Gary W. Cox

Electoral institutions,cleavage structures,and the number of parties

Theory: A classic question in political science concerns what determines the number of parties that compete in a given polity. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to answering this question, one that emphasizes the role of electoral laws in structuring coalitional incentives, and another that emphasizes the importance of preexisting social cleavages. In this paper, we view the number of parties as a product of the interaction between these two forces, following Powell (1982) and Ordeshook and Shvetsova (1994). Hypothesis: The effective number of parties in a polity should be a multiplicative rather than an additive function of the permissiveness of the electoral system and the heterogeneity of the society. Methods: Multiple regression on cross-sectional aggregate electoral statistics. Unlike previous studies, we (1) do not confine attention to developed democracies; (2) explicitly control for the influence of presidential elections, taking account of whether they are concurrent or nonconcurrent, and of the effective number of presidential candidates; and (3) also control for the presence and operation of upper tiers in legislative elections. Results: The hypothesis is confirmed, both as regards the number of legislative parties and the number of presidential parties.

Closeness, Expenditures, and Turnout in the 1982 U.S. House Elections

Students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout. This may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters, but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this explanation. Another possibility is that elite actors respond to closeness with greater effort at mobilization. We explore the latter possibility by using FEC and state data on campaign expenditures in House, Senate, and gubernatorial races. Our results indicate that closeness has an effect at both the mass and elite levels. We also provide quantitative estimates of the effect of Senate and gubernatorial expenditure on House turnout.

Why Did The Incumbency Advantage In U.S. House Elections Grow

Theory: A simple rational entry argument suggests that the value of incumbency consists not just of a direct effect, reflecting the value of resources (such as staff) attached to legislative office, but also of an indirect effect, reflecting the fact that stronger challengers are less likely to contest incumbent-held seats. The indirect effect is the product of a scare-off effect-the ability of incumbents to scare off high-quality challengers-and a quality effect-reflecting how much electoral advantage a party accrues when it has an experienced rather than an inexperienced candidate. Hypothesis: The growth of the overall incumbency advantage was driven principally by increases in the quality effect. Methods: We use a simple two-equation model, estimated by ordinary least-squares regression, to analyze U.S. House election data from 1948 to 1990. Results: Most of the increase in the incumbency advantage, at least down to 1980, came through increases in the quality effect (i.e., the advantage to the incumbent party of having a low-quality challenger). This suggests that the task for those wishing to explain the growth in the vote-denominated incumbency advantage is to explain why the quality effect grew. It also suggests that resource-based explanations of the growth in the incumbency advantage cannot provide a full explanation.

Electoral Equilibrium under Alternative Voting Institutions

This paper investigates the nature of multicandidate electoral equilibria under three different classes of single-ballot-single-winner voting systems: (1) scoring rules (including the plurality rule, Bordas method of marks, and negative voting); (2) Condorcet completion procedures; and (3) multiple vote procedures (including approval voting). Some of the key findings of the paper are that (1) multicandidate equilibria under the plurality rule must be noncentrist (Theorem 1); (2) in an election held under any Condorcet procedure, candidates have a dominant strategy to adopt the median voters position (Theorem 4); (3) there is a set of nontrivial voting methods for which equilibria routinely exist regardless of the dimensionality of the policy space; and (4) the plurality rule is alone among commonly discussed voting procedures in not having centrist multicandidate equilibria.

STRATEGIC VOTING EQUILIBRIA UNDER THE SINGLE NONTRANSFERABLE VOTE

Previous investigations of strategic voting equilibria in mass electorates have looked only at single-member districts. I shall investigate such equilibria in multimember districts operating under the single nontransferable vote system. What appear to be the most natural equilibria conform to the M + 1 rule, according to which strategic voting in M-seat districts produces exactly M + 1 vote-getting candidates in equilibrium, any others having their support totally undercut. This result provides the beginnings of a formal underpinning for Reeds recent extension of Duvergers Law to the Japanese case. The model also generates specific and empirically testable hypotheses concerning the exceptions to the M + 1 rule that one ought to expect in equilibrium. I test these hypotheses with Japanese data. Finally, the model also reveals a type of strategic voting that is specific to multimember districts. I use Japanese data again to explore the empirical importance of this kind of strategic voting.

Turnout and Rural Corruption: New York as a Test Case

In 1974 Philip Converse and Jerrold Rusk offered an institutional, and Walter Dean Burnham, a behavioral explanation of the decline in voter turnout in the northern United States around the turn of the century. An examination of turnout figures for New York State from 1870 to 1916 demonstrates that election statistics lend some support to both explanations, and that the elections around 1890 provide the strongest evidence in favor of the Converse-Rusk hypothesis. A systematic analysis of election-related stories in contemporary newspapers allows a test of Converses assertion that the introduction of the secret ballot decreased reported turnout by damping down what he alleges was widespread rural corruption. Concluding that neither previous theory stands up well when confronted with the detailed voting figures and newspaper evidence, we propose an alternative explanation which melds the institutional and behavioral hypotheses.

Agenda Power in Brazil's Camara Dos Deputados, 1989-98

This article examines a general proposition about democratic legislatures--that their agenda will be cartelized by any majority government--in the context of a case study of the Brazilian Câmara dos Deputados (Chamber of Deputies). The main question is to identify when consistent agenda control by a single majority coalition, as opposed to agenda control by shifting majorities, has emerged in the post-1988 Câmara. Consistent agenda control emerges routinely in parliamentary regimes: the government commands a majority in the assembly; the legislative agenda is negotiated among the governing parties, typically with each able to veto the placement of bills on the agenda. However, the Câmara faces an external executive, the president, with substantial formal powers to set its agenda. Consistent agenda control thus can emerge only if the president chooses to ally with a majority coalition in the assembly. If the president always chooses to form such an alliance--a presidentially led agenda cartel--then one would expect some consistently parliamentary patterns in Brazil: the appointment of legislative party leaders to the cabinet; the use of statutes rather than decrees to achieve policy goals; the avoidance of bills that split the governing coalition. The authors find that only the Cardoso presidency displays consistent evidence of such a presidentially led agenda cartel. In this sense, the argument differs from that of Figueiredo and Limongi, who argue that presidents have consistently pursued a parliamentary mode of governance in Brazil. Yet it also differs from those who argue that presidents have consistently pursued a shifting-coalitions strategy. The results suggest that presidents make a strategic choice, with much hinging on that choice.

Closeness and Turnout: a Methodological Note

Many articles in political science have examined the statistical relationship between the closeness of elections and turnout. Usually, a moderate relationship is found: closer elections tend to have higher turnout. This note shows that the operational variable almost universally used in the literature to measure closeness--viz., the percent of the vote garnered by the winner minus the percent of the vote garnered by the runner-up--is spuriously correlated with turnout. An alternative measurement of closeness which avoids this problem is described.

Bonding, Structure and the Stability of Political Parties: Party Government in the House

The public policy benefits that parties deliver are allocated by democratic procedures that devolve ultimately to majority rule. Majority-rule decision make, however, does not lead to consistent policy choices; it is unstable. In this paper, we argue that institutions - and thereby policy coalitions - can be stabilized by extra-legislative organization. The rules of the Democratic Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives dictate that a requirement for continued membership is support on the floor of the Caucus decisions for a variety of key structural matters. Because membership in the majority partys caucus is valuable, it constitutes a bond, the posting of which stabilizes the structure of the House, and hence the policy decisions made in the House. We examine the rules of the House Democratic Caucus and find that they do in fact contain the essential elements of an effective, extralegislative bonding mechanism.

The Uncovered Set and the Core

Recent work in social choice theory has focused on an important generalization of the core known as the uncovered set. Miller (1977, 1980), working with finite alternative spaces, and McKelvey (1986), working with infinite alternative spaces, argue that the uncovered set serves as a general solution set for majority voting games. They and others have shown that, under a variety of institutional settings, game theoretic behavior by participants leads to outcomes in the uncovered set. Perhaps the simplest example of this is two-candidate competition under the plurality rule. In this context, Miller (1980) observed that an electoral strategy is undominated (in the usual game theoretic sense) if and only if it is an element of the uncovered set, and McKelvey (1986), building on a previous paper by McKelvey and Ordeshook (1976), demonstrated that the uncovered set contains the support set of any mixed strategy equilibrium. In the context of multicandidate competition, Cox (1985) showed that, under certain Condorcet voting procedures, undominated strategies will be in the uncovered set. The relationship of the urfcovered set to sophisticated voting and agendas has also been explored. Shepsle and Weingast (1984) have applied and extended Millers results to derive bounds on agenda reachable outcomes in multidimensional choice spaces, while McKelvey has shown in related work that the uncovered set contains any outcome reachable by sophisticated voting when agendas are endogenously generated. The importance of the uncovered set as a solution concept naturally motivates interest in its size and properties. Miller has demonstrated, in the case of tournaments, that the uncovered set coincides with the core, when a core exists. He has conjectured that the uncovered set is generally