Joshua D. Clinton

Lawmaking and Roll Calls

The ability to generate theories of lawmaking has not been matched by an ability to evaluate the success of these theories for explaining legislative reality. The principal problem in testing lawmaking theories is that many analysts use roll-call votes—or various measures based on roll-call votes—when, in fact, these votes are partly a cause and partly a consequence of the very things the theories seek to explain. This can lead to erroneous substantive conclusions and characterizations. I show how embedding the theoretical predictions of the party gatekeeping and veto pivot theories of lawmaking within a statistical model used to estimate ideal points yields a straightforward test; if the gridlock interval measured using votes on policies predicted by the theories is nonzero, the predictions of the theory are not supported by the observed data and assumed behavioral voting model. Implementing the test reveals little support for either theory.

Design, Inference, and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape (2003) presents an analysis of his suicide terrorism data. He uses the data to draw inferences about how territorial occupation and religious extremism affect the decision of terrorist groups to use suicide tactics. We show that the data are incapable of supporting Papes conclusions because he “samples on the dependent variable.”—The data only contain cases in which suicide terror is used. We construct bounds (Manski, 1995) on the quantities relevant to Papes hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about the relevant statistical associations from the data produced by Papes research design.

To Simulate or NOMINATE

Carroll et al. (2009) summarize the similarities and differences between the NOMINATE and IDEAL methods of fitting spatial voting models to binary roll-call data. As those authors note, for the class of problems with which either NOMINATE and the Bayesian quadratic-normal model can be used, the ideal point estimates almost always coincide, and when they do not, the discrepancy is due to the somewhat arbitrary identification and computational constraints imposed by each method. There are, however, many problems for which the Bayesian quadratic-normal model can be easily generalized, so as to address a broad array of questions and take advantage of additional data. Given the nature and source of the differences between NOMINATE and the Bayesian approach—as well as the fact that both approaches are approximations of the decision-making processes being modeled—we believe that it is preferable to choose the more flexible Bayesian approach.

''The Most Liberal Senator''?: Analyzing and Interpreting Congressional Roll Calls

The non-partisan National Journal recently declared Senator John Kerry to be the ‘‘top liberal’’ in the Senate based on analysis of 62 roll calls in 2003. Although widely reported in the media (and the subject of a debate among the Democratic presidential candidates), we argue that this characterization of Kerry is misleading in at least two respects. First, when we account for the ‘‘margin of error’’ in the voting scores -- which is considerable for Kerry given that he missed 60 % of the National Journal’s key votes while campaigning -- we discover that the probability that Kerry is the ‘‘top liberal’’ is only.30, and that we cannot reject the conclusion that Kerry is only the 20 th most liberal senator. Second, we compare the position of the President Bush on these key votes; including the President’s announced positions on these votes reveals the President to be just as conservative as Kerry is liberal (i.e., both candidates are extreme relative to the 108 th Senate). A similar conclusion holds when we replicate the analysis using all votes cast in the 107 th Senate. A more comprehensive analysis than that undertaken by National Journal (including an accounting of the margins of error in voting scores) shows although Kerry belongs to the most liberal quintile of the contemporary Senate, Bush belongs to the most conservative quintile.

Does Advertising Exposure Affect Turnout

We identify an exogenous source of variation in exposure to campaign advertising in the 2000 presidential election, based on residence in battleground states. If exposure to campaign advertising makes a potential voter significantly more likely to vote, then we should see significantly greater turnout in battleground states. We do not. This result is robust to several specifications and evident in a natural experiment consisting of New Jersey residents. Conditional on existing campaign targeting strategies, campaigns do not affect the turnout decisions of the voters we study.

Laws and Roll Calls in the U.S. Congress, 1891–1994

Recent empirical studies of lawmaking activity by legislatures rely heavily on roll call based measures and assume that roll call activity reflects lawmaking activity. We question this assumption for the case of the U.S. Congress. We examine several plausible sources of dissonance between the set of enacted public statutes and the universe of recorded votes in the U.S. Congress, using a comprehensive dataset of public enactments and roll call activity between 1891 and 1994. Because only 11.9% of the bills signed into law receive a recorded vote in the House, only 7.9% receive a recorded vote in the Senate, and only 5.5% receive a recorded vote in both the House and Senate, we provide guidance as to when studying voting behavior is likely a reasonable proxy for lawmaking behavior. There are sometimes important differences between the laws that do and do not receive a roll call that researchers should account for when using roll calls to study lawmaking in the U.S. Congress.

More a Molehill than a Mountain: The Effects of the Blanket Primary on Elected Officials' Behavior from California

Scholars, politicians, parties, and the U.S. Supreme Court argue that restricting the set of eligible voters for a primary election affects the nature of representation voters receive from elected officials. Evidence supporting this argument is elusive because the same elected officials are often responsible for determining the type of primary election used. Using a quasi-natural experiment resulting from a 1996 constitutional referendum in California, we examine whether expanding the eligible primary electorate from only registered partisans to any registered voter affects who is elected and the positions elected representatives take. We show that the blanket primary appears to favor the election of more moderate representatives and that incumbents take more moderate positions in the U.S. House of Representatives and California Assembly. This is true only in less partisan districts, and there are no effects in districts dominated by a single party. These differential effects suggest that concerns about r...

Influencing the Bureaucracy: The Irony of Congressional Oversight

Does the president or Congress have more influence over policymaking by the bureaucracy? Despite a wealth of theoretical guidance, progress on this important question has proven elusive due to competing theoretical predictions and severe difficulties in measuring agency influence and oversight. We use a survey of federal executives to assess political influence, congressional oversight, and the policy preferences of agencies, committees, and the president on a comparable scale. Analyzing variation in political influence across and within agencies reveals that Congress is less influential relative to the White House when more committees are involved. While increasing the number of involved committees may maximize the electoral benefits for members, it may also undercut the ability of Congress as an institution to collectively respond to the actions of the presidency or the bureaucracy.

The National News Media’s Effect on Congress: How Fox News Affected Elites in Congress

Despite the prominence of the national news media, it is unclear whether elected officials are affected by the national news media in policy-consequential ways because of the difficulty of disentangling the influence of the media on Congress from Congress’s influence on the media. We use a unique opportunity to determine whether position-taking behavior in Congress and the likelihood of reelection is affected by the national news media. Using the fact that the Fox News Channel spread gradually across the United States after being launched in October of 1996 in ways unrelated to the ideology of congressional districts and the incumbent representatives, we show that representatives become less supportive of President Clinton in districts where Fox News begins broadcasting than similar representatives in similar districts where Fox News was not broadcast. Moreover, the effects took a few years to be realized, and the entry of Fox News in a district did not appear to affect which representatives were reelected. Consistent with theories emphasizing the anticipatory actions taken by elected officials to maximize their electoral security in the face of changing electoral conditions, our results suggest that the national media may slightly affect the prospects for policy change by altering representatives’ expectations and the positions that they take.

Elite Perceptions of Agency Ideology and Workforce Skill

Perceptions of the policy leanings of government agencies are an important component of an agency’s political environment, and an agency’s political environment can greatly influence how agencies formulate and implement public policy. We use a recent survey of federal executives to measure the perceptions of the ideological leanings of twice as many agencies as previously possible. Our estimates compare reassuringly to extant measures based on both expert evaluations and aggregations of the opinions of those working within agencies. We also develop a novel measure of perceptions of workforce skill. Given the prominence of the concepts of agency ideology and skill in theories of executive branch politics, the estimates we generate provide important opportunities for understanding agencies’ political environments and their implications for policy making. The generation of these measures also illustrates an approach to measuring hard-to-observe characteristics that could usefully be adopted in other contexts.