Eric McGhee

A Primary Cause of Partisanship? Nomination Systems and Legislator Ideology

Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a polarizing influence. Likewise, many reformers advocate opening party nominations to nonmembers as a way of increasing the number of moderate elected officials. Data and measurement constraints, however, have limited the range of empirical tests of this argument. We marry a unique new data set of state legislator ideal points to a detailed accounting of primary systems in the United States to gauge the effect of primary systems on polarization. We find that the openness of a primary election has little, if any, effect on the extremism of the politicians it produces.

One Vote Out of Step? The Effects of Salient Roll Call Votes in the 2010 Election

We investigate the relationship between controversial roll call votes and support for Democratic incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Consistent with previous analyses, we find that supporters of health care reform paid a significant price at the polls. We go beyond these analyses by identifying a mechanism for this apparent effect: constituents perceived incumbents who supported health care reform as more ideologically distant (in this case, more liberal), which in turn was associated with lower support for those incumbents. Our analyses show that this perceived ideological difference mediates most of the apparent impact of support for health care reform on both individual-level vote choice and aggregate-level vote share. We conclude by simulating counterfactuals that suggest health care reform may have cost Democrats their House majority.

What it takes to win: Questioning gender neutral outcomes in U.S. house elections

When women run for office, they win at the same rate as men. A significant body of research substantiating this claim has been touted by scholars and womens groups alike. “Gender neutral” outcomes, however, mask important sex differences in congressional candidacies. Indeed, extensive research has revealed a gender gap in political ambition: women are more hesitant to run for office and are more concerned about their credentials and viability than similarly situated men.

Party Registration and the Geography of Party Polarization

Are voters in the United States sorting into geographic “enclaves” of determined commitment to one party or the other, or do voting and public opinion patterns hide a fundamentally ambivalent electorate? The most common geographic measure of partisanship—the presidential vote—cannot identify strength of commitment to the parties because voters have no viable alternative to the major-party candidates. We use party registration statistics instead, since voters can safely register with a third party or as an independent without giving up their right to choose a major-party candidate in the fall election. These numbers suggest that the strongest trend by far is not growing polarization but the large and pervasive increase in registered independents. Although the 2008 election was extraordinary in many ways, its impact on these basic trends is ambiguous. We offer some preliminary analysis that suggests this trend is ideologically meaningful and bears important implications for polarization, and then make a case for further research on the independent phenomenon.

Kingmakers or Cheerleaders? Party Power and the Causal Effects of Endorsements

When parties make endorsements in primary elections, does the favored candidate receive a real boost in his or her vote share, or do parties simply pick the favorites who are already destined to win? To answer this question, we draw on two research designs aimed at isolating the causal effect of Democratic Party endorsements in California’s 2012 primary election. First, we conduct a survey experiment in which we randomly assign a party endorsement, holding all other aspects of a candidate’s background and policy positions constant. Second, we use a unique dataset to implement a regression discontinuity analysis of electoral trends by comparing the vote shares captured by candidates who barely won or barely lost the internal party endorsement contest. We find a constellation of evidence suggesting that endorsements do indeed matter, although this effect appears to be contingent upon the type of candidate and voter: endorsements matter most for candidates in their party’s mainstream, and for voters who identify with that party and for independents. The magnitude of their impact is dramatically smaller than might be estimated from research designs less attuned to recent advances in causal inference.

Redistricting California: An Evaluation of the Citizens Commission Final Plans

THE CALIFORNIA Journal of Politics & Policy Volume 4, Issue 1 Redistricting California: An Evaluation of the Citizens Commission Final Plans Vladimir Kogan University of California, San Diego Eric McGhee Public Policy Institute of California Abstract For the first time in California history, a carefully vetted commission of citizens has overseen the delicate task of redrawing the state’s political boundaries. By ana- lyzing the maps produced by the commission and comparing these plans to the redistricting overseen by the legislature a decade earlier, we show that the new pro- cess has produced important improvements in terms of both the criteria voters said they cared about and the representational implications of interest to academics and political observers. In many respects, however, the magnitude of these gains has fallen short of what many political reformers may have hoped for. Perhaps the most important lesson from the 2011 round of redistricting is that a fair process, no mat- ter how nonpartisan and participatory, cannot avoid the reality that any redistricting scheme produces both political winners and losers. Keywords: redistricting, redistricting reform, California politics, political polar- ization Copyright

Concern over Immigration and Support for Public Services

THE CALIFORNIA Journal of Politics & Policy Volume 2 , Issue 1 Concern over Immigration and Support for Public Services Eric McGhee and Max Neiman Public Policy Institute of California Abstract This paper presents data and analysis suggesting that immigration as an issue has ramified on to a broader policy agenda than “just” immigration. We show that, con- trolling for a wide range of political and demographic variables, those who say that immigration is the most important problem facing the state of California are more likely to want a smaller government that provides fewer services. However, we also find that this link weakens as the number of people concerned about immigration grows. The results suggest that public concern over immigration can be, within some range, a potent means of rallying voters against government. This potential, however, weakens as the proportion of individuals concerned about immigration rises beyond a certain level. KEYWORDS: immigration, public services, public policy, California Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank Bruce Cain, Jack Citrin, Ken- neth Fernandez, Nathan Kalmoe, Thad Kousser, Dowell Myers, Carole Tolbert, and participants in the Governing a Multi-Ethnic California conference for helpful comments and suggestions. www.bepress.com/cjpp

Election fundamentals and polls favor the republicans

SY M P OS I U M Election Fundamentals and Polls Favor the Republicans Benjamin Highton, University of California, Davis Eric McGhee, Public Policy Institute of California John Sides, George Washington University O ur congressional forecasting model provides predictions of individual House and Senate races as well as aggregate party seat shares in each chamber. It does so by marrying an underlying structural or “fundamentals”-based model with available polling data—an approach similar to Linzer (2013). The structural portion of the model is based on contested House and Senate elections from 1980 to 2012, excluding those when an independent or third-party candidate won a signifi cant share of the vote. 1 The dependent variable is the Democratic candidate’s share of the major-party vote. The independent vari- ables are drawn from the extensive literature that has identifi ed signifi cant national and state or district correlates of congres- sional election outcomes (e.g., Jacobson 2012). These include: • The nonannualized change in real gross domestic product (GDP) in the fi rst two quarters of the election year. • The president’s average approval rating in June of the elec- tion year. • Whether it is a midterm or presidential election year. • Whether the seat is being contested by a Republican incum- bent, a Democratic incumbent, or no incumbent (i.e., it is an open seat). • The Democratic Party’s share of the two-party presidential vote in each political unit (states or districts) in the concur- rent or most recent election (mean-deviated by election year). • Relative candidate quality, which is the diff erence between the Democrat’s level of previous elective offi ce experience and the Republican’s. For House races, experience is coded as a dichotomy, distinguishing candidates who have held at least some elective offi ce from candidates who have held no such offi ce. For Senate races, each candidate is coded on a six-point scale: no elective offi ce; a local offi ce or state legislator; a statewide offi ce other than governor (including former US senators); US House or large city mayor; governor; or incumbent US senator. • The Democratic candidate’s share of spending by the two major-party candidates. For Senate elections, the model also includes: • The previous Democratic vote share for the seat. The eff ect of this variable is allowed to vary by whether the incumbent 786 PS • October 2014 senator is running for reelection. (Including lagged vote share in the model of House elections requires excluding election years that follow redistricting.) • Whether an appointed senator is running for his or her fi rst election, and that senator’s party. All variables are coded so that higher values capture better circumstances for Democratic candidates. For the three national- level variables, we multiply each by a variable for the president’s party (–1=Republican; +1=Democrat) and also include that indi- cator in the model. We account for uncertainty in our forecasts by assigning probabilities to all our predictions based on the error param- eters in our models (Lauderdale and Linzer 2014). Likewise, because the structural model cannot account for all the factors that make each state and election year unique, we estimate a multilevel model with random intercepts for states and years so we can propagate that uncertainty more precisely into our predictions. 2 The results of the structural model for both House and Senate elections are shown in table 1. Across the two types of elections notable similarity exists in the apparent eff ects of presidential approval and the midterm penalty. The estimated eff ects of campaign spending are also almost identical across the models. The estimate for presiden- tial vote is larger for House elections, but that may be due to the inclusion of previous vote in the Senate models because both variables tap the local partisan balance. Also note that several candidate-related variables—incumbency, appointed, and qual- ity diff erential—are not comparable across the election types because of the diff erences in model specifi cation and measure- ment noted previously. These parameter estimates may be used to make predictions for the 435 House and 36 Senate elections this year. We do this by substituting the 2014 values for each of the elections and computing the predicted vote shares. (Because fi nal spending amounts will not be available until well after November, we use the most recent fi gures for fundraising during the 2013–2014 cycle.) Our estimates take into account uncertainty about the model parameters (the standard errors of the coeffi cients) along with the overall uncertainty in the model. In this process, the random error terms for years and states can be thought of as “off sets” that identify how each year or state diff ered from all others for unmeasured reasons. The multilevel model constrains these off sets to collectively form a normal distribution with

Has the Top Two Primary Elected More Moderates

Party polarization is perhaps the most significant political trend of the past several decades of American politics. Many observers have pinned hopes on institutional reforms to reinvigorate the political center. The Top Two primary is one of the most interesting and closely-watched of these reforms: a radically open primary system that removes much of the formal role for parties in the primary election and even allows for two candidates of the same party to face each other in the fall. Here we leverage the adoption of the Top Two in California and Washington to explore the reform’s effects on legislator behavior. We find an inconsistent effect since the reform was adopted in these two states. The evidence for post-reform moderation is stronger in California than in Washington, but some of this stronger effect appears to stem from a contemporaneous policy change—district lines drawn by an independent redistricting commission—while still more might have emerged from a change in term limits that was also adopted at the same time. The results validate some claims made by reformers, but question others, and their magnitude casts some doubt on the potential for institutions to reverse the polarization trend.

How Much Does the Public Know About the State Budget, and Does it Matter?

The budget crises of recent years have left the sense that California legislators are unwilling or unable to work together. Is public misinformation part of the problem? The Statewide Survey of the Public Policy Institute of California has repeatedly shown that most California voters have only the barest sense of where the state gets its money or what it spends it on. If voters were better informed, would they change their opinions about the budget, possibly opening a way to compromise? To answer this question, I simulate the effect of full information on opinions about budget-related issues. The results suggest that a hypothetical fully informed electorate might be less supportive of spending, but would mostly hold opinions about the budget similar to the ones they hold now. Budget opinion is driven less by information than by broad predispositions like party affiliation and ideology, as well as feelings about specific issues and groups.