William R. Shaffer

Policy Preferences of Party Elites and Masses Conflict or Consensus

This study examines the sharing of public policy preferences between American state political party elites and party followers in the mass public on ten matters of state policy. Employing responses from about 1600 county political party chairmen in the 50 states and responses of party followers in several national-level surveys, we find meaningful differences between Democratic and Republican party elites, with the Democratic chairmen consistently more liberal on the ten matters of state policy than the Republican chairmen. Smaller differences in policy preferences, generally, are reported between the Democratic and Republican followers in the mass public. Spatially, the Democratic elite, the Democratic mass, and the Republican mass are grouped together near a centrist position on the policy questions, while the Republican elite is positioned at a distance in the conservative direction on most of the ten matters of state policy.

Rating the Performance of the Ada in the U.S. Congress

URING the 1970s, literally dozens of interest groups began to assemble and publish ratings of U.S. senators and congressmen.1 The express purpose of these evaluations is to assess a legislators roll-call voting behavior against either a broad ideological standard or a narrow set of interests most salient to the rating organization. Presumably, this exercise allows one to determine the extent to which a representative or senator is liberal, conservative, pro-labor, pro-business, pro-family, moral, etc. Naturally, the rating organizations promulgate their scales to reward their friends and punish their opponents in Congress. From a putatively more dispassionate perspective, political scientists also have employed some of these measures as independent and dependent variables in their research. In either case, an index arguably says something about the behavior of the congressmen and senators. In this paper, however, the primary objective is to evaluate the ratings of what is perhaps the most experienced rating organization, namely the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Even though some studies have examined composite indices, none has assessed the overall measure on the basis of the separate roll call which constitute the rating. In the present research, the key roll-call votes selected by the ADA for inclusion in its Liberalism Quotient (LQ) will be analyzed in order to determine if they form a reliable and valid measure of liberalism.

IDEOLOGICAL TRENDS AMONG SOUTHERN U.S. DEMOCRATIC SENATORS Race, Generation, and Political Climate

Southern Democrats in the U.S. Congress have been characterized as an aberrant bloc within the Democratic party. Their conservative ideological propensities have even led them to coalesce with Republicans on many occasions to form the Conservative Coalition. In recent years, however, southern Democrats have become an increasingly liberal group, thereby more closely approximating the stance of the national Democratic party. This article examines not only this recent trend, but also the ideological transformations of southern Democrats since World War II. From 1947 through 1968, the persistent decline in liberalism appears to have been driven by period effects, while the increasingly moderate voting records of southern Democratic senators from the mid-1960s through 1983 seem to have been sparked by cohort and period effects. At no time during the post-World War II era, however, have votes on racial policy had a decisive bearing on the ideological posture of this regions U.S. Senate members.

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.

Supreme Court Justices’ Economic Behaviour: A Multilevel Model Analysis

Supreme Court justices are overlooked, but important, national policy-making players who render final and consequential decisions in cases on economic conflicts. The research question asks what forces explain the decisional behaviour of Supreme Court justices in economic rights cases between a private and a public party. Theoretically, the decisional behaviour of an individual justice is a function of his or her notion as to what makes ‘good’ law, pursued in a cultural-collegial setting that is oriented by majoritarian requirements, while constrained by the legal nature of the case being considered. Empirically, all economic decisions made by Norwegian Supreme Court justices in five-justice panels from 1963 to 2012 are analyzed. Our multilevel model demonstrates that individual, collegial and case-level forces all contribute to explain the justices’ votes. These results suggest that case-related dynamics, such as who the plaintiff is or the amount of disagreement between justices, matter, but also that ideology – via appointment mechanisms – matters when a nations high court justices decide economic cases. Understanding the foundational assumptions and the institutional procedures is vital when transporting judicial behaviour models across polities.

Distant allies and proximate enemies in issue voting: Myth or reality?

The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation as to why Euclidean distance serves as a reasonably good approximation of reality when it does not incorporate explicity a consideration of the sides of the issue taken by the voter and candidate. The empirical evidence indicates quite clearly that Euclidean distance and side of issue are extremely highly correlated. Two general classes of explanation are offered. First, this powerful association can be seen as a function of the mathematical difficulty of actually being in close proximity to a preferred party while being on the opposite side of an issue on a 7-point scale. Second, even after this mathematical artifact is taken into account, the combined effects of assimilation, contrast, and negativity may bring favored candidates closer to the voter and drive the opposition further away, resulting in a strong correlation of Euclidean distance and side of the issue.

Computer Simulations of Voting Behavior

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Simple and Inexpensive Election Prediction: A Practical Alternative

URING the time period in which the nation goes to the polls to select a president, congressmen or statewide office-holders, the major television networks either gather massive quantities of information or have access to the data necessary for prediction and analysis of election results. Even the most casual political spectator is no doubt familiar with the predictions periodically reported by newscasters on election night. As one could surmise, generating these prognostications which are based upon limited information is a costly enterprise. The purpose of this research note is to present a simple, inexpensive means of predicting election outcomes which is well within the financial capacity of virtually any local radio or television station which offers a significant coverage of electoral contests. Quite obviously local radio and television stations do not enjoy a resource base which facilitates the extensive and intensive analyses we have come to expect from our national television networks. For the most part, local stations must rely upon the national networks and newswire information as data sources. Nevertheless, a simple method of prediction can be employed by local radio or television stations characterized by a modest (or meager) fiscal capability.l