René Lindstädt

The Changing Dynamics of Senate Voting on Supreme Court Nominees

A near-universal consensus exists that the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987 triggered a new regime in the Senates voting over presidential nominees—a regime that deemphasizes ethics, competence, and integrity and stresses instead politics, philosophy, and ideology. Nonetheless, this conventional wisdom remains largely untested. In this paper we explore the extent to which the Bork nomination has affected the decisions of U.S. senators. To do so, we modernize, update, and backdate the standard account of confirmation politics offered by Cameron, Cover, and Segal (1990) to cover all candidates for the Supreme Court from Hugo L. Black in 1937 through John G. Roberts, Jr. in 2005. Our results confirm conventional wisdom about the Bork nomination but with two notable caveats. First, while the importance of ideology has reached new heights, the Senates emphasis on this factor had its genesis some three decades earlier, in the 1950s. Second, while ideology is of paramount concern to senators, a candidates professional merit also remains a significant determinant of success in the Senate.

Balancing Competing Demands: Position-Taking and Election Proximity in the European Parliament

Parties value unity, yet members of parliament have incentives to deviate from the party line. This article examines how members of the European Parliament (EP) respond to competing demands from national parties and European party groups. We examine ideological shifts within a single parliamentary term to assess how election proximity affects party group cohesion. Our formal model of legislative behavior suggests that when EP elections are proximate, national party delegations shift toward national party positions, thus weakening EP party group cohesion. Our Bayesian item-response analysis of roll calls in the 5th EP supports our theoretical predictions.

Leaning Right and Learning From the Left Diffusion of Corporate Tax Policy Across Borders

There is an increased focus in comparative politics and international relations on how choices of governments are dependent on choices made by other governments. The authors argue that although the relationship between policy choices across countries is often labeled as either diffusion or competition, in many cases the theoretical mechanisms underpinning these labels are unclear. In this article, the authors build a model of social learning with a specific application to the diffusion of corporate tax reductions. The model yields predictions that are differentiable from existing models of tax competition. Specifically, the authors argue that social learning is most likely in the wake of tax policy cuts by left governments. They test the model using an existing data set of corporate tax rate changes and an author-created data set of changes in tax legislation, covering 20 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. The authors’ empirical findings show that social learning is an important determinant of corporate tax policy making.

Adaptive behaviour in the European Parliament: Learning to balance competing demands

Parliamentary institutions and partisan norms are complex and new members of parliament are unlikely to possess an innate awareness of optimal behaviour. This paper examines how new legislators adopt the behavioural patterns of incumbent members in the Sixth European Parliament. The latter provides an excellent opportunity to study such adaptive behaviour; in addition to newly elected members from 15 former states, new members from ten accession countries took seats for the first time. We examine how voting behaviour differs between new members from the 15 former states, new members from accession countries, and incumbent members. Our analysis shows that new members from former states defect less from their European political group than incumbents, while new accession country members defect more. Over time, the differences between these groups disappear.

Dynamic elite partisanship: party loyalty and agenda setting in the US house

Legislators and legislative parties must strike a balance between collective and member-level goals. While there are legislative and reputational returns to coordinated behavior, party loyalty has a detrimental effect on members’ electoral success. We argue that members and parties navigate these competing forces by pursuing partisan legislation when the threat of electoral repercussions is relatively low — when elections are distant. We test our theory by examining House members’ likelihood of casting a party vote over the election cycle, assessing whether members strategically alter their levels of party loyalty as elections approach. We also explore whether majority parties strategically structure the agenda according to variation in members’ electoral constraints. Our approach allows elite partisanship to follow a dynamic process, which we term dynamic partisanship. We find that with increasing election proximity, members are less likely to cast party votes and parties are less inclined to schedule votes that divide the parties. ∗Please send all correspondence to Ryan J. Vander Wielen. Email: vanderwielen@temple.edu; Phone: 215.204.1466; Post: Department of Political Science, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122. †René Lindstädt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and Director, Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis, University of Essex. Ryan J. Vander Wielen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University.