David R. Mayhew

Wars and American Politics

Wars have been underexamined as causal factors in American political history. The nations freestanding hot wars seem to have generated at least four kinds of major effects: policy changes of lasting consequence, new issue regimes, durable changes in electoral alignments, and durable changes in party ideologies. Considered here are the War of 1812, the War with Mexico, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. David R. Mayhew is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University (david.mayhew@yale.edu). His publications include Party Loyalty among Congressmen; Congress: The Electoral Connection ; “Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals”; Placing Parties in American Politics ; Divided We Govern ; Americas Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere , James Madison through Newt Gingrich ; and Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre . The author thanks Alan Gerber, Matthew Green, Jacob Hacker, Sonam Henderson, Rogan Kersh, Philip Klinkner, Heinz Kohler, Joseph LaPalombara, Bruce Russett, Abbey Steele, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Robert A. Dahl: questions, concepts, proving it

What were the ingredients of Robert A. Dahl’s genius as a political scientist? First, he asked good questions. Those were ordinarily bold, broad questions central to political theory that appear at the openings of his works and orient them. Second, he was resourceful in creating or tailoring holistic concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘power’, as well as compositional categories such as ‘cumulative’ vs. ‘noncumulative’ resources, or ‘participation’ and ‘contestation’ as routes to democratization. Third, he evangelized for hypothesis testing and reliance on data-sets as the future of political science, and he acted on this advice.

A Note on Close Elections and Regression Analysis of the Party Incumbency Advantage

Much research has recently been devoted to understanding the effects of party incumbency following close elections, typically using a regression discontinuity design. Researchers have demonstrated that close elections in the United States may systematically favor certain types of candidates, and that a research design that focuses on close elections may therefore be inappropriate for estimation of the incumbency advantage. We demonstrate that any issues raised with the study of close elections may be equally applicable to the ordinary least squares analysis of electoral data, even when the sample contains all elections. When vote share is included as part of a covariate control strategy, the estimate produced by an ordinary least squares regression that includes all elections either exactly reproduces or approximates the regression discontinuity estimate.

Congress, The Electoral Connection

In this second edition to a book that has now achieved canonical status, David R. Mayhew argues that the principal motivation of legislators is reelection and that the pursuit of this goal affects the way they behave and the way that they make public policy. In a new foreword for this edition, R. Douglas Arnold discusses why the book revolutionized the study of Congress and how it has stood the test of time. The book also contains a new preface by the author.