Robert X. Browning

Democratic Representation and Partisan Bias in Congressional Elections

The translation of citizen votes into legislative seats is of central importance in democratic electoral systems. It has been a longstanding concern among scholars in political science and in numerous other disciplines. Through this literature, two fundamental tenets of democratic theory, partisan bias and democratic representation, have often been confused. We develop a general statistical model of the relationship between votes and seats and separate these two important concepts theoretically and empirically. In so doing, we also solve several methodological problems with the study of seats, votes and the cube law. An application to U.S. congressional districts provides estimates of bias and representation for each state and deomonstrates the models utility. Results of this application show distinct types of representation coexisting in U.S. states. Although most states have small partisan biases, there are some with a substantial degree of bias.

Social Welfare Policy

U.S. social welfare policy is fragmented and multifaceted. These characteristics date back to the origins of the Social Security Act (SSA) of 1935 and have endured through many periods of reform. The lack of a universal or comprehensive social policy is a distinguishing feature of American politics which has been reinforced through federalism and through the underlying work ethic of the U.S. economic system. During the eight years of the Reagan Administration efforts to dismantle, to restructure or to reform existing social programs were only partially successful. One might cynically observe that another president has come and gone, but the basic structure of U.S. social programs remains largely intact (Palmer and Sawhill, 1982; 1984).

Leaders and Followers in a Strong Party State

Generally considered patronage rather than issue oriented, the state of Indiana is usually above the suspicion of harboring political parties that adopt widely differing policy positions. In this study, the policy preferences of three different elite groups are compared with those of rank-and-file party members and Independents. Interestingly enough, each partys leadership sets are fairly tightly clustered. Furthermore, elite interparty cleavages are much greater than those displayed by any of the mass public groupings. Notwithstanding some popular images of Hoosier politics, the choice between Democratic and Republican leaders is real and palpable.

Creating an Online Television Archive, 1987–2013

The growth of television, and in particular television news, has created a challenge in preserving and providing access to the resulting material. At the same time, technology has opened many opportunities to capture this information and make it more widely available. In some ways, it is a race of technology against the speed of content creation. In this paper, we describe a very successful archival project that records, indexes, archives and makes available the totality of the programming of the U.S. based C-SPAN television network, a nonprofit network that telecasts the entirety of the U.S. congressional proceedings, hearings, presidential speeches and other public policy events. As such, it is an archive of unedited primary source events. The use of evolving technology over 25 years has made this archive possible and it exists free on the Internet for world-wide access.