Jonathan Woon

Made in Congress? Testing the Electoral Implications of Party Ideological Brand Names

We investigate the connection between legislative parties and election outcomes, focusing on ideological party brand names that inform voters. If the source of information conveyed by brand names is the partys aggregate roll-call record, then changes in legislative party membership should influence election returns. We formalize the argument with an expected utility model of voting and derive district-level hypotheses, which we test on U.S. House elections from 1952 to 2000. We test alternative specifications that vary with respect to the specificity of voter information and find that party positions and heterogeneity both affect vote share independently of incumbents’ positions. The results provide modest support for the expected utility model but nevertheless suggest that Congress is an important source of the publics beliefs about the parties, and this effect is clearest for challengers, rather than incumbents, who run under the partys label.

Measuring Changes in American Party Reputations, 1939-2004

Scholars increasingly emphasize that party reputations are valuable electoral assets. The authors measure temporal change in the parties’ relative reputations across several distinct policy areas and find that each party tends to have advantages on certain issues but that the patterns are far from permanent. Democrats have strong advantages on social welfare issues, but Republicans have made some gains. Republican advantages on taxes and “law and order” have been weaker. The authors also find that party competition has strengthened impressions of the parties. Results support the notion that parties carry a collective—if occasionally transitory—reputation on a host of issues.

Testing Theories of Lawmaking

Tests of formal models of legislative politics have become increasingly common, and have tended to draw confident and positive inferences about focal theories. This is not a particularly satisfactory development, however, inasmuch as the supposedly supported theories are quite different from one another, and the tests that generate the support tend overwhelmingly to focus on one theory rather than competing theories. We develop and employ a method of comparative theory-testing using estimates of cutpoints on final passage results. The findings are inconclusive in part because the theories, while substantively different, are often operationally nearly observationally equivalent.

Issue Attention and Legislative Proposals in the U.S. Senate

Legislative institutions play a central role in establishing the relative importance of numerous public concerns. Every two years, members of Congress introduce several thousand bills and collectively whittle these down to a few hundred public laws, elevating some issues while lowering others. The earliest stages of this process require legislators to shape policy alternatives through effort-intensive activities: gathering information, drafting bills, building coalitions, and keeping pace with the actions of various interests. Bauer, de Sola Pool, and Dexter emphasize the importance of the early stages of legislating compared to the final roll-call stage: The decisions most constantly on [a member’s] mind are not how to vote, but what to do with his time, how to allocate his resources, and where to put his energy. There are far more issues before Congress than he can possibly cope with. (1972, 405)

Lying aversion, lobbying, and context in a strategic communication experiment

Almost all institutions within modern democracies depend on a mix of communication and competition. However, most formal theory and experimental evidence ignores one of these two features. We present a formal theory of communicative competition in which senders vary in their aversion to lying, and test hypotheses from this theory using a strategic communication experiment. To influence lying aversion, we compare a Context Condition, in which pre-play instructions are cast in political language, with a Baseline Condition, in which all language is abstract. We find that in early rounds of play, subjects in the Context Condition exaggerated more as a function of their biases than those in the Baseline Condition when we control for the past history of play. However, by the last round of play, subjects in both conditions converged on persistent exaggeration. This finding indicates that competition crowds outlying aversion in settings of strategic communication.

Change We Can Believe In? Using Political Science to Predict Policy Change in the Obama Presidency

Based on the results of the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, an analysis using theories and methods of modern political science (pivotal politics theory, ideal point estimates, and bootstrap simulations) suggests that the conditions are ripe for real policy change. Specifically, we should expect policies to move significantly in a liberal direction, few or no policies should move in a conservative direction, and many of the outcomes will be moderate or somewhat to the left of center (rather than far left). Furthermore, the predictions depend as much on partisan polarization and the results of the congressional election as they do on the outcome of presidential election itself.

Laboratory Tests of Formal Theory and Behavioral Inference

Political scientists seek to answer questions about political behavior, institutions and outcomes. Why do (or do not) people cooperate to achieve common goals? To what extent do elections induce politicians to follow the wishes of the public? Why is government unable to enact new laws demanded by popular majorities? At the most general level, the method of advancing scientific knowledge of politics involves developing theories and testing their predictions. Theories are often expressed in terms of models that are purposeful, abstract simplifications of the real world, and formal theory involves a set of concepts and methods for systematically constructing and analyzing mathematical models.

Delaying the Buck: Timing and Strategic Advantages in Executive-Legislative Bargaining over Appropriations

Delay is a common feature of appropriations politics. Although members of Congress and the president often decry lengthy delays in the passage of appropriations bills, we investigate whether such delays might confer strategic advantages, and if so, to whom. We draw from bargaining theory to understand how the relationship between the duration of negotiations and outcomes depends on the underlying distribution of bargaining power and the nature of the bargaining process. In our empirical analysis, we find that delay is associated with greater concessions to the president, but not with more extreme outcomes. We also find that the House and Senate concede more to presidents who prefer less spending, while the Senate is more responsive to presidential needs during presidential election years. These results suggest that the presidents power comes from the asymmetry of veto and proposal rights, rather than from symmetric bargaining with proposals and counterproposals or a “war of nerves.”

How Hard to Fight? Cross-Player Effects and Strategic Sophistication in an Asymmetric Contest Experiment

Many political phenomena—from wars to elections and lobbying—involve winner-take-all contests in which the value of the prize differs across the actors involved and from one issue to the next. To better understand competitive behavior in such environments, we conduct a controlled laboratory experiment in which participants face a series of asymmetric prize values in a lottery contest game. We find support for some, but not all, of the game’s comparative static predictions. Most subjects respond to changes in their own values, but few subjects conditionally respond to cross-player changes. We also administer two information-based treatments—feedback and a calculator—finding that feedback on past play has a stronger effect on decreasing socially wasteful effort than a payoff calculator. Our data suggest a new type of heterogeneity in the degree of strategic sophistication, one that differs from the existing models of iterated reasoning.

The Macro-dynamics of Partisan Advantage

How do party reputations change over time? We construct a measure of the common movement in the parties’ perceived policy handling abilities for the period 1980 to 2016 and investigate its relationship with the public’s evaluation of Congress and the president. In contrast to key claims made in theories of congressional parties, we find an inconsistent relationship between evaluations of Congress and party reputations and find no evidence that successful agenda control enhances the majority party’s reputation. Instead, our analysis shows a strong relationship between party reputations and presidential approval, reaffirming the central role the president plays in shaping party reputations.