Aage R. Clausen

PATTERNS AND SOURCES OF TICKET SPLITTING IN SUBPRESIDENTIAL VOTING

The primary source of divided government in the United States is voters who split their ballots between the parties. Yet there has been little comprehensive examination of either patterns or sources of ticket splitting in recent years. Instead, divergent lines of research have emerged, emphasizing such things as voter partisanship, incumbency, and a “new” (young, well-educated, even partisan) kind of ticket splitter; and their focus has been too often restricted to the atypical president–Congress pair. We seek to unify these research traditions in a comprehensive model of split-ticket voting and to test this model across the partisan ballot in a typical election setting-here, the contests for five Ohio state-wide offices in 1990. The model incorporates partisan strength, candidate visibility, and the individual characteristics that distinguish the “new ticket splitters”. The results support our partisan strength and candidate visibility explanations but provide little support for the emergence of a new type of ticket splitter.

Partisan mobilization and electoral participation

Electoral participation typically has been investigated without consideration of the impact of political mobilization. We construct a more complete measure of participation in elections—voting in and for governor, senator, treasurer and state supreme court justices in Ohio in 1986. We seek to demonstrate unmistakably that the efforts of political parties and candidates stimulate voting participation, even when we take into account other standard determinants. We draw our data from the 1986 Ohio Political Survey. And, we show that, ceteris paribus, the contacts of citizens with party or campaign workers, as well as information about the campaign, have a significant impact on the degree of electoral participation.

The Dimensionality of Roll-Call Voting Reconsidered

With little debate, a unidimensional approach to the study of roll-call voting in Congress has achieved acceptance. We argue in favor of the policy dimension approach and suggest that such an approach has distinct advantages. First, by allowing for interpretable, multiply correlated dimensions, the policy dimension approach allows a greater understanding of the subtleties of congressional voting. Second, the approach allows new dimensions to emerge and established ones to converge or diverge. Finally, the policy dimension approach allows us to examine sets of policy positions that deviate from a unidimensional model and to explain these policy profiles.

Policy Partisanship in Legislative Leadership Recruitment and Behavior

This study proposes a theory of policy partisanship in the selection, retention, and behavior of legislative party leadership and tests that theory on the U.S. Congress. The theory varies from the dominant middleman theory in expecting that legislative leaders will take policy positions away from the party center and toward the position advanced by the majority of a partys members. Strongest support for the theory is found in the House of Representatives and within the majority Democratic party. Institutional differences are cited to explain why the theory applies less well to the Senate. The study primarily concerns the behavior of leaders while in office. A secondary summary of preleadership behavior notes that leadership aspirants do not conform to expectations that they would move in the direction of the party tilt to enhance their leadership candidacies. However, leadership behavior is more partisan than preleadership behavior.

Profiling House Members: The Policy Dimensions Approach

AbstractWith decreasing debate, a unidimensional approach to the study of roll-call voting in Congress has increasingly achieved acceptance. We argue in favor of an alternative, the policy dimension approach, and suggest that such an approach has the advantage of allowing us to examine sets of policy positions that deviate from a unidimensional model, and to explain these policy profiles.