John M. Bruce

Party Balancing and Voting for Congress in the 1996 National Election

We extend Fiorinas balancing theory by developing and testing inferences from a simple and general spatial model of partisan preference in two institutional dimensions. This model contains a number of theoretical and methodological insights that have not yet been articulated in the growing literature on the origins of divided government. We focus here on the models most basic implications, emphasizing first that the act of party balancing requires that voters have nonseparable partisan preferences across the electoral arenas of U.S. government. We show how it follows that the institution-specific partisan preferences of balancers are not defined on the metric that contains the partisan preferences of nonbalancers. We examine the empirical relevance of this result by estimating a variety of statistical models of congressional voting preference. Analysis proceeds in two directions, first with illustrations of a changepoint (and a resultant heteroskedastic error variance) problem in simple models of voter choice and then with results from more elaborate model specifications. The evidence weighs heavily in favor of the empirical relevance of party balancing in the 1996 congressional election. We conclude by pointing to a number of theoretical and methodological issues that merit further attention in future research on balancing.

I'd Rather Switch than Fight: Lifelong Democrats and Converts to Republicanism among Campaign Activists

Analysis of a survey of 1988 presidential campaign activists revealed that one-third of the Republican activists at one time thought of themselves as Democrats. Drawing on the mass realignment literature, the duration, movement, and motivation of this elite realignment were examined. A multivariate probit model was developed to analyze party switching that combines demographic, political, and attitudinal motivations. Ideology, parents political activity, and age were found to be statistically significant influences on the decision to switch parties. We then explored patterns of Republican-to-Democrat switching using bivariate analysis. The article concludes by discussing some implications of party switching for the American party system.

Political Parties in State and Nation Party Advantage and Party Competition in a Federal Setting

Research on party competition in the United States suffers because existing measures do not allow for an examination of national-level competition in the states. We view this as a significant oversight, and argue that party competition in the United States must be evaluated within a federal context. Toward that end, we develop measures of partisan electoral advantage and competition based on margin of victory in state and national offices for the legislature and executive. These measures allow us to examine, for the first time, patterns of competition for both state and national offices within and across the states. The patterns seen in the data are interesting and preliminary insights promising. We believe the measure developed here will permit a more expansive and theoretically interesting examination of party competition, and that these descriptive analyses point to a wide variety of interesting future pursuits.

The Science of Political Science Graduate Admissions

As political scientists, we spend much time teaching and doing scholarly research, and more time than we may wish to remember on university committees. However, just as many of us believe that teaching and research are not fundamentally different activities, we also need not use fundamentally different standards of inference when studying government, policy, and politics than when participating in the governance of departments and universities. In this article, we describe our attempts to bring somewhat more systematic methods to the process and policies of graduate admissions.

Partisan-Ideological Divergence and Changing Party Fortunes in the States, 1968—2003 A Federal Perspective

We expand on previous literature on party competition in the American states by examining competition for both state and national offices. We find significant differences in Democratic Party electoral advantage within states, along with across-state variation in changes in these differences over time. We attribute these results to movement in the partisanship and ideology of the states citizenry. As consistency in these core political attitudes increases, parties are able to campaign and govern on messages that are more consistent across electoral levels. The result is greater consistency in party electoral performance across state and national offices.

Segmented Partisanship in a Southern Political Elite

Segmented partisanship combines the traditional conceptualization of party identification with the reality of different parties operating in different locales. Using a sample of campaign contributors in Georgia legislative elections, we analyze the importance of segmented partisanship by comparing the behavior and attitudes of segmented partisans to those with consistent party identifications. Segmented partisans are generally less active and less ideologically extreme than their consistent counterparts, with the differences across the groups varying with the salience of the appropriate state or national reference group. The net effect of segmented partisanship is to moderate the issue conflict between parties as some citizens seek the best fitting partisan identification.