Members and parties have electoral incentives to address issues on the congressional agenda to satisfy public demand. When determining which issues to address, majorities seek to minimize their uncertainty about the costs and electoral benefits of legislating by revisiting policy areas previously addressed. This theory is tested using error-correction models that demonstrate that policy activity within each chamber is in a long-term equilibrium and that the passage of legislation, even important bills, promotes future policymaking in the same policy area. This relationship is stronger when the majority has less information about the costs of lawmaking—specifically, when it faces a chamber controlled by the opposite party and when it is a new majority.

Why do some leaders protect their citizens from natural disasters while others do not? This paper argues that leaders in large coalition systems provide more protection against natural disasters than leaders in small coalition systems. Yet, autocrats also provide large-scale disaster protection if members of their winning coalition are exposed to natural hazards. The paper tests these propositions by examining cross-country variation in the number of sea-level stations as a lower bound for protection against ocean-originated disasters. Empirical evidence indicates that leaders in large coalition systems deploy more sea-level stations than their counterparts in small coalition systems. The evidence also shows that if the national capital is close to the coast, thus exposing members of the ruling coalition to ocean-originated hazards, leaders across political systems install more sea-level stations.

Retrospective voting is a central explanation for voters’ support of incumbents. Yet, despite the variety of conditions facing American cities, past research has devoted little attention to retrospective voting for mayors. This paper first develops hypotheses about how local retrospective voting might differ from its national analog, due to both differing information sources and the presence of national benchmarks. It then analyzes retrospective voting using the largest data set on big-city mayoral elections between 1990 and 2011 to date. Neither crime rates nor property values consistently influence incumbent mayors’ vote shares, nor do changes in local conditions. However, low city-level unemployment relative to national unemployment correlates with higher incumbent support. The urban voter is a particular type of retrospective voter, one who compares local economic performance to conditions elsewhere. Moreover, these effects appear to be present only in cities that dominate their media markets, suggesting media outlets’ role in facilitating retrospective voting.

Voter turnout in second-order elections is on a dramatic decline in many modern democracies. This article investigates how electoral participation can be substantially increased by holding multiple of these less important elections simultaneously. Leading to a relative decrease in voting costs, concurrent elections theoretically have economies of scale to the individual voter and thus should see turnout levels larger than those obtained in any stand-alone election. Leveraging as-if-random variation of local election timing in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of concurrent mayoral elections on European election turnout at around 10 percentage points. Exploiting variation in treatment intensity, we show that the magnitude of the concurrency effect is contingent upon district size and the competitiveness of the local race.

A large class of theoretical models posits that voters choose candidates on the basis of issue congruence, but convincing empirical tests of this key claim remain elusive. The most persistent difficulty is obtaining comparable spatial estimates for winning and losing candidates, as well as voters. We address these issues using candidate surveys to characterize the electoral platforms for winners and losers, and large issue batteries in 2008 and 2010 to estimate voter preferences. Questions that were answered by both candidates and citizens allow us to jointly scale these estimates. We find robust evidence that vote choice in congressional elections is both strongly associated with spatial proximity and that individual-level and contextual variables commonly associated with congressional voting behavior condition the magnitude of its importance. Our results have important implications for theories of voter decision-making and electoral institutions.

This paper studies how citizen-initiated referenda affect the decision-making of elected representatives. In the absence of direct democracy, elected officials who do not share the preferences of voters may enact their preferred policies even at the cost of decreasing the likelihood of reelection. Direct democracy diminishes the policy benefits of doing that, as voters may now overturn some of the policy decisions. Hence, elected officials are induced to implement the policies preferred by the voters not only on those issues that are subject to a possible citizen-initiated referendum, but also on those that are not. This result holds even when the voters’ information about their true interests is limited. Moreover, whereas in a representative democracy, being more informed may undermine voters’ ability to control public officials, the possibility of citizen-initiated referenda means that additional information improves voter control, including on issues that may be outside the direct democracy domain.

Previous scholarship has provided ample evidence that non-spatial considerations can trump voters’ policy preferences in candidate selections. The literature has been less successful, however, in providing a sense of the factors that raise candidates’ non-policy appeal. Faced with the challenging task of separating policy and non-policy aspects of individual vote choices, empirical research has frequently relied on shorthand measures like candidate incumbency. This paper separates the valence component from policy-based candidate selections by explicitly supplying voters with information on the policy agreement between themselves and their district candidates. Relying on the distinction between campaign valence and character valence by Stone and Simas, it is shown that candidate valence is driven by candidate visibility in a party-dominated political system.

Party competition is largely about making policy promises to voters. We argue that the clarity of the expressed policy position may be equally important. If blurred messages toward different audiences and therefore ambiguous positions can attract votes from different groups, parties have incentives to present ambiguous rather than clear-cut policy platforms. We present a formal model of multi-party competition with stochastic voting where party leaders make strategic choices on both the position and the level of ambiguity of their platforms. Leaders respond to the demands of two principals, the general public and party core constituencies. We derive two hypothesis on the location and ambiguity of party platforms and provide initial tests of these hypotheses in a comparative setting in 14 Western European democracies gathering data on voter and party left-right positions from Eurobarometer surveys and electoral manifestos. Ambiguity of party profiles is estimated using a variant of Wordscores on a newly established data set of electoral manifestos. We find that platforms become more ambiguous as the preferences of the two principals diverge. Our findings imply that ambiguity can be a winning strategy for parties, especially in settings with strong partisan lines.

To what extent do political campaigns mobilize voters? Despite the central role of campaigns in American politics and despite many experiments on campaigning, we know little about the aggregate effects of an entire campaign on voter participation. Drawing upon inside information from presidential campaigns and utilizing a geographic research design that exploits media markets spanning state boundaries, we estimate the aggregate effects of a large-scale campaign. We estimate that the 2012 presidential campaigns increased turnout in highly targeted states by 7–8 percentage points, on average, indicating that modern campaigns can significantly alter the size and composition of the voting population. Further evidence suggests that the predominant mechanism behind this effect is traditional ground campaigning, which has dramatically increased in scale in the last few presidential elections. Additionally, we find no evidence of diminishing marginal returns to ground campaigning, meaning that voter contacts, each likely exhibiting small individual effects, may aggregate to large effects over the course of a campaign.

The effect of conditioning on an additional covariate on confounding bias depends, in part, on covariates that are unobserved. We characterize the conditions under which the interaction between a covariate that is available for conditioning and one that is not can affect bias. When the confounding effects of two covariates, one of which is observed, are countervailing (in opposite directions), conditioning on the observed covariate can increase bias. We demonstrate this possibility analytically, and then show that these conditions are not rare in actual data. We also consider whether balance tests or sensitivity analysis can be used to justify the inclusion of an additional covariate. Our results indicate that neither provide protection against overadjustment.

Individuals who are more sensitive to negative outcomes from error are more likely to provide nonresponses in surveys. We argue Neurotics’ sensitivity to negative outcomes leads them to avoid gathering costly information and forming/reporting opinions about stimuli. Using data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we show Neuroticism is strongly and positively associated with NA/DK responses when placing politicians on a seven-point ideological scale. We then introduce to political science a Bayesian hierarchical model that allows nonresponse to be generated by both a lack of information as well as disincentives for response. Using this model, we show that the NA/DK responses in these data are due to inhibited information collection and indecision from error avoidance by Neurotics.

Presidential systems around the world vary in the proportion of legislators required to override an executive veto. We argue that the nature of the override provision affects executive influence in policymaking; as the proportion needed to override a veto increases, so should executive influence. We leverage varying override requirements across the US states to conduct a comparative study of executive influence over budgetary outcomes. Using governors’ budget requests and enacted appropriations for fiscal years 1987–2011, we provide evidence that state legislatures better accommodate budgetary requests in states with higher override requirements. Further, governors whose preferences are extreme relative to the legislature are more likely to have their budgetary goals met in states with a higher veto threshold.

Comparable household income measures are crucial for most social science analyses of cross-national public opinion survey data. However, income questions in many cross-national surveys suffer from comparability and interpretability limitations that have not been adequately addressed by the existing literature. In this article, we examine the income measure in one major survey, the World Values Survey (WVS), arguing that a variety of problems arise when drawing inferences—descriptive or causal, individual or aggregate—using the standard ten-category measure. We then propose and implement a number of corrections to these potential biases and present a series of diagnostics that confirm the importance of our proposed corrections. We conclude by documenting some of the same challenges in the income measures used in other cross-national surveys. The accompanying data set can be merged with the WVS to make better use of the income measure.

Political scientists interested in estimating how public opinion varies by constituency have developed several strategies for supplementing limited constituency survey data with additional sources of information. We present two evaluation studies in the previously unexamined context of British constituency-level opinion: an external validation study of party vote share in the 2010 general election and a cross-validation of opinion toward the European Union. We find that most of the gains over direct estimation come from the inclusion of constituency-level predictors, which are also the easiest source of additional information to incorporate. Individual-level predictors combined with post-stratification particularly improve estimates from unrepresentative samples, and geographic local smoothing can compensate for weak constituency-level predictors. We argue that these findings are likely to be representative of applications of these methods where the number of constituencies is large.

Studies have shown that a foreign policy position of a member of Congress is often distinct from a domestic one. Despite this, measures commonly used to determine the foreign policy positions of members of Congress are based on congressional votes on domestic as well as foreign policy matters. As foreign policy votes take up only a small portion of all congressional votes, these measures conflate a member’s foreign policy position with his or her domestic policy position. While there are other measures based exclusively on foreign policy votes, these are also problematic because they tend to use a small number of controversial votes and thus inflate extremism. To address these shortcomings, I present a new measure by applying a Bayesian item response theory model to all foreign policy votes. This paper demonstrates the similarities, differences, and advantages of this measure by comparing it with the existing measures in a series of analyses of foreign policy positions of political parties and individual legislators.

The connection between the economy and vote choice continues to garner interest both in the academic and popular press. To isolate the effects of economic considerations, we develop a laboratory experiment that allows us to vary these considerations at three levels: the individual, community, and national economy. Choices by policymakers directly affect outcomes at each of these levels, allowing us to test for egotropic, “communotropic,” and sociotropic voting, as well as examine information search. We observe significant demand for information and that demand decreases with the complexity of the environment. Moreover, information demand is positively associated with other-regarding behavior.

This article discusses the methodological challenges of legislative surveys. Following an overview of different types of survey biases, the article argues that self-selection and misreporting are the most critical problems for legislative surveys. In order to identify the self-selection and misreporting biases, we compare the answers with a survey from Swiss members of parliament with their observed behavior in the parliament. The empirical analysis shows that the survey sample has a substantial misreporting bias. We conclude that the parliamentarian’s attitude toward the survey object is strongly linked to their response. These issues should be addressed to improve the design and quality of legislative surveys.

We argue that political sciexntists can provide additional evidence for the predictive validity of observational and quasi-experimental research designs by minimizing the expected prediction error or generalization error of their empirical models. For observational and quasi-experimental data not generated by a stochastic mechanism under the researcher’s control, the reproduction of statistical analyses is possible but replication of the data-generating procedures is not. Estimating the generalization error of a model for this type of data and then adjusting the model to minimize this estimate—regularization—provides evidence for the predictive validity of the study by decreasing the risk of overfitting. Estimating generalization error also allows for model comparisons that highlight underfitting: when a model generalizes poorly due to missing systematic features of the data-generating process. Thus, minimizing generalization error provides a principled method for modeling relationships between variables that are measured but whose relationships with the outcome(s) are left unspecified by a deductively valid theory. Overall, the minimization of generalization error is important because it quantifies the expected reliability of predictions in a way that is similar to external validity, consequently increasing the validity of the study’s conclusions.

This research note extends the confrontational approach to estimating party policy positions by providing a way to estimate uncertainty associated with the measurements. The confrontational approach is a flexible method of determining party policy positions, which is ideally suited to measure parties’ positions on issues that are specific to a country or period in time. We introduce a method of estimating the uncertainty of confrontational estimates by restating the approach as a special case of an item response theory, opening up the possibility of using the confrontational approach not only as a descriptive tool but also as a means of testing hypotheses on party policy preferences. We illustrate our model using analysis of the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election and the 2009 European elections.

Consensual-pluralistic institutional features of representative democracies have traditionally been associated with satisfaction with democracy (SWD). However, more recent studies report contradictory results on the effects of some of these institutional determinants on SWD. This article confirms these puzzling findings by showing that electoral proportionality increases SWD while other pluralistic factors such as government fractionalization produce the opposite effect. We illustrate this duality of counteracting effects by expanding the number of cases under study to different regions of the world in a comprehensive time-series cross-sectional sample of 58 democracies between 1990 and 2012. In the second part of the paper, we are able to reconfirm these findings at the individual level by employing survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.