Jamie L. Carson

Candidate Quality, the Personal Vote, and the Incumbency Advantage in Congress

Most political observers agree that incumbent legislators have a considerable advantage over nonincumbents in modern congressional elections. Yet there is still disagreement over the exact source of this advantage and the explanation for its growth over time. To address this debate we utilize a unique set of historical elections data to test for the presence of an incumbency advantage in late-nineteenth-century House elections (1872–1900). We find a modest direct effect of incumbency and a substantial candidate quality effect. Moreover, the cartel-like control of ballot access by nineteenth century political parties created competition in races that the modern market-like system simply does not sustain. Our results suggest that candidate quality is a fundamental piece of the puzzle in understanding the historical development of the incumbency advantage in American politics.

Redistricting and Party Polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives

The elevated levels of party polarization observed in the contemporary Congress have been attributed to a variety of factors. One of the more commonly recurring themes among observers of congressional politics is that changes in district boundaries resulting from the redistricting process are a root cause. Using a new data set linking congressional districts from 1962 to 2002, we offer a direct test of this claim. Our results show that although there is an overall trend of increasing polarization, districts that have undergone significant changes as a result of redistricting have become even more polarized. Although the effect is relatively modest, it suggests that redistricting is one among other factors that produce party polarization in the House and may help to explain the elevated levels of polarization in the House relative to the Senate.

Position-Taking and Electoral Accountability in the U.S. House of Representatives:

While past research has offered some initial evidence linking patterns of position-taking behavior with incumbents’ electoral fortunes, we are left without a comprehensive study that informs us whether individual roll-call votes can be electorally consequential and lends insight into the conditions under which position-taking on roll calls may yield electoral implications. This article takes a step toward filling that void by examining the electoral implications of hundreds of House roll calls since the early 1970s. We find that, after controlling for the usual factors, a wide range of individual roll-call decisions have significant effects on incumbents’ electoral margins. We also find that the extent to which a particular roll call is controversial, salient, and a catalyst for intra-party disagreement affects whether it has electoral implications. In sum, our analysis addresses longstanding questions regarding how and when legislators are rewarded or punished at the polls for their behavior in Congress.

Parties as Procedural Coalitions in Congress: An Examination of Differing Career Tracks

We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predictions from the party cartel theory (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994, 2002). We gain leverage on the question of party influence in Congress by focusing on three types of House members: reelection seekers, higher-office seekers, and retiring members. We argue that retiring House members are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect means (when compared to higher-office seekers and reelection seekers) to determine the existence of party influence. Results from a pooled, cross-sectional analysis of the 94th through 105th Congresses (1975–98) suggest that party influence is indeed present in Congress, especially where the party cartel theory predicts: on procedural, rather than final-passage, votes. Moreover, we find that procedural party influence is almost exclusively the domain of the majority party. This latter finding is especially important because most prior studies have been limited to investigating interparty influence only.

The Effect of State Redistricting Methods on Electoral Competition in United States House of Representatives Races

Legislative redistricting in the states is highly contentious due, at least in part, to its partisan implications. But does the method by which states draw legislative districts affect partisan competition in the elections that are held in these districts? We examine the effects of three methods used by states to draw district boundaries on competition in congressional elections. Specifically, we evaluate the effects on competition of legislative, judicial, and commission redistricting plans enacted prior to the 1992 and 2002 congressional elections. We find that more competitive elections occur when courts and commissions are directly involved in the redistricting process, as opposed to when redistricting is handled only in the state legislative process.

Strategic Politicians and U.S. House Elections, 1874–1914

One of the most fundamental changes in post-World War II congressional elections has been the rise of candidate-centered campaigns. This phenomenon has given rise to considerable theoretical and empirical literature demonstrating the strategic behavior of congressional candidates. Yet very few scholars have assessed the effect or existence of strategic candidate behavior for the pre-World War II era. We seek to fill part of this void by exploring the extent to which experienced or quality candidates played a role in influencing the electoral fortunes of incumbent House members in elections spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our findings suggest that in terms of strategic emergence and electoral performance, congressional candidates exhibited patterns of behavior which are strikingly similar to those seen in modern-day campaigns, suggesting that individual ambition is the best explanation for candidate behavior in both eras.

Unpacking Agenda Control in Congress: Individual Roll Rates and the Republican Revolution

The twelve years following the Republican revolution provide ideal ground to test existing theories of congressional behavior and organization. The authors examine the incidence of individual roll rates in the U.S. House to “unpack” the degree to which the 1994 election produced a change in agenda control and examine how it affected roll rates. Then, to understand differences in agenda control, we compare majority and minority party roll rates before and after the election. The results confirm majority party influence over the House agenda and show that the Republican leadership exhibited remarkably similar behavior to the Democrats prior to 1995.

Coalition Formation in the House and Senate: Examining the Effect of Institutional Change on Major Legislation

We investigate various theories of legislative coalition formation in a bicameral context. More specifically, we employ a quasi-experimental design to examine the size of coalitions in both the House and Senate across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This offers us considerable analytical leverage in investigating how changes in key institutional decision rules (the adoption of the Reed’s Rules in the House and the passage of cloture in the Senate) affect the likelihood of passing major policy reform. Our findings indicate that when the size of the majority party is adequately controlled for, changes in institutional structures do not have a significant effect on cross-chamber coalition formation.

Partisanship, Consensus, and Committee-Floor Divergence A Comparison of Member Behavior in the 96th and 104th Congresses

Although some studies of Congress have employed aggregate-level ideological measures to characterize the outlier tendencies of congressional committees, such measures cannot reveal intracommittee variation in the propensity for disagreement between committees and the floor. In this analysis, we examine differences in voting behavior between members of the committee to which bills were initially referred and the House in the 96th and 104th Congresses. We demonstrate that significant variation occurs both within and among committees, and divergence is at times quite high among some committees not traditionally considered outliers. In the multivariate analysis, we discover that many vote-level factors significantly influence the degree of committee-floor divergence, and a considerable range of variation is evident in the level of divergence across committees. We also find that the number of committees exhibiting divergent behavior, the degree of this divergence, and the breakdown between the parties differs dramatically between the two periods.

Consensus, Conflict, and Partisanship in House Decision Making: A Bill-Level Examination of Committee and Floor Behavior

Although conflict and partisanship are deeply entrenched in the publics view of the U.S. Congress, political scientists have noted that consensus characterizes much of the legislative branchs operations. We build on an expanding literature that moves beyond a focus on roll call voting and explore individual bills as the unit of analysis in an attempt to obtain an accurate picture of the broader context in which House decision making occurs. Drawing on evidence spanning 24 years, we document the extent to which consensus rather than conflict typifies House decision making. Our bill-level analysis facilitates a unique examination of the context in which committees operate as well as the ensuing floor environment. The results provide insight into the factors attending to the degree of consensus and conflict associated with bills—particularly the salience of the issue and the committee of origin—while painting a more complete picture of the day-to-day environment of the U.S. House.