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Parties in Elections, Parties in Government, and Partisan Bias

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Keith Krehbiel ,
Adam Meirowitz  and
Thomas Romer
Keith Krehbiel
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. e-mail: krehbiel@stanford.edu
Adam Meirowitz
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. e-mail: ameirowi@princeton.edu
Thomas Romer
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. e-mail: romer@princeton.edu
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Abstract

Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidates in elections and when winning candidates choose among policy alternatives in government. But the inextricably linked institutions, incentives, and behavior that determine these multistage choices are substantively complex and analytically unwieldy, particularly if modeled explicitly and considered in total, from citizen preferences through government outcomes. To strike a balance between complexity and tractability, we modify standard spatial models of electoral competition and governmental policy-making to study how components of partisanship—such as candidate platform separation in elections, party ID-based voting, national partisan tides, and party-disciplined behavior in the legislature—are related to policy outcomes. We define partisan bias as the distance between the following two points in a conventional choice space: the ideal point of the median voter in the median legislative district and the policy outcome selected by the elected legislature. The study reveals that none of the party-in-electorate conditions is capable of producing partisan bias independently. Specified combinations of conditions, however, can significantly increase the bias and/or the variance of policy outcomes, sometimes in subtle ways.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , Spring 2005 , pp. 113 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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