Eleanor Neff Powell

Revisiting Electoral Volatility in Post-Communist Countries: New Data, New Results and New Approaches

This article provides a detailed set of coding rules for disaggregating electoral volatility into two components: volatility caused by new party entry and old party exit, and volatility caused by vote switching across existing parties. After providing an overview of both types of volatility in post-communist countries, the causes of volatility are analysed using a larger dataset than those used in previous studies. The results are startling: most findings based on elections in post-communist countries included in previous studies disappear. Instead, entry and exit volatility is found to be largely a function of long-term economic recovery, and it becomes clear that very little is known about what causes ‘party switching’ volatility. As a robustness test of this latter result, the authors demonstrate that systematic explanations for party-switching volatility in Western Europe can indeed be found.

Understanding the Party Brand: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Valence

The valence component of a party’s reputation, or brand, has been less scrutinized than other components of party-based theories of legislatures. This lack of scrutiny results from the difficulty of isolating the valence component from policy-related components and the difficulty of studying legislators’ motives. We overcome these challenges by conducting survey experiments on both voters and state legislators that show (1) that scholars have underestimated the impact of the party valence brand’s potential role in elections, (2) that legislative party leaders pressure members more on votes when the outcome affects the party valence brand, and (3) that the value of the party brand can sometimes directly affect legislators’ votes. Our results provide a rationale for why legislative leaders put so much effort into media spin battles and suggest that parties’ reputations affect legislative leaders’ ability to pass their agenda.

Congressmen in Exile: The Politics and Consequences of Involuntary Committee Removal

We show how preferred committee assignments act as an electoral subsidy for members of Congress—empowering representatives’ legislative careers. When holding preferred assignments, legislators are free to focus on legislative activity in Washington, DC. But when the subsidy is removed, legislators are forced to direct attention to the district. To test our theory of legislative subsidy, we exploit committee exile—the involuntary removal of committee members after a party loses a sizable number of seats. Legislators are selected for exile using members’ rank on the committee, causing exiled and remaining legislators to appear strikingly similar. Using exile, we show that it has only limited electoral consequences, but this is partly due to compensatory efforts. Exiled legislators shift attention away from Washington and towards the district: they raise and spend more money for reelection, author less legislation, are absent for more days of voting, and vote with their party less often.

Money in Exile: Campaign Contributions and Committee Access

Understanding how money influences the legislative process is essential for assessing American democracy, but problems of endogeneity, legality, and observational equivalence make it difficult to isolate the effect of contributions on policy. We seek to answer long-standing questions about the influence of money in Congress by exploiting a congressional procedure (committee exile) that exogenously varies a member’s influence over the policy-making process. We leverage exile as an identification strategy to show that business interests seek short-term access to influential legislators. Industries overseen by the committee decrease contributions to exiled legislators and instead direct their contributions to new committee members from the opposite party. Partisan interests, in contrast, attempt to influence electoral outcomes—boosting contributions to exiled members. Together, we provide evidence that corporations and business PACs use donations to acquire immediate access and favor—suggesting they at least anticipate that the donations will influence policy.