J. Mark Wrighton

Expressions of Distrust: Third-Party Voting and Cynicism in Government

Voter distrust of the national government is an ongoing theoretical concern for scholars who study voting behavior in the United States. Previous research demonstrates that distrustful voters are less likely to vote for major party candidates than their more trusting counterparts. Using the American National Election Survey, we explore the relationship between citizen distrust and voting for three major third-party challengers (Wallace, Anderson, and Perot) and the use of trust levels as predictors of third- party voting. We find citizen trust levels are significant and strong predictors of third-party voting, independent of other common explanatory variables of vote choice. We also find trust levels are stable over time, and we find little evidence to support the argument that trust levels measure trust of incumbent political figures.

Campaigns and Political Marketing in Political Science Context

Wayne P. Steger, PhD, is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, DePaul University, 990 West Fullerton, Suite 2200, Chicago, IL 60614 (E-mail: wsteger@ depaul.edu). Sean Q Kelly, PhD, is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Timon Hall, Room #11, Niagara University, Niagara, NY 14109 (E-mail: sqkelly@niagara.edu). J. Mark Wrighton, PhD, is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, 321 Horton Social Science Center, Department of Political Science, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824 (E-mail: Mark.Wrighton@unh.edu).

A Test of Ideological Bias in House Subcommittees, 1979-2000

Committees play a pivotal role in the legislative process. Since the mid-1970s, subcommittees have been important in the lawmaking process as well. Given this enhanced performance, the membership of subcommittees can be a key element in the direction that the legislative process takes. In this article, we develop and test a set of expectations regarding the ideological makeup of subcommittees. Resting firmly on the shoulders of Cox and McCubbins (1993), we assert that those subcommittees with particularized interests will possess memberships which are ideologically distinguishable from their parent committees, while those that affect a wider range of interests will have contingents ideologically indistinguishable from their parent committees. Employing a Monte Carlo simulation technique on ideological composition data of members of subcommittees of the House Appropriations and Ways and Means Committees from the 96th to 106th Congresses, we expect to find that the occurrence of subcommittee outliers are generally consistent (with some notable exceptions) in their direction over time. Additionally, we test the hypothesis that there were no significant changes in the mix of subcommittee outliers from the 103rd to the 104th Congresses and beyond. We find that the change in partisan control of the House resulted in few shifts in outliers.