Theodore S. Arrington

Another Look at Approval Voting

Some of those who want to reform our present electoral system would replace plurality voting with approval voting. The proposed system has rarely been used in this country, and its adoption does not appear to be likely in the foreseeable future. It is then, basically, as an intellectual exercise that Professors Arrington and Brenner examine the case for approval voting in this article and find it wanting on a number of grounds, the most important of them being that it would unsettle our two-party system.

Effects of Campaign Spending On Local Elections The Charlotte Case

Data on Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, N.C. elections held between 1975 and 1980 were collected. The effects of campaign spending, party, sex, race, and incumbency are examined in five types of elections in this single area: nonpartisan school board, single member district primaries, single member district general partisan elections, multiple seat primaries, and multiple seat general partisan elections. Three conclusions are worthy of note: (1) Money is as important in partisan elections as in primaries and school board contests, (2) Campaign spending plays a stronger role in single member district elections and incumbency a stronger role in multiple seat elections, (3) incumbency, party, and campaign spending are not as strongly related to the vote as is suggested by studies that focus on many different constituencies for one office.

Partisan Campaigns, Ballots, and Voting Patterns: The Case of Charlotte

This article uses the unique election history of Charlotte, North Carolina, to study the effects of ballot and campaign types. Charlotte had a nonpartisan campaign and ballot in 1971, a partisan campaign with a nonpartisan ballot in 1973, and a partisan campaign and ballot in 1975. The voting pattern by precinct in these three municipal elections shows that a partisan voting pattern failed to occur in the absence of a partisan ballot, even when the campaign was vigorously partisan. Racial voting patterns were muted when the partisan ballot was introduced, but not in the partisan campaign without a partisan ballot.

UNANIMOUS DECISION MAKING ON THE U.S. SUPREME COURT: Case Stimuli and Judicial Attitudes

Although behavioral scholars have devoted much time and energy to attempting to explain decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court, they have virtually ignored the unanimous decision. We investigated the Vinson, Warren, and Burger Courts and discovered that the liberal outcome was more successful in the unanimous cases whether those cases involve civil liberties or economic liberalism and whether they were decisions to reverse or decisions to affirm. We also ascertained that the ideological position that tended to win in the unanimous reverse cases was related to the ideological position that tended to win in the nonunanimous reverse cases, but that no such relationship was present in the two kinds of affirm cases. These two findings are in conformity with a psychometric model, which posits that the relative position of judicial attitudes and case stimuli determines the vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.

William O. Douglas: Consistent Civil Libertarian or Parabolic Supporter?

Ulmer claimed, contrary to the common wisdom, that Justice Douglass support for civil liberties during his tenure on the Supreme Court conformed to a parabolic curve. Ulmers conclusion is based on both unanimous and nonunanimous cases. We argue that unanimous cases should not have been included, for the votes in these cases reflect both legal and attitudinal variables. When we plot Douglass support for civil liberties in nonunanimous cases we discover that he was a consistent civil libertarian from the beginning of the Warren Court until the end of his career.

Race and Campaign Finance in Charlotte, N.C

Although there are no published studies showing the role of race in money politics, there is a great deal of research on campaign finance and separate research on the political behavior of blacks. We will not examine either set of studies in detail here, but we will discuss a few of the works that guided our research. We expect, first, that blacks are less likely to contribute and give less money to campaigns than whites. Adamany (1972: 11) and Alexander (1976: 97) both agree that contributors tend to be people with high incomes, strong parental activism, a more than usual attentiveness to politics, and high political efficacy. All of these characteristics are more common among whites than among blacks. Moreover, Arrington (1984) has shown that blacks vote less consistently than whites in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. Adamany (1972: 200) argues that there is no sign of mass contributing by blacks to the black candidates and factions at the national level.

Strategic Voting for Damage Control On the Supreme Court

Prominent scholars argue that the Supreme Court justices vote insincerely and in favor of the majority at the conference vote in order to obtain either damage control over the content of the majority opinion or to conform to the majority. Those justices who cast their vote late in the order of voting at the conference are in a better position to behave this way because they are more likely to know which side will win. Using Spaeth’s Burger Court dataset we examine whether there is a statistical association between the order of voting of the justices and the extent to which they joined the winning coalition at the conference vote. We find little evidence of such an association using either bivariate or multivariate techniques and conclude that such behavior is exceedingly rare.

The limited vote alternative to affirmative districting

Abstract The Supreme Court may have effectively put affirmative districting off limits as a procedure to alleviate vote dilution in voting rights cases. If so, alternative voting systems seem logical, if not popular options. In this paper six voting systems at use in the US are evaluated utilizing nine measures of feasibility. Two traditional and popular voting systems — simple at-large, multi-seat and single-member districts — are compared to four alternatives — single transferable vote, cumulative voting, equal allocation cumulative voting and limited voting. The comparison along nine dimensions suggests that limited voting may be a viable alternative in situations where affirmative districting is not feasible or unlikely to withstand court oversight. Examination of jurisdictions in the US South which use limited voting shows that it is largely confined to Alabama and North Carolina. The results of elections before and after the adoption of limited voting shows that the number of minority candidates increases and their chance of winning goes up greatly when limited voting replaces simple at-large systems.

Response to “Predicting and Dissecting the Seat-Votes Curve in the 2006 U.S. House Election”

The article on the seats-votes curve by Kastellec, Gelman, and Chandler (January 2008, 139–45) presents interesting and helpful analysis and data. Especially important is the insight that incumbency necessarily requires a minority party to receive more than 50% of the vote to gain control of the House of Representatives. However the article is misleading in two respects.

Testing Murphy's Strategic Model Assigning the Majority Opinion to the Marginal Justice in the Conference Coalition on the U.S. Supreme Court

Murphy contended that an astute chief justice could assign the majority opinion to the “most moderate member” of the conference coalition, hoping that such an assignment “might prevent defection or even gain adherents.” We discovered that Murphys model was partially supported with data from the Vinson, Warren, and Burger Courts. When the conference coalition was larger than minimum winning (mw), assignment of the majority opinion to the marginal justice in the conference coalition was more likely to result in an opinion joined by the other justices in the conference coalition, making it an effective defensive strategy. It may not, however, be a very effective offensive strategy.