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Party Responsibility in the States: Some Causal Factors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Thomas A. Flinn
Affiliation:
Oberlin College

Extract

Pleas and programs for party responsibility are not new. It is remarkable, however, how little the discussion has advanced. I do not mean that I am surprised that the path of reform has been hard but that knowledge of the subject has not grown in proportion to the length of the discussion. Proponents believe party responsibility introduces desired qualities into the policy process and makes possible rational organization of the electorate in terms of policy. Not much has been done to provide adequate support for either of these propositions. In fact, it is hard to discover a serious effort to put these propositions in some form which would permit a partial but rigorous test. Opponents on the other hand conjure up visions of polarized parties, downtrodden minorities, and multipartyism as the fruits of party responsibility. They are able to make these improbable inferences by working with an exceedingly simple model, by ignoring the functions of party competition and the complex of factors which seem to shape party systems. Some observers less involved in the argument allow that the debate may have some value since it leads to notice of important realities. But, for them, proposed reforms are not to be taken seriously because they are Utopian in two senses: (1) sweeping and incalculable; and (2) out of reach. This view seems to overlook the fact that party responsibility is a matter of degree and that incremental reform is, at least, possible in principle. Finally, very little attention has been paid to factors which may promote or inhibit party responsibility.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1964

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References

1 This study is a revision of a paper delivered at the APSA annual meeting of 1963. I was assisted in preparation by a grant from the Ford Foundation to Oberlin College for the study of public affairs. The assistance of Robert Murphy and Virginia Woodcock is also acknowledged with deep appreciation.

2 Jewell, Malcolm E., “Party Voting in American State Legislatures,” this Review, Vol. 49 (Sept., 1955), pp. 773791Google Scholar, and studies cited by Jewell, , The State Legislature (New York, 1962)Google Scholar, ch. 3.

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18 This is in effect a time sample, and it is taken to be a random sample of party opposition votes in the 1959 session. Findings are spoken of as applying to the entire session, and probabilities are given. Another time sample taken from the 1963 session is treated in the same way. If the data analyzed do not constitute random samples, then the probabilities add nothing, of course; and certain statements must be taken to apply only to the data analyzed and not to the entire legislative sessions from which they were drawn.

19 But see Froman, Lewis A. Jr., “Inter-Party Constituency Differences and Congressional Voting Behavior,” this Review, Vol. 57 (March, 1963), pp. 5762Google Scholar. As I understand him, he seems to argue that intra-party differences relate to differences in constituency and that Democrats and Republicans tend to represent different kinds of constituencies. Therefore, differences between the parties are due to constituency influences. This is not necessarily true since intra-party differences may have little or nothing to do with inter-party differences, as Table II in this study shows. Furthermore, Froman's phi coefficients which he uses to measure the relations of constituency to intra-party differences are so weak as to suggest negative rather than positive findings.

20 MacRae, Duncan Jr., “The Relations Between Roll Call Votes and Constituencies in the Massachusetts House of Representatives,” this Review, Vol. 46 (December, 1952), pp. 10461055Google Scholar, reprinted in Eulau, , Eldersveld, , and Janowitz, (eds.), Political Behavior (Glencoe, Ill., 1956), pp. 317324Google Scholar.

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23 Pesonen in a recent study [Pesonen, Pertti, “Close and Safe State Elections in Massachusetts,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 7 (February, 1963), pp. 5470]CrossRefGoogle Scholar replicates MacRae's study using a more recent session of the Bame legislature. He uses an improved measure of party loyalty, and reaches the same conclusion as MacRae concerning the relation of constituency and party voting. However, he works with only seven roll calls; and does not measure the strength of the observed relation.

24 Dye, op. cit., pp. 476–477.

25 Ibid., p. 477.

26 Ibid., pp. 479–480.

27 Members were also scored on 60 party agreement votes. (10 of the original 183 roll calls were dropped since one party or the other was evenly divided making it impossible to characterize the vote as a party agreement or a party opposition vote.) The scores of Democratic and Republican members on party opposition votes were each correlated with their scores on party agreement votes. The product moment coefficients were less than .1 in each case, indicating that a party opposition vote and a party agreement vote are distinctly different events in the life of the legislature.

28 See Mood, A. M., Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (New York, 1950), pp. 318326Google Scholar. The procedure is designed to permit comparison of variance around the over-all mean with the sum of the variance around class means. It is specially useful in the present situation since it allows flexibility in the creation of classes.

29 Fifty party opposition roll calls were selected. They are every such vote which occurred between May 15 and the July 11 recess. Members who voted on less than 35 of the 50 selected votes were dropped: 3 Republicans and 3 Democrats. Others were given scores expressing the percentage of their votes cast in support of positions taken by a majority of Democrats.

30 MacRae, op. cit., reprinted in Eulau et al., pp. 321–322.

31 Pesonen, op. cit., p. 62.

32 Dye, op. cit., p. 477.

33 Patterson, Samuel C., “The Role of the Deviant in the State Legislative System: The Wisconsin Assembly,” The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 14 (June, 1961), pp. 460–472, 467CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Becker, R. W. et al. , “Correlates of Legislative Voting: Michigan House of Representatives, 1954–1961,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 6 (Nov., 1962), pp. 384396CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Actually, the number of members from districts classified by the authors as close is so small as to make the finding doubtful. What the data do show clearly, however, is that so few members of the Michigan House come from close districts that electoral insecurity could not influence the behavior of many members.

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38 Respondents did not differ significantly from from non-respondents in terms of constituency characteristics or in terms of party support scores; in fact, they were remarkably similar. Respondents were, therefore, treated as a proper sample from which inferences could be drawn. If there is objection, then it is only necessary to consider what follows as applying to about two-thirds of the members of the 1963 Ohio House and not to the whole House.

39 McClosky, Herbert et al. , “Issue Conflict and Consensus Among Party Leaders and Followers,” this Review, Vol. 53 (June, 1960), pp. 406427Google Scholar.

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