George A. Krause

The Republicans Should Pray for Rain: Weather, Turnout, and Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections

The relationship between bad weather and lower levels of voter turnout is widely espoused by media, political practitioners, and, perhaps, even political scientists. Yet, there is virtually no solid empirical evidence linking weather to voter participation. This paper provides an extensive test of the claim. We examine the effect of weather on voter turnout in 14 U.S. presidential elections. Using GIS interpolations, we employ meteorological data drawn from over 22,000 U.S. weather stations to provide election day estimates of rain and snow for each U.S. county. We find that, when compared to normal conditions, rain significantly reduces voter participation by a rate of just less than 1% per inch, while an inch of snowfall decreases turnout by almost .5%. Poor weather is also shown to benefit the Republican partys vote share. Indeed, the weather may have contributed to two Electoral College outcomes, the 1960 and 2000 presidential elections.

The Institutional Dynamics of Policy Administration: Bureaucratic Influence over Securities Regulation

Theory: A dynamic systems model of administrative politics that (1) relaxes restrictive causal assumptions among the president, Congress, and an administrative agency, (2) emphasizes aggregate institutional behavior, and (3) analyzes both anticipated and unanticipated policy behavior is set forth as a more general means to investigate agency-political relationships. Hypotheses: The main set of hypotheses focus on the aggregate institutional relationships among the president, Congress, and administrative agency. These four possible hypotheses include bureaucratic influence, bureaucratic autonomy, mutual influence, and political influence. The purpose here is to assess the relative merits of competing explanations for bureaucratic behavior. Securities regulation is a perfect area of inquiry to investigate these competing perspectives since the findings of existing research on this topic are disparate. Methods: Vector autoregressive time series statistical methods are used to empirically test the dynamic systems model of administrative politics by examining three empirical models of SEC enforcement behavior in relation to presidential and congressional budgetary preference signals for the 1949-92 annual period. Results: The SEC sends potent signals of their own (via their changes in regulatory outputs) that will affect the budgetary preferences of its political principles. However, the SECs administrative outputs are shown to be somewhat less sensitive to political budgetary preference signals than what one would expect. Presidential and congressional budgetary preference signals (with respect to the SEC) are interdependent to a sizeable extent, thus raising doubts about the separate, independent effect democratic institutions have over the bureaucracy. The implications of this study suggest that conventional theories of agency-political relations serve as an oversimplified way to study administrative behavior. Future research on this topic

Opportunity, Constraints, and the Development of the Institutional Presidency: The Issuance of Executive Orders, 1939-96

A central question in the study of executive politics concerns whether presidents behave in an idiopathic, opportunistic fashion reflecting individual differences across administrations, or whether presidents behave as institutional actors who are constrained by external forces that occur across administrations. We argue that development of the institutional presidency is an important consideration in understanding presidential behavior. We maintain that presidents will behave consistent with the opportunistic model during the developmental phase of the institutional presidency, while they will act compatibly with the constraint model once the institution has fully matured. Using data on executive orders for the 1939-96 sample period, both event count regression techniques and model selection criteria are employed to test our theory. The statistical evidence supports our claim that each theory has empirical merit, depending upon the stage of the institutional presidency under investigation.

Federal Reserve Policy Decision Making: Political and Bureaucratic Influences

While a significant body of literature in the field of bureaucratic politics has developed recently focusing on the principal-agent relationship and its effect on policy outputs, there has been very little research exploring the foundations of decision making in multiagent bureaucracies. This paper sets forth a general theoretical framework for analyzing the nature of consensual decision making in multiagent bureaucratic agencies while allowing for agents with different contractual principals. This paper explores the consensual nature of decision making for these bodies by examining the patterns of dissent in the Federal Reserve Systems Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) from January 1967 to December 1990. The findings of this study reveal that internal authorities (e.g., Fed chairs) have a greater impact than external authorities (e.g., presidential administrations) because of the high levels of institutional expertise, leadership, cohesion, loyalty, and the socialization process that exists within the bureaucratic agency. Also, in the case of external authorities, these results strongly suggest that contractual principals have a greater impact on consensual decision making than noncontractual principals.

Power Shift: Measuring Policy Centralization in U.S. Intergovernmental Relations, 1947-1998

Much extant research on the distribution of power in the American federal system is drawn from qualitative case studies of particular acts of government. This often limits the empirical testing of generalizable hypotheses. To address this shortcoming, we develop an aggregate time series measure of policy centralization by the U.S. federal government for the 1947-1998 annual period utilizing relevant public laws and executive orders. On a substantive level, the data provide quantitative information regarding the willingness of the national government to delegate policymaking responsibility to state governments. This, in turn, can be used to assess the distribution of powers between governmental levels—a subject that has received little systematic inquiry to date. These measures indicate that although U.S. national government policymaking authority has risen in an overall sense during the postwar period vis-à-vis subnational counterparts, it has not grown monotonically over time. Contrary to existing descriptive accounts, the data also show that neither Nixon nor Reagan’s New Federalism initiatives intended to delegate or decentralize policymaking authority to subnational governments have succeeded in igniting systemic, persistent devolution in American federalism.

Explaining Bureaucratic Optimism: Theory and Evidence from U.S. Executive Agency Macroeconomic Forecasts

We offer a theory of intertemporal bureaucratic decision making which proposes that an agencys forecast optimism is related to the extent to which it discounts future reputation costs associated with bureaucratic incompetence. Agency forecasts of the distant future are more likely to be optimistic than short-term forecasts. We claim that unstable organizations will discount reputation costs at a steeper rate than stable organizations, and therefore will produce more optimistic forecasts. We test our theory using macroeconomic forecasts produced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) across six forecast horizons from 1979 to 2003. The statistical results are generally consistent with our theory: OMB generates more optimistic long-term forecasts than SSA. Further, differences in forecast optimism between these executive branch agencies widen as the forecast horizon increases. Our evidence suggests that more stable agencies place a premium on minimizing reputation costs. Conversely, less stable agencies are more likely to accommodate political pressures for forecast optimism. These findings underscore the importance of institutional design for understanding how executive agencies balance the conflicting goals of political responsiveness and bureaucratic competence within the administrative state.

Coping with Uncertainty: Analyzing Risk Propensities of SEC Budgetary Decisions, 1949–97

Students of public organizations acknowledge that administrative agencies make decisions in an uncertain policy environment. Existing research on public bureaucracy either makes simplifying a priori assumptions about such behavior or completely ignores this fundamental issue. This study proposes a statistical test of agency risk-bearing behavior to shed light on bureaucratic decision making under conditions of uncertainty. An analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) agency budget requests for the 1949–97 period yields risk coefficients that are compatible with analytically derived results. The empirical findings indicate that the SEC exhibits relatively greater concern about organizational maintenance when the type of uncertainty that it experiences is external to the decision-making purview of the organization than when it is internal to the agency. However, mixed statistical evidence is obtained that the SEC places comparatively greater value on organizational maintenance, as reflected in its budgetary decisions, during an era of greater political instability induced by divided party government than under unified government.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the 1999 Public Choice Society, March 12–14, 1999, Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana. The author wishes to thank Janice Boucher Breuer, Charles Cameron, Brandice Canes–Wrone, Dan Carpenter, Jeffrey Cohen, Stephen Dilworth, Jim Douglas, David Epstein, Brad Gomez, Chris Kam, David Lewis, Ken Meier, Tom Romer, Andy Whitford, B. Dan Wood, LeeAnne Krause, and seminar participants at Columbia University and the University of South Carolina, and the anonymous APSR reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments at various stages of this project. I thank Tim Groseclose and Dan Ponder for providing some of the ADA voting score data used in this paper. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Sherry Ann Krause. Any errors that remain are my own.

The diversity paradox : political parties, legislatures, and the organizational foundations of representation in America

Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1: Diversity Dilemmas in Democratic Representation Chapter 2: Internal Valuation in Political Organizations: Political Parties and Gender-Based Group Dynamics in the U.S. House of Representatives Chapter 3: A Unified Theory of Colleague Valuation in Political Organizations Chapter 4: Testing the Unified Theory of Colleague Valuation in the U.S. House of Representatives Chapter 5: Coordination Dilemmas and the Critical Mass Problem: Differentiating Colleague Valuation Between Incumbents and Challengers in the U.S. Senate Chapter 6: Can Organizational Mechanisms Solve Minority Group Coordination Problems? Logic, Lessons, and Evidence from Legislative Caucuses in the American States Chapter 7: The Organizational Foundations of Democratic Representation References

Electoral Incentives, Political Business Cycles and Macroeconomic Performance: Empirical Evidence from Post-War US Personal Income Growth

Conventional wisdom suggests that macroeconomic outcomes do not follow a political business cycle (PBC) pattern. In this study, the nature of the electoral underpinnings of such opportunistic behaviour are investigated by analysing alternative formulations of PBC theory: (1) a naA¯ve-unconditional PBC, (2) an electoral security-conditional PBC, (3) an electoral uncertainty-conditional PBC; and (4) a partisan-conditional PBC. Data on the US real personal income growth rate for the 1948:1–2000:4 quarterly period reveals support for both naA¯ve-unconditional and partisan-conditional PBCs, yet rejects an electoral cycle attributable to the incumbent administrations ex ante re-election prospects. Simulation analysis reveals that while Democratic administrations enjoy higher income growth than Republican counterparts for non pre-election stimulus periods, Republican presidents are associated with larger pre-election economic expansions than Democratic presidents consistent with a partisan-conditional PBC theoretical model. This finding supports the notion that incumbent governments engage in partisan-based policy balancing with respect to the creation of opportunistic electoral cycles in real macroeconomic activity. On a broader level, these statistical findings provide strong support for adaptive models of the electoral cycle that emphasize partisan differences while refuting the policy neutrality proposition and rational-competence models predicated on the extent to which an incumbent administration experiences electoral vulnerability.

Separated Powers and Institutional Growth in the Presidential and Congressional Branches: Distinguishing between Short-Run versus Long-Run Dynamics

A central feature of the modern presidential and congressional branches has been its institutional development. Growth in the presidential and legislative branches reflect distinct short-run and long-run dynamics. In the former case, Presidents exhibit greater responsiveness to congressional branch efforts than vice versa. However, in the long run a steadystate equilibrium exists, whereby the Presidency cannot permanently exploit Congress. This proposition is empirically tested by applying a Vector Error Correction Mechanism (VECM) statistical modeling approach to analyze constant dollar-branch expenditure data for the 1939-1997 period. The empirical evidence shows that an “opportunistic Presidency” prevails in the short run; in the long run; however, considerable evidence is obtained in favor of an institutional equilibrium consistent with the “iron law of emulation” thesis. On a more general theoretical level, these findings make the novel point that a critical distinction must be made between short-run and long-run dynamics when assessing institutional relationships involving the Presidency and Congress.