Michael Peress

Benchmarking across Borders: Electoral Accountability and the Necessity of Comparison

When the economy in a single country contracts, voters often punish the government. When many economies contract, voters turn against their governments much less frequently. This suggests that the international context matters for the domestic vote, yet most research on electoral accountability assumes that voters treat their national economies as autarkic. We decompose two key economic aggregates—growth in real gross domestic product and unemployment—into their international and domestic components and demonstrate that voters hold incumbents more electorally accountable for the domestic than for the international component of growth. Voters in a wide variety of democracies benchmark national economic growth against that abroad, punishing (rewarding) incumbents for national outcomes that underperform (outperform) an international comparison. Tests suggest that this effect arises not from highly informed voters making direct comparisons but from “pre-benchmarking” by the media when reporting on the economy. The effect of benchmarked growth exceeds that of aggregate national growth by up to a factor of two and outstrips the international component of growth by an even larger margin, implying that previous research may have underestimated the strength of the economy on the vote.

Estimating Proposal and Status Quo Locations Using Voting and Cosponsorship Data

Theories of lawmaking generate predictions for the policy outcome as a function of the status quo. These theories are difficult to test because the widely applied ideal point estimation techniques do not recover the locations of proposals or status quos. Instead, such techniques only recover cutpoints. This limitation has meant that most existing tests of theories of lawmaking have been indirect in nature. I propose a method of directly measuring ideal points, proposal locations, and status quo locations on the same scale, by employing a combination of voting data, bill and amendment cosponsorship data, and the congressional record. My approach works as follows. First, we can identify the locations of legislative proposals (bills and amendments) on the same scale as voter ideal points by jointly scaling voting and cosponsorship data. Next, we can identify the location of the final form of the bill using the location of the last successful amendment (which we already know). If the bill was not amended, the...

The spatial model with non-policy factors: a theory of policy-motivated candidates

The theoretical literature on two candidate elections is dominated by symmetric contests and vote-maximizing candidates. These models fail to capture two important features of real elections. First, most elections pit a stronger candidate against a weaker one. Second, candidates care not only about holding office, but also about policy outcomes. Ignoring any one of these features means we will fail to capture an important dynamic—strong candidates must balance their desire to change policy with their need to win the election. We provide conditions for the existence of an equilibrium in the spatial model with non-policy factors, when candidates are policy motivated. We provide a characterization of ‘regular’ equilibria and show that there exists at most one regular equilibrium. We provide conditions that guarantee that all equilibria are regular. We derive comparative statics for the model and show that increasing a candidate’s non-policy advantage causes that candidate to move towards his ideal point.

Targeting Political Advertising on Television

We study the targeting of political advertising by congressional candidates on television. Targeting strategies for television dier from targeting strategies for direct mail advertising or get out the vote eorts because candidates cannot target voters individually. Instead, candidates must target television programs with viewers most similar to the desired target voters. Thus, for targeted advertising to have value, the audiences for television programs must dier in mean

Scaling the Critics: Uncovering the Latent Dimensions of Movie Criticism With an Item Response Approach

We study the critical opinions of expert movie reviewers as an item response problem. Building on earlier “unfolding” models, we develop a framework that models an individual’s decision to approve or disapprove of an item. Using this approach, we are able to recover the locations of movies and ideal points of critics in the same multidimensional space. We demonstrate that a three-dimensional model captures much of the variation in critical opinions. The first dimension signifies movie “quality” while the other two connote the nature and subject matter of the films. We then demonstrate that the dimensions uncovered from our “utility threshold model” are statistically significant predictors of a movie’s success, and are particularly useful in predicting the success of independent films.

Common-Space Ideal Points, Committee Assignments, and Financial Interests in the State Legislatures:

We present a new unified dataset of common-space ideal points, committee assignments, and financial interests for all state legislators in 1999. We describe the compilation of the dataset and offer a few possible applications.

Optimal Supermajority Requirements in a Two-Party System

Legislative governance in the United States is characterized by a system of checks and balances. On the one hand, agenda-setting power is concentrated. The majority party has significant control over the agenda. Such power is tempered by supermajority requirements (such as the 60-vote requirement for invoking cloture), bicameralism, and the presidential veto. I develop a theory of legislative outcomes which incorporates supermajority requirements. I argue that supermajority requirements can, in fact, serve an important purpose in balancing concentrated agenda-setting power. I find that substantial supermajority requirements are optimal for legislation, if the aim is to enact policies preferred by the median voter.

Request Fulfilling When Citizens Demand Clientelist Benefits

Traditional accounts of clientelism typically focused on patron–client relations with minimal scope for citizen autonomy. Despite the heightened agency of many contemporary citizens, most studies continue to depict clientelism as a phenomenon that is firmly under elite control. The prevailing tendency is to view clientelism as a top-down process in which machines target citizens with offers of material benefits. Without denying the importance of elites, we emphasize the role of citizen demands in clientelism. Citizens often approach machines of their own volition to ask for help and may vote for a competitor if requests are unfulfilled. In response to these citizens, machines often engage in what we call “request fulfilling.” Interviews with citizens and politicians, coupled with cross-national survey data from Africa and Latin America, suggest the importance of this phenomenon. In addition, Argentine survey data in studies by Stokes and Nichter are better explained by request fulfilling than alternative explanations.

Strategic voting in multi-office elections

What are the incentives for voters to vote strategically when legislative policy outcomes are constrained by a system of checks and balances? The policy-balancing theory supposes that moderate voters split their tickets because such splitting is the only way these voters can achieve moderate policy outcomes. I show that a different type of strategic voting, policy stacking, is characteristic of legislatures that endow the majority party with only limited institutional powers. Focusing on voting for the president and House of Representatives in the United States reveals that a substantial proportion of voters engage in policy-stacking behavior, but very few engage in policy-balancing behavior.