William Koetzle

Accounting for Corruption: Economic Structure, Democracy, and Trade

Though corruption poses fundamental challenges to both democratic governance and market economies, political science research has only recently begun to address corruption in a comparative context. In this article we explain variation in the perceived level of corruption (defined as the misuse of public office for private gain) across fifty countries. We propose a set of hypotheses that explain variation in corruption levels in terms of domestic political-economic structure, democratic norms, integration into the international economy, and Protestant religious affiliation. Levels of corruption, we propose, are higher: (1) the lower the average income level, (2) the greater the extent of state control of the economy, (3) the weaker are democratic norms and institutions, (4) the lower the degree of integration in the world economy, and (5) the lower the share of the population with Protestant religious affiliation. The data analysis broadly confirms our predictions: in the multivariate regression, each of the independent variables is significant in the direction we expect.

A New Look at Split‐Ticket Outcomes for House and President: The Comparative Midpoints Model

We argue that conservative districts that go Democratic for the House should be likely to choose a Republican for president, while liberal districts represented by a Republican should be likely to opt for a Democrat for president. We test these and related predictions about split-ticket voting with election data from the eight presidential elections between 1964 and 1992. We show that ideological differences in the estimated location of the districts median voter explains a substantial component of the systematic variation in patterns of split outcomes in this period across districts, but that other factors (e.g., an especially popular incumbent or a particularly poor challenger, the magnitude of presidential election victory, region-specific realignment effects) also play a role.

Congressional Leadership 1965–96: A New Look at the Extremism versus Centrality Debate

An examination of the differences between the ideological positions of leaders and other members in the U.S. House of Representatives (1965-96) demonstrates that Republican leaders tend to be significantly to the right of the median Republican member and Democratic leaders tend to be significantly to the left of the median Democratic member. Furthermore, leaders from both parties tend to be ideologically located near the mode of their partys ideological distribution. These empirical results have implications for issues such as party polarization, conditional party government, and the possibility of separating out party and ideology.

The Potential Electoral Disadvantages of a Catch-All Party Ideological Variance among Republicans and Democrats in the 50 US States

In two-party competition, the more ideologically concentrated party may be advantaged in that its party median may be closer to the overall median voter than is that of the more dispersed party. Because of party activists and the intermediating effects of party primaries which tend to lead to the selection of candidates near the party median, voters often choose in a general election between candidates with widely divergent views. It follows that a smaller, but more ideologically cohesive, party may find its candidate closer to the overall median voter than is the candidate of the larger party. Such a party should be able to win elections that mere numbers of identifiers would suggest it ought not be able to win. In American politics, it is widely accepted that, in terms of voter ideology, the Democratic Party is more of a catch-all party than the Republicans; i.e. its partisan identifiers are more ideologically dispersed. This insight, however, is based primarily on (a) national-level data and (b) data from a period when Democratic identifiers far outnumbered Republican identifiers and when a very high fraction of southern voters were both Democratic in partisan affiliation and conservative in ideology. We look at American National Election Study data from a 1988-92 panel which uses states as its sampling frame to see the extent to which Republican Party identifiers are more ideologically united than Democratic identifiers in each of the 50 states. Even when we look within individual states, we find that Republicans are considerably more ideologically homogeneous then Democratic identifiers. Thus, for contests fought at the state level, we would expect to see Republicans electorally advantaged relative to their actual number of party identifiers.

The R2=.93: Where then do they differ? Comparing liberal and conservative interest group ratings

Interest groups ratings have long been used by social scientists to distinguish between liberal and conservative members of Congress. It is also well known that ratings by different groups are highly correlated with one another. Here, rather than focusing on the similarities between such measures, we focus on the differences between them. Although the relationship between measures is nearly linear, we find systematic robust differences between ADA and ACU scores.

Changes in the Location of the Median Voter in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1963-1996

We consider the degree of ideological polarizationwithin and between the parties in the U.S. House ofRepresentatives for the period 1963–1996, using theGroseclose, Levitt and Snyder (1996) adjustment method for ADA and ACU scores to ensure over timecomparability of roll call voting data. We focusespecially on the median House member, since webelieve that change in the median offers a bettermeasure of the impact of the change in party controlthan does changes in the mean roll-call votingscore.Our data analysis makes two general points. First andforemost, when we looked at the change in the locationof the House median voter, we found a dramatic changeafter the Republicans gained a majority in the House in1994. After the Republicans became a majority in theHouse, the ADA median in the House in 1995–1996 was at24, far closer to the Republican median of 4 than tothe Democratic median of 83. The shift in medianfrom 1993–1994 to 1994–1995 involved a change of over 25points in one election – far and away the greatestsingle shift in ideology of the modern era. Incontrast, the mean changed only 1 point overthis same period. Second, for the three decades weinvestigated, we found three historical epochs vis a visthe relative locations of the ADA (or ACU) floormedian and the ADA (or ACU) floor mean in the U.S.House of Representatives – two inflection points in1983 and 1994 which are related to trends in regionalrealignment.

Death, Where Is Thy Sting? The Senate as a Ponce (de Leon) Scheme

M altzman, Sigelman and Binder (1996), in what we regard as monumental work, have reinvigorated the study of death in office. But their data analysis is incomplete. First, they fail to project realistically the trends in actual and expected congressional deaths illustrated in Figure 1 of their paper. Second, like many congressional scholars, they do not pay sufficient attention to the Senate. We provide new evidence that the U.S. Senate may offer the solution to mankinds oldest quest, the fountain of youth (Gilgamesh n.d.; de Leon 1460-1521).2 Table 1 presents data on the proportion of U.S. Senators who died in office, by decade, from 1910 to 1990 (CQ 1995). We plotted the senatorial mortality rate data reported in Table 1 versus year (for data grouped by decade) as shown in Figure 1. The r2 for the regression of mortality rates on time is an astonishingly large .87.3 Rarely have we seen such a clear time trend. Senators are

A Divided-Government-Based Explanation for the Decline in Resignations from the US Senate, 1834-1996

We note the declining number of US Senate resignations that have occurred from 1834 through to 1996. While certainly this trend is related to the rise of careerism in Congress, we analyze it from the perspective of divided government (where the channels of power are shared by both parties). The results of our analysis show that most of the resignations that do occur happen when the party of the outgoing senator will retain the seat being vacated. We link the declining number of resignations to an increase in a specific instance of divided government: namely, divided partisan control of one or both Senate seats relative to the body that fills Senate vacancies in the event of a resignation. The desire on the part of senators to resign only when their party will remain in control has remained constant over time, but the proportion of senators who could resign with this assurance has decreased.