Thomas M. Carsey

State and national factors in gubernatorial and senatorial elections

Theory: Voters link candidates for govemor and senator to the president through partisanship. However, voters also distinguish between the functional responsibilities that govemors and U.S. senators have regarding the health of state and national economies, respectively. Hypotheses: Voting in elections for both governor and senator should respond to presidential approval. Voting in senate elections should respond to evaluations of the national economy while voting in gubernatorial elections should respond to evaluations of the state economy. Method: We replicate Atkeson and Partins (1995) analysis of American National Election Studies (ANES) date controlling for the pooled and clustered nature of the data. We then crossvalidate their study using media exit polls. Results: Our analysis confirms the above hypotheses, which contrasts with the findings of Atkeson and Partin (1995). These differences result from controlling for the pooled and clustered nature of the data and from the well-documented misreport problem in the ANES data.

Activists and Conflict Extension in American Party Politics

Party activists have played a leading role in “conflict extension”—the polarization of the parties along multiple issue dimensions—in contemporary American politics. We argue that open nomination systems and the ambitious politicians competing within those systems encourage activists with extreme views on a variety of issue dimensions to become involved in party politics, thus motivating candidates to take noncentrist positions on a range of issues. Once that happens, continuing activists with strong partisan commitments bring their views into line with the new candidate agendas, thus extending the domain of interparty conflict. Using cross-sectional and panel surveys of national convention delegates, we find clear evidence for conflict extension among party activists, evidence tentatively suggesting a leading role for activists in partisan conflict extension more generally, and strong support for our argument about change among continuing activists. Issue conversion among activists has contributed substantially to conflict extension and party commitment has played a key role in motivating that conversion.

Party and Committee in Distributive Politics: Evidence from Defense Spending

Recent studies of the domestic distribution of military procurement expenditures and representation on congressional defense committees support the traditional committee-centered distributive theory of congressional policymaking in a manner consistent with the assumption that Congress is organized to produce gains from exchange among legislators with diverse interests via intercommittee logrolling. This paper compares the committee-centered distributive theory to a party-centered distributive theory. Analysis of a multiequation model using pooled time-series data on the distribution of military procurement expenditures and defense committee representation among states from 1963 to 1989 supports a party-centered version of the distributive theory.

New Measures of Partisanship, Ideology, and Policy Mood in the American States

We construct measures of U.S. state partisan identification, self-reported ideology, and policy mood using data from the 2000 and 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys (NAES) and the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). These measures improve on existing methods for estimating state-level preferences because the surveys provide larger state samples without pooling across years. After detailing our methods for constructing the measures, we assess their validity through comparisons with measures already in use by scholars of state politics. We find that our measures correlate strongly with those created by Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993) and Berry et al. (1998) and with measures from state-level polls. We conclude that our measures can be useful to research in state politics.

The reciprocal relationship between state defense interest and committee representation in Congress

Does prior representation of a state on a Congressional defense committee lead to higher levels of per capita defense contracts, or do higher levels of prior per capita contract awards to a state increase its probability of being represented on a defense committee? To solve this puzzle, we estimate a cross-lagged three-equation model on data from all 50 states from 1963 to 1989 using maximum likelihood within LISREL. We find a substantial reciprocal but non-confounding relationship between representation and the allocation of benefits for the House, but not for the Senate. Thus, for the House, this more appropriate model of distributive politics in Congress supports both the committee-induced benefits hypothesis and the recruitment hypothesis. Further, the paper elaborates on how this reciprocal relationship plays out over time.

Policy Balancing and Preferences for Party Control of Government

Divided party control of government is one of the defining features of contemporary American politics. Of the competing theories offered to account for this phenomenon, the notion of policy balancing offered by Fiorina (1988, 1992, 1996) and Alesina and Rosenthal (1995) has garnered the most attention, though it has received limited empirical support. The lack of support stems in part from: (1) the failure to separate voter preferences for party control of government from the actual act of casting a straight or split ticket, (2) using suspect measures of preference for divided government, and (3) ignoring voters who support unified control of government regardless of which party has that control. In this article, we provide a direct test of the policy balancing thesis that addresses these issues. Specifically, we examine how citizen preferences for partisan, divided, or unconditional unified control of government depend upon their own ideological locations and their perceptions of the locations of the two parties. Using original data collected from a statewide survey in Illinois in 2000, we uncover clear support for the policy balancing argument.

A Dynamic Model of Political Change Among Party Activists

In this article, we develop a dynamic model of aggregate attitudinal change among party activists in order to better understand the process by which new issues/cleavages divide major political parties. We build on existing research by developing a model of change that incorporates both conversion among continuing activists and the replacement of previous activists with newcomers who hold different views. We first explore such change among activists of the two major parties in the United States on the abortion issue. We then consider a number of alternative specifications of the model in order to generalize our findings. We conclude that conversion among continuing activists contributes in a substantial way to aggregate change among party activists by influencing the level of change, accelerating the change process, and sustaining change over time.

Misreport of Vote Choice in U.S. Senate and Gubernatorial Elections

Previous research has found strong evidence of a pro-winner vote misreport bias in the National Election Studies (NES). We extend this research by examining the reported vote for U.S. senator and governor in the 1990, 1992, and 1994 NES and in the 1990 and 1992 Senate Election Studies (SES). We find continuing evidence of a pro-winner misreport problem. In contrast, we uncover no significant pro-winner bias in state exit polls conducted by the media. We test two commonly asserted explanations of the source of this misreport bias, but find no evidence that the problem is related either to the number of days between the election and the survey interview or to incumbency. Finally, we test a model of the misreport process that suggests that less politically engaged and less politically sophisticated voters are most likely to over-report support for the winner. Our results here are mixed; we find some evidence that Independents are more likely to misreport in favor of the winner, but we find no evidence that education level affects the likelihood of misreporting.

State legislative elections, 1967-2003: Announcing the completion of a cleaned and updated dataset

More than 15 years nine election cycles have passed since a comprehensive set of state legislative election data was compiled and made available to researchers and practitioners: the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Researchs (ICPSR) State Legislative Election Returns in the United States dataset (Study #8907) collected by Malcolm Jewell (Jewell 1991) and containing observations from 1967 to 1988.1 With this hiatus in mind, we set out at various times initially in three independent efforts (Berry and Carsey; Niemi, and Powell; Snyder) to gather legislative election data for all states and elections since 1988. In addition, Berry and Carsey (2005) cleaned the original dataset to make it more accurate and usable; their corrections led to the release of a revised ICPSR dataset (Study #3938). The culmination of these efforts is a dataset containing information about general elections for state legislative seats from 1967 to 2003, now available through ICPSR (Study 21480).2 In announcing the availability of the newly cleaned and updated dataset, we thought it useful to present trends for three of the most prominent measures related to state legislative elections: incumbent reelection percentages, open seat percentages, and the percentage of competitive races. We present these trends largely without analysis. While some correlates and tentative explanations are obvious such as the apparent impact of legislative professionalism (Niemi et al. 2006) developing full explanatory models of each of

Group Effects on Party Identification and Party Coalitions across the United States

Most examinations of the sociodemographic group foundations of political party identification and party coalitions in the United States rely on national samples (e.g., the National Election Studies). Therefore, they fail to consider (a) state-to-state variation in the group components of party identification and party coalitions and (b) how state context structures this variation. We rely on media exit polls from the 1988, 1992, and 1996 elections to examine group influences on party identification and party coalitions across the large states. Although there are common threads across the nation in Democratic and Republican support, we find significant state-to-state variation in the nature of group influences on party identification. For many sociodemographic characteristics, group size conditions the importance of the characteristic for party identification, a finding consistent with a contextual theory of political behavior. A group’s size and the partisan loyalty of its members interact to determine a group’s importance to coalition building in a state.