection,” dominates the behavior of members of Congress. The logic of the electoral connection seems to demand that any potential member of Congress for a given district would behave in a nearly identical manner as all others, the manner most nearly in line with the preferences of his or her district. Empirical evidence supports this position as well. From this perspective, it seems unlikely that, ceteris paribus, a woman would represent a given congressional district differently than a man in the same office. Taking advantage of the development of widely-accepted and widely-utilized, comprehensive measures of Congressional ideology, Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE data, I seek to answer a question first posed by Susan Welch, “Are women more liberal than men in the United States Congress?” Utilizing NOMINATE data, I test the effect of gender against the effects of party, region, and district characteristics in the House of Representatives for the 92nd-105th Congresses to determine whether there is an independent gender effect on voting in Congress. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2003 meeting of the MPSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]