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This paper explores an important but unexamined element of presidential cabinet appointments - their electoral implications. To what extent do presidents make strategic appointments to their cabinet of sitting members of the House and Senate that help their party to pick up congressional seats from the other party or that minimize the chances that the other party will take seats vacated by appointees of the president's party? To analyze these dynamics, we examine whether House and Senate appointees to cabinet or cabinet-rank posts over the 37 years from 1977 through 2013 come from safe seats or competitive seats and whether senators appointed by the president primarily come from states with governors of the same party who have the power to appoint an interim senator. We find that recent presidents have infrequently selected sitting members of the House and Senate for cabinet or cabinet-rank service, and that presidents have almost never nominated sitting members of Congress from the other party for cabinet service, and thus do not use these picks to seek electoral gain for their party. Presidents have been mostly risk averse when appointing sitting members of Congress from their own party to the cabinet, but in certain instances presidents have run clear electoral risk by opening a congressional seat in the wake of a cabinet appointment, and at times have seen their party suffer the long-term loss of both House and Senate seats as a result. This research sheds light on the important tensions that at times exist between a president choosing the team he feels he needs for his cabinet and the electoral prospects of his political party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have studied elected officials' presentation of self, typically through examination of behavior in their districts, speeches, and web sites. In this paper, the authors examine a little-studied but telling element of U.S. senators' presentation of self-the images they display to constituents and others visiting their offices in Washington, D.C. We analyze both the total amount of items displayed as well as the number that focus on the senators themselves, and find that having run for president, being a Republican, and representing a state closer to Washington, D.C., all predict a senator having more self-centered front office dé cor, while having served more years in the chamber and hailing from a state closer to the nation's capital are associated with greater sheer number of items displayed in a senator's front office. Our findings shed light upon how senators view themselves and hope to shape the perceptions of their personality and legislative records in the eyes of the people to whom they owe their public office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We find that communities with stronger interest group sectors received more federal grants than those with weaker associational systems. This is important because we also find that groups are less common in areas that appear to need them more. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses content analysis of interest group materials and Congressional Record statements, as well as campaign finance records, to explore the relationship between interest group information provision and congressional information use. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares experiences of three recent APSA Congressional fellows with interest groups' influence in a Senate personal office, House committee staff office, and the House leadership office. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how interest groups strategically frame political issues and how this activity translates in congressional debates. At the heart of this research lie questions about the ability of political elites to affect the role and structure of issue debates. These are longstanding theoretical questions in the political science literature (Riker 1980, 1993; Jones 1994), but empirically under-examined by interest groups scholars. While scholarship often looks for interest group influence in congressional roll call votes or committee behavior, a more pervasive form of influence may be found in how interest groups affect the framing of the policy debate. To explore this relationship, I examine interest group and congressional framing of the partial birth abortion issue over a four year period between 1995 and 1998. The analysis is conducted in two stages. First, I use content analysis of interest group inputs and outputs to examine similarities and differences in interest group and congressional framing. Second, I explore the factors that explain a Member's propensity to promote an interest group's frames using a Heckman selection model. The results of the content analysis suggest a high level of unity between interest group and congressional framing efforts on the partial birth abortion issue. The statistical evidence suggests a link between interest group activity and congressional framing activity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do parties alter their positions on losing issues? We examine how the Democratic party tried to neutralize the Republican party's advantage on crime issues. We analyze media coverage of criminal sentencing issues from 1969-2000 and compare it to public preferences regarding which party would be better at handling crime. We show that as Democrats provided more consistent "tough on crime" messages, the public came to see the Democratic party as one that could effectively handle crime issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the evolution of PAC activity surrounding the abortion issue. I posit that as the abortion issue grew increasingly more partisan and more salient that interest group strategies changed in response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Polarization in American Politics: Interest Groups, Mass Media and Contestation of the Abortion Issue How does a public problem become a partisan issue? This paper analyzes this question by examining interest groups? use of the media regarding the abortion issue. When interest groups supporting and opposing abortion arrived on the political scene in the early 1970s, there was uncertainty about who their potential allies and opponents would be. In particular, the Republican and Democratic parties had not yet developed clear and opposing positions on the issue. Over the next three decades, however, pro-life groups became firmly attached to the Republican Party while pro-choice groups became a mainstay of the Democratic Party. We examine how this interest group/political party connection developed by analyzing the way that abortion was treated in the mass media. Our guiding hypothesis is that media references to abortion not only became more frequent during this period reflecting the growing salience of the issue but that coverage increasingly indicated that pro-life groups were positively identifying with the Republican Party while pro-choice groups were becoming more closely aligned with the Democratic Party. In other words, we argue that media coverage of abortion helped facilitate a clarification of conflict surrounding the issue?a clarification that eventually led pro-life groups to the Republican Party and pro-choice groups toward the Democratic Party. In order to examine this process empirically we will create two indexes of media coverage of abortion for the thirty period, 1973-2003. The first will simply record the frequency of media stories concerning the issue that include a reference to interest groups. The second index will focus on the content of these stories, specifically on the extent and manner in which opposing interest groups are mentioned in conjunction with the Republican and Democratic parties. We will measure whether over time pro-life groups display increasing positive affect toward the Republican Party while becoming increasingly negative toward the Democratic Party and whether the reverse is equally true among pro-choice interest groups. Interest groups on both sides of the abortion issue spearheaded the growing polarization of the parties on this issue. Their crucial role in this process, we believe, can be well documented through an examination of the mass media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of women in Congress often focus on the differences between women and men as legislators. Particularly, they often ask whether the unique experiences and viewpoints women bring to the policy making process make women stronger advocates of a women’s issues policy agenda. Typically, this question is examined by comparing men and women’s legislative behavior as two groups in a specific legislative institution (e.g. Swers 2002; Reingold 2000; Thomas 1994). From these comparisons, we know women as a group introduce more bills than men that relate to women’s issues, and they support these bills in various ways throughout the legislative process. On the other hand, Congressional studies continue to focus on district-level influences on legislators’ behavior, because of the need for MCs to please their constituencies to aid in reelection (Mayhew). It remains difficult to determine the extent to which gender, in relation to partisanship or district characteristics, shapes women’s pursuit of a women’s policy agenda. In this paper, we attempt to understand the impact of gender on women’s legislative behavior in a different way, by attempting to hold constant district and party variables. We compare whether women and men legislators represent the same district differently. In cases where a woman of the same political party is elected to a congressional seat previously held by a man, does she represent this district differently with respect to gender? We focus on two questions: 1. Do women legislators introduce more bills about women’s issues than the male legislator who held the seat previously? 2. Do women legislators talk about women’s issues more in their comments on the floor than the male legislator who held the seat previously? To answer these questions, our cases are men and women who served the same district in the 105th through 107th (1996-2002) Congresses, during which no redistricting took place and Republicans maintained majority control of the House of Representatives. We expect to find women do focus more attention on women’s issues by introducing more bills and talking more about women’s issues than their male counterpart who represented that district before them, presenting further evidence for the importance of women representing women in Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]