Barry C. Burden

The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article highlights the president, who has extensive opportunities, both ex ante and ex post, to influence the distribution of federal outlays. We analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24-year period—the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled. Using district and county fixed-effects estimation strategies, we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays. We find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the presidents party represent them.

Candidate Positioning in US Congressional Elections

Theory suggests that three factors – the importance of ideology to primary voters, costly movement due to candidate reputations and lack of competition – all contribute to candidate divergence in US congressional elections. These predictions are analysed with new data from a 2000 mail survey that asked congressional candidates to place themselves on a left–right ideological scale. The data reveal that candidates often diverge, but that the degree of candidate polarization is variable and may be explained by factors in the theory. Candidates with firm public reputations, those who face weak general election competition, and those who experience stiff primary competition are all more likely to deviate from the median voter’s position. Perhaps more importantly, the locations that candidates adopt have clear effects on their vote shares. Spatial theories in the Downsian tradition posit that the ideological positions of candidates are the most important determinants of election outcomes. Candidates’ positions seldom differ due to the centripetal pull of the median voter. 1 In contrast, empirical work generally finds that elections, particularly at the subpresidential level, are more about mundane factors like incumbency and candidate quality than ideology. Moreover, to the degree that ideology does matter, candidates appear to diverge more than converge, contrary to the classic spatial account. This article seeks to bridge the gap between formal theoretic and empirical accounts of candidate behaviour in subpresidential American elections. It begins with the outline of a simple theory of candidate positioning. I argue that three factors – lack of competition, the pull of primary electorates and the costs of candidate movement – jointly foster candidate divergence. The theory explains how ideology matters in elections and why more extreme candidates can defeat moderate opponents despite the inward draw of the median voter. The article then turns to an empirical examination of the theory’s predictions. I first discuss the importance and difficulty of measuring candidate ideology, particularly for challengers. Then I detail how a new candidate survey rectifies these problems. Examination of these survey data demonstrates that candidate divergence is the norm but that voter preferences encourage some centrism. The next section identifies factors that increase or decrease candidate divergence. As the theory expects, primary competition pulls candidates apart while general election competition, as indicated by candidates’ relative qualities, draws them inward. Finally, I demonstrate the ways in which positioning affects election outcomes. Across several model specifications, it is clear that candidates’ locations, even in congressional elections, affect their vote shares.

A New Approach to the Study of Ticket Splitting

A new solution to the ecological inference problem is used to examine split-ticket voting patterns across states and congressional districts in the 1988 elections. Earlier studies of ticket splitting used either aggregate data, which suffer from the “ecological fallacy” and threaten individual-level inferences, or survey data from small, unrepresentative samples. We produce more accurate estimates of the proportions of voters splitting their ballots in each state and district, which enables us to examine variations across geographical units. We also clarify the connection between ticket splitting and divided government and test several competing theories about the causes of both. We find, contrary to balancing arguments, that voters are not intentionally splitting tickets to produce divided government and moderate policies. In most cases split outcomes are a by-product of lopsided congressional campaigns that feature well-funded, high-quality candidates versus unknown competitors.

The Vote-Stealing and Turnout Effects of Ross Perot in the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election

Including abstention as a choice in vote choice models enables one to calculate the votestealing and turnout effects of third-party candidates. A model of the vote including abstention also produces parameter estimates and marginal effects for some explanatory variables that differ from the results of a model that excludes abstention. We present two multinomial probit models of vote choice in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. One model includes abstention as a choice; the other does not. The model that includes abstention reveals that Ross Perot increased turnout by nearly three percentage points in 1992, and his candidacy decreased Clintons margin of victory over Bush by seven percentage points. Under compulsory voting, Clintons margin of victory barely increases, and Perots vote share remains nearly constant.

Institutions and Policy Representation in the States

Can government institutions strengthen the influence of public opinion on policy-making? While institutions often limit representation, I identify two institutional features of state lawmaking that may enhance democratic control, but in somewhat different way. I hypothesize the one institution external to the state legislature—the ballot initiative—improves representation on specific issues, while one institution internal to the legislature—the committee discharge procedure—enhances responsiveness to mass preferences generally. This difference emerges because legislators engage in repeated interactions and logrolling across a wide range of issues while advocates of ballot initiatives do not. My analyses largely, although not entirely, support these hypotheses, with the initiative making abortion policy more responsive and committee discharge making policy generally more respnsive. These results suggest a domain-specific influence of institutions that were previously thought to have similar effects on policy representation.

BUDGET RHETORIC IN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS FROM 1952 TO 2000

We offer a theory to identify the determinants of presidential campaign rhetoric related to the federal budget. The theory builds on the literature dealing with issue ownership, candidate strategy, retrospective voting, and voter preferences to generate eight hypotheses about the use of budget rhetoric. To test these hypotheses, over 800 campaign speeches from the major party presidential nominees from 1952 to 2000 are content analyzed. The content analysis generates measures of both the volume and tone of budget rhetoric. Volume is driven primarily by the objective balance of the budget and subjective importance given to it by voters and a conditional effect involving budget balance, incumbency, and partisanship. Tone is more complex, with “positive” rhetoric determined mostly by the budget balance and partisanship and “overstated” rhetoric shaped solely by the salience of the budget to the electorate. The article concludes with suggestions for future research.

The Impact of Election Day Registration on Voter Turnout and Election Outcomes

Voter registration is widely viewed as a barrier to voter participation in general, and especially so for likely Democratic voters. A popular remedy for both turnout effects is election day registration (EDR), which eliminates the closing date by permitting registration at the polls. Following earlier research we posit a small positive effect of EDR on turnout. But contrary to conventional wisdom, we theorize that individuals most likely to take advantage of EDR are in fact Republican voters. To investigate these causal effects we make use of a natural experiment in Wisconsin. When EDR was implemented in Wisconsin in 1976, only municipalities that already required registration were affected by the change in the law. Analysis of this intervention shows that EDR did increase turnout in Wisconsin but actually decreased the Democratic share of the two-party vote for president.

Economic Discontent as a Mobilizer: Unemployment and Voter Turnout

Published scholarship argues that a poor economy depresses voter participation in the United States. This troubling result suggests that incumbents are “underpenalized” for bad economic performance. We challenge this conclusion theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we argue that a worsening economy has a disruptive effect that prods worried citizens to voice concern and seek remedies. Empirically, we analyze county-level data and find that, contrary to earlier studies, higher unemployment rates in fact stimulate more people to vote. We show that the effect is not the result of heightened electoral competition when unemployment is high. The relationship displays a partisan asymmetry in which Republican candidates are especially harmed by higher unemployment. The results also indicate that studies of economic voting need to consider the role of turnout in connecting economic performance to the incumbent’s vote share.

Ballot Regulations and Multiparty Politics in the States

American politics is dominated by two major parties and has been for a century. The duopoly enjoyed by the Democrats and Republicans is largely the result of Duvergers Law: the tendency of a single-member district system to produce two-party competition (Duverger 1963 ). Minor parties ultimately fail in a single-member district system because (1) the winner-take-all approach does not reward candidates who finish third and (2) citizens vote strategically to avoid “wasting” their votes on hopeless candidates and spoiling the election (Cox 1997 ; Riker 1982 ). Because the U.S. two-party system is so dependent on its majoritarian electoral rules, one might suspect that other election regulations would have little effect on the number of parties. A longer version of this paper was presented at the conference, “2008 and Beyond: The Future of Election and Ethics Reform in the States,” Columbus, OH, January 16–17, 2007. I thank Richard Winger of Ballot Access News for comments and information.

A technique for estimating candidate and voter locations

Abstract This paper develops a simple technique for locating voters and candidates in two-party US elections. Such a procedure is attractive because it overcomes the limitations of existing techniques that fail to place incumbents, challengers, and constituents on the same scale. The method is demonstrated using data from the 1988 presidential and congressional elections. The new data are then used to reevaluate spatial theories of candidate competition.