James M. Snyder

Political Parties and the Distribution of federal Outlays

Theory: Several models of distributive politics predict a role for parties in determining the allocation of federal outlays. Hypotheses: The number of Democratic voters will be positively correlated with federal outlays, even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables. The degree to which a program will be skewed to Democrats will be a function of the amount of variation in program benefits across districts, whether the program is administered by formula, and the extent of one-party control when the program is initiated. Methods: Regression analysis of district-level data on election outcomes and federal assistance programs for the period 1984-90. Results: The number of Democratic voters is an important predictor of the amount of federal dollars flowing to a district. Programs with a greater amount of variation across districts are more heavily skewed to Democrats, as are programs administered by formula. Programs initiated in the latter half of the 1970s, a time of solid Democratic control, exhibit the greatest bias towards Democrats; programs started in the Reagan era show no such bias. Our results are consistent with a model in which parties in the United States play an important, but limited role in determining the distribution of federal dollars: given enough time, parties can target types of voters, but they cannot easily target specific districts.

Estimating Party Influence in Congressional Roll-Call Voting

This article develops and implements a simple procedure to estimate the extent to which party influences roll-call voting in the U.S. Congress. We find strong evidence of party influence in both the House and the Senate, in virtually all congresses over the period 1871-1998. We do not find any large, systematic differences in influence between the House and Senate. Over the post-war period, party influence in the House occurs especially often on key procedural votes-the rule on a bill, motions to cut off debate, and motions to recommit. In terms of substantive issues, party influence appears most frequently on budget resolutions, tax policy, social security, social welfare policy, and the national debt limit, while it is relatively rare on moral and religious issues and civil rights, and entirely absent on issues such as gun control. On some issues, such as agriculture, public works, and nuclear energy, party influence has varied dramatically over the period we study.

The Impact of Federal Spending on House Election Outcomes

While it is widely believed by academics, politicians, and the popular press that incumbent members of Congress are rewarded by the electorate for bringing federal dollars to their district, the empirical evidence supporting that claim is extremely weak. One explanation for the failure to uncover the expected relationship between federal spending and election outcomes is that incumbents who expect to have difficulty being reelected are likely to exert greater effort in obtaining federal outlays. Since it is generally impossible to adequately measure this effort, the estimated impact of spending is biased downward because of an omitted variable bias. We address this estimation problem using instrumental variables. For each House district, we use spending outside the district but inside the state containing the district as an instrument for spending in the district. Federal spending is affected by a large number of actors (e.g., governors, senators, mayors, and other House members in the state delegation), leading to positive correlations in federal spending across the House districts within states. However, federal spending outside of a district is unlikely to be strongly correlated with the strength of that districts electoral challenge. In contrast to previous studies, we find strong evidence that federal spending benefits congressional incumbents: an additional

Comparing Interest Group Scores across Time and Chambers: Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress

100 per capita in spending is worth as much as 2 percent of the popular vote. The only category of federal spending that does not appear to yield electoral rewards is direct transfers to individuals.

Valence Politics and Equilibrium in Spatial Election Models

Interest group ratings are widely used in studies of legislative behavior. Since the set of votes used is not constant over time and across chambers, the scales underlying the scores can shift and stretch. We introduce an econometric model that corrects the problem. Specifically, we derive an index, much like an inflation index for consumer prices, that allows one to make intertemporal and interchamber comparisons of interest group ratings. The adjusted scores for the ADA show a strong liberal trend in the average member of Congress during 1947–94, followed by a conservative reversal. A nonparametric test using ADA and ACU scores demonstrates the validity of adjusted scores and the invalidity of nominal scores for intertemporal and interchamber comparisons. Using two studies (Levitt 1996; Shipan and Lowry 1997) we illustrate that the choice of adjusted versus nominal scores may greatly affect substantive conclusions of researchers.

The Strength of Issues: Using Multiple Measures to Gauge Preference Stability, Ideological Constraint, and Issue Voting

Spatial models of two-party or two-candidatecompetition almost never have pure-strategy Nashequilibria when the issue space has more than onedimension. This paper shows that the introduction ofvalence issues can create conditions where equilibriaexist, even in a multidimensional setting. We derivesufficient conditions for the existence of equilibria,and characterize the spatial locations of twocompeting parties or candidates when such equilibriaexist. The party with the advantage on the valencedimension will generally take a moderate position onthe positional issues. We consider the implications ofthese results for public perceptions of the parties,incumbency advantages, and realigning elections.

The Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Elections: An Analysis of State and Federal Offices, 1942–2000

A venerable supposition of American survey research is that the vast majority of voters have incoherent and unstable preferences about political issues, which in turn have little impact on vote choice. We demonstrate that these findings are manifestations of measurement error associated with individual survey items. First, we show that averaging a large number of survey items on the same broadly defined issue area—for example, government involvement in the economy, or moral issues—eliminates a large amount of measurement error and reveals issue preferences that are well structured and stable. This stability increases steadily as the number of survey items increases and can approach that of party identification. Second, we show that once measurement error has been reduced through the use of multiple measures, issue preferences have much greater explanatory power in models of presidential vote choice, again approaching that of party identification.

Long-Term Investing in Politicians; Or, Give Early, Give Often

Rising incumbency advantages in U.S. House elections have prompted a wave of new electoral laws, ranging from campaign nance regulations to term limits. We test a central claim for these reforms { that the incumbency advantage re°ects the collective irresponsibility inherent in legislatures. We study incumbency advantages for all state executive elections from 1942 to 2000 and contrast that with incumbency advantages in state and federal legislative elections. We nd that incumbency advantages for state executives and for legislators are similar in magnitude and have grown at the same rate over the last 60 years. If anything legislators have lower incumbency advantages than state executives. This nding reveals that the incumbency advantage is not unique to legislatures and that theories of incumbency advantages based on redistricting, legislative irresponsibility, pork barrel politics, and other features of legislatures do not explain the incumbency advantage. Some time in the late 1960s, congressional scholars began to note the increasing vote margins of U.S. House incumbents. By the mid-1970s a full-blown debate about the magnitude and sources of the incumbency advantage in US House elections had emerged. The list of potential causes is many { redistricting, congressional-bureaucratic relations, pork barrel spending, campaign nances, and declining party attachments. Broadly speaking, the debate over the sources of the incumbency advantage points either to factors that are distinctive to legislative politics, such as pork barrel politics and redistricting, or to factors that likely a®ected all o±ces, most notably the decline of party attachments or the growth of government generally. The conventional wisdom holds that legislative incumbents have uniquely high electoral advantages for two reasons. The rst is that many things that are thought to a®ect reelection rates are unique to legislatures. The most important of these are redistricting and seniority. Cox and Katz (2002) argue that the redistricting revolution caused the rise of incumbency advantages after the 1960s, because district lines can now be drawn to prevent competition. McKelvey and Reizman (1992) argue that seniority systems create a disincentive for voters to select someone else. Power within the legislature is tied to seniority, and as a legislator climbs the seniority rank the voters that legislator represents will bene t. Because all incumbents have some seniority no voters want to turn out their incumbent in the place of a new person, who will be the lowest ranked legislator. A second reason that legislators are thought to have especially large incumbency advantages is the lack of collective responsibility. Executives are held accountable for the broad performance of their agencies. Governors are responsible for economic performance; attorneys general, for crime; and so forth. Executives are also accountable for their actions: an executive decision is the decision of the individual politician. Legislatures, by contrast, are collective bodies. It is hard to know who in the legislature is responsible for a weak economy or a high crime rate. Party leaders can also coordinate legislators so that an individual legislator does not have to cast a vote that is particularly unpopular in the individuals

Legislative bargaining under weighted voting

THE political history of the United States is filled with stories about the power of money in shaping public decisions, and concern about this power is a frequent cause for public debate and an occasional cause for public legislation. Nonetheless, despite years of research by political scientists and economists, the extent to which money actually buys political influence on a regular basis remains a mystery. Virtually all scholarly work attempting to document a systematic effect of money on public decisions focuses on the relationship between campaign contributions-especially Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions-and congressmens roll-call voting behavior.1 Overall, the

Artificial Extremism In Interest Group Ratings

Organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting. We analyze this setting using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model. Unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory, we find that each voters expected payoff is proportional to her voting weight. An exception occurs when many high-weight voters exist, as low-weight voters may expect disproportionately high payoffs due to proposal power. The model also predicts that, ex post, the coalition formateur (the party chosen to form a coalition) will receive a disproportionately high payoff. Using data from coalition governments from 1946 to 2001, we find strong evidence of such formateur effects.