Devin Caughey

Honor and War: Southern US Presidents and the Effects of Concern for Reputation

Reputation has long been considered central to international relations, but unobservability, strategic selection, and endogeneity have handicapped quantitative research. A rare source of haphazard variation in the cultural origins of leaders—the fact that one-third of US presidents were raised in the American South, a well-studied example of a culture of honor—provides an opportunity to identify the effects of heightened concern for reputation for resolve. A formal theory that yields several testable predictions while accounting for unobserved selection into disputes is offered. The theory is illustrated through a comparison of presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and systematically tested using matching, permutation inference, and the nonparametric combination of tests. Interstate conflicts under Southern presidents are shown to be twice as likely to involve uses of force, last on average twice as long, and are three times more likely to end in victory for the United States than disputes under non-Southern presidents. Other characteristics of Southern presidencies do not seem able to account for this pattern of results. The results provide evidence that concern for reputation is an important cause of interstate conflict behavior.

Substance and Change in Congressional Ideology: NOMINATE and Its Alternatives

Studies in American Political Development, page 1 of 19, 2016. doi:10.1017/S0898588X16000092 ISSN 0898-588X/16 # Cambridge University Press 2016 Substance and Change in Congressional Ideology: NOMINATE and Its Alternatives Devin Caughey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Eric Schickler, University of California – Berkeley Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE scores have been a boon to the study of Congress, but they are not without limitations. We focus on two limitations that are especially important in historical applications. First, the dimen- sions uncovered by NOMINATE do not necessarily have a consistent ideological meaning over time. Our case study of the 1920s highlights the challenge of interpreting NOMINATE scores in periods when party lines do not map well onto the main contours of ideological debate in political life. Second, the commonly used DW-NOMINATE variant of these scores makes assumptions that are not well suited to dealing with rapid or non- monotonic ideological change. A case study of Southern Democrats in the New Deal era suggests that a more flexible dynamic item-response model provides a better fit for this important period. These applications illustrate the fea- sibility and value of tailoring one’s model and data to one’s research goals rather than relying on off-the-shelf NOMINATE scores. Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE project has been a boon to the study of congressional history and of American political development more generally. 1 By placing legislators and roll calls in a Common Space, DW-NOMINATE and other variants of the basic NOMINATE procedure have permitted the de- velopment of measures of concepts such as partisan homogeneity and polarization that (potentially) “travel” across time, greatly facilitating the analysis and comparison of congressional politics across American history. A wide range of studies have em- ployed NOMINATE-based measures to track these concepts over a long time span and to test competing theoretical models. 2 It is fair to say that no data source has had a greater impact on the study of legislative politics—both historically and in the contemporary period—than the NOMINATE project. NOMINATE scores provide a statistical summary of legislators’ voting behavior. The scores themselves do not have any inherent meaning independent of the theoretical and substantive framework that we use to interpret them. For Poole and Rosenthal, this theoret- ical framework derives from a formal model of legisla- tive behavior: NOMINATE scores are estimated based on a spatial model of legislators’ voting decisions, along with a set of assumptions about voting errors and about change in legislators’ preferences over time. By itself, this formal model does not necessarily imbue the resulting scores with ideological meaning, and it is often possible to make use of the scores We thank Emily Hertz for excellent research assistance. We also thank Richard Valelly, David Mayhew, Kevin Quinn, and the participants at the 2014 Congress and History Conference for helpful comments. 1. For a recent overview of the NOMINATE project, see Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Ideology and Congress (New Bruns- wick, NJ: Transaction, 2007). 2. See, e.g., Eric Schickler, “Institutional Change in the House of Representatives, 1867 –1998: A Test of Partisan and Ideological Power Balance Models,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 2 (2000): 269– 88; John H. Aldrich, Mark M. Berger, and David W. Rohde, “The Historical Variability in Conditional Party Govern- ment, 1877– 1994,” in Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress, ed. David Brady and Mathew D. Mc-Cubbins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 23– 51; Gary W. Cox and Matthew D. McCubbins, Setting the Agenda: Re- sponsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Hahrie Han and David W. Brady, “A Delayed Return to Historical Norms: Congressio- nal Party Polarization after the Second World War,” British Journal of Political Science 37, no. 3 (2007): 505; Matthew J. Lebo, Adam J. McGlynn, and Gregory Koger, “Strategic Party Government: Party Influence in Congress, 1789– 2000,” American Journal of Political Science 51, no. 3 (2007): 464– 81. NOMINATE AND CONGRESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT