Linda L. Fowler

The Grass Roots Connection: Environmental Activists and Senate Roll Calls

Interest groups resort to grass roots lobbying tactics with increasing frequency, but they are unsure when and how such a strategy affects congressional decision making. In analyzing citizen activists who belong to environmental organizations and their influence on Senate roll calls, this paper defines the limits and possibilities of such grass roots pressure. In general, the statistical results indicate that grass roots mobilization has a modest value as a lobbying tool, but they also suggest that certain issues, state conditions, and characteristics of the group members themselves shape the receptivity of senators to organized constituent opinion.

Looking for Sex in All the Wrong Places: Press Coverage and the Electoral Fortunes of Gubernatorial Candidates

Although female candidates have achieved parity on some dimensions, political institutions remain deeply gendered in how they structure the parameters of electoral competition. We rely on a new data set of gubernatorial races from the 1990s to address the theoretical and empirical challenges created by the interaction of gender, media content, and electoral institutions. Based on an analysis of 1,365 newspaper articles for 27 contests in which a woman held a major party nomination, we uncover evidence of continuing bias in media coverage. Yet significant coefficients on candidate sex tell only part of the story. Gendered contextual factors linked to the contest and state in which candidates compete, as well as the newspapers that cover their races, also affect womens experiences on the campaign trail. The major finding, however, is the presence of a powerful baseline effect favoring male candidates that is deeply embedded in U.S. politics. All else equal, women gubernatorial candidates suffer a substantial vote deficit that results from non-observable influences. The results support the emerging consensus among feminist theorists that greater focus on the political context is likely to produce bigger scholarly payoffs than is continued attention to observable differences between male and female candidates.

Replication as Regulation

Debate among political scientists over replication is comparable in many respects to controversy among policy analysts about the ends and means of regulation. Proponents of replication seek to provide the collective good of freeflowing information and to sanction the negative externality of sloppy scholarship. Similarly, opponents of replication claim property rights in the data and variables they have created through hard work and ingenuity. As with disputes over regulatory policy, the fundamental sticking point is whether the benefits of mandatory replication to the community of political scientists outweigh the costs of compliance to individuals. Pervasive evidence

Veto-Proof Majorities, Legislative Procedures, and Presidential Decisions, 1981–2008

Super-majorities have occurred frequently in Congress but have escaped scholarly attention. This paper employs new measures of positive agenda control and a unique data set of 3,407 nontrivial bills from 1981 to 2008 to answer two questions: how did legislative leaders construct veto-proof coalitions, and what did presidents do with them? Legislative leaders, we argue, deployed procedures to expand and sustain veto-proof coalitions, despite increasing polarization. The resulting history, which signaled members’ commitment to a bill, provided information to the president that reduced uncertainty about possibilities for interbranch bargaining and the likely success of a veto. We find that positive agenda control increased the probability of vote tallies of two-thirds or more, especially after the 1994 election. In addition, we demonstrate that presidents concentrated veto activity on bills with outcomes of less than two-thirds, rejected some veto-proof bills for reputational gains, and deployed signing statements strategically. The analysis suggests that congressional leaders paradoxically gained capacity for nurturing large, bipartisan alliances as the institution became more polarized. Moreover, it demonstrates that strategic activity by legislative leaders is critical to explaining variation in presidential options for veto bargaining and signing statements.