Gregory Shufeldt

Two Distinct Concepts Party Competition in Government and Electoral Competition in the American States

American state politics scholars have generally relied on Ranney’s measure of the partisan composition of state legislatures and governors’ offices to evaluate competition between parties for control of state government, and Holbrook and Van Dunk’s measure of the competitiveness of individual state legislative elections to evaluate the degree of electoral competition in a state. Both measure “competition” and were previously correlated with one another, so researchers might be tempted to consider them two measures of the same concept. This would be mistaken, however, because they are measuring two distinct concepts. We use new data on state legislative partisan balance and election returns to compute (and make publicly available) the two measures of competition from 1970 to 2003, a time span that is significantly longer than any previous study. We show that the relationship between the two measures has drastically changed over the last 30 years. Although the two measures were positively correlated in the 1970s and 1980s, they are now (as we might expect, given they are different concepts) negatively correlated. We investigate one possible explanation for this change and conclude by discussing a set of practical recommendations for scholars who plan to incorporate a measure of competition in future studies.

State Party Competition and Citizens’ Political Engagement

Abstract Is living in a politically competitive state beneficial for democratic citizenship? Given citizens’ generally limited information about state politics, we argue that the most effective method of evaluating this question is by examining the degree to which the two parties generally compete for control of state government. Using data on citizens’ political attitudes and participation from the American National Election Studies and the Ranney measure of state party competition, we investigate the relationship between state party competition and citizen engagement from 1952 to 2008. Our analysis reveals that citizens report more interest in politics and participate at higher rates when there is greater competition between the two parties in their state. We also find that the relationship between competition and engagement has varied over time and that it is the strongest among citizens with lower levels of education and income. These findings suggest that vigorous competition for control of state government has important implications for citizens’ political engagement and, ultimately, the quality of democracy in the American states.

Party–Group Ambivalence and Voter Loyalty: Results From Three Experiments:

Renewed emphasis on the group-based nature of political parties makes understanding the relationship between partisan and group identities essential. How do citizens respond to the internal disconnect between their partisan identity and their other politically salient identities? In addition, do differences in the group-based nature of each party lead to asymmetric effects of party–group ambivalence? Using data from an original survey experiment across three samples—the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the 2012 Convention Delegate Study, and a 2015 sample from Amazon Mechanical Turk—I find that party–group ambivalence diminishes party loyalty, making respondents less likely to vote for, contribute to, or volunteer for their political party’s candidate. Moreover, the strength of this impact is consistently larger among Republican identifiers than Democratic identifiers. These results suggest that party asymmetry in party coalitions may have an impact on party loyalty.

Labor Union Membership and Life Satisfaction in the United States

While a voluminous literature examines the effects of organized labor on workers’ wage and benefit levels in the United States, there has been little investigation into whether membership in a labor union directly contributes to a higher quality of life. In this paper, we uncover evidence that union members are more satisfied with their lives than those who are not members and that the substantive effect of union membership on life satisfaction rivals other common predictors of quality of life. Moreover, we find that union membership boosts life satisfaction across demographic groups regardless if someone is rich or poor, male or female, or young or old. These results suggest that organized labor in the United States can have significant implications for the quality of life that citizens experience.

Comparing Two Measures of Electoral Integrity in the American States

We compare two widely publicized measures of state electoral integrity in the United States: the Electoral Integrity Project’s 2016 U.S. Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Survey and the Pew 2014 Elections Performance Index. First, we review the theoretical and empirical differences between the two measures and find that they correlate at a surprisingly low level across the states. Second, given this low correlation, we examine the component parts of these indices and find that both are capturing multiple dimensions. Third, we examine how the components and the individual indicators that comprise each measure are linked to citizens’ stated perceptions about electoral integrity. Throughout the article, we articulate a set of preemptive recommendations that urge researchers to be cautious and deliberate when choosing among measures of electoral integrity to use in future empirical studies.

The State of the Minimum Wage: Federalism, Economic Policy, and Workers’ Well-Being

Abstract In this essay, we contribute to the growing national discussion about the future of minimum wage policy and its implications for working class Americans. First, we discuss the politics of the minimum wage in the United States, with special attention to the sizable and rich variation across the fifty American states and the importance of federalism. Second, we examine competing theoretical arguments (and, when available, empirical evidence) about the advantages and the disadvantages of increasing the minimum wage, particularly as it pertains to workers’ well-being. Third, as a case study of the potential effects of raising the minimum wage, we present preliminary results from an original empirical analysis that assesses how state minimum wage increases impact the quality of life that working class citizens experience.