Despite concerns about the debilitating effects of partisanship on democratic government, in recent years political parties have gained strength in state governments as well as in Washington. In many ...cases these parties function as machines. Unlike machines of the past that manipulated votes, however, today's machines determine which candidates can credibly compete in a primary. Focusing on the history and politics of California, Seth E. Masket reveals how these machines evolved and how they stay in power by directing money, endorsements, and expertise to favored candidates, who often tend toward the ideological extreme. In a provocative conclusion, Masket argues that politicians are not inherently partisan. Instead, partisanship is thrust upon them by actors outside the government with the power to manipulate primary elections.
In recent years antidemocratic behavior has rippled across the nation. Lameduck state legislatures have stripped popularly elected governors of their powers; extreme partisan gerrymanders have warped ...representative institutions; state officials have nullified popularly adopted initiatives. The federal 'Constitution' offers few resources to address these problems, and ballot-box solutions cannot work when antidemocratic actions undermine elections themselves. Commentators increasingly decry the rule of the many by the few. This article argues that a vital response has been neglected. State constitutions embody a deep commitment to democracy. Unlike the federal 'Constitution', they were drafted - and have been repeatedly rewritten and amended - to empower popular majorities. In text, history, and structure alike, they express a commitment to popular sovereignty, majority rule, and political equality. We shorthand this commitment the democracy principle and describe its development and current potential. The article's aims are both theoretical and practical. At the level of theory, we offer a new view of American constitutionalism, one in which the majoritarian commitment of states' founding documents complements the antimajoritarian tilt of the national document. Such complementarity is an unspoken premise of the familiar claim that the federal 'Constitution' may temper excesses and abuses of state majoritarianism. We focus on the other half of the equation: state constitutions may ameliorate national democratic shortcomings. At the level of practice, we show how the democracy principle can inform a number of contemporary conflicts. Reimagining recent cases concerning electoral interference, political entrenchment, and more, we argue that it is time to reclaim the state constitutional commitment to democracy.
Often dismissed as window dressing, nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties, play an important role in non-democratic regimes. In a comprehensive cross-national ...study of all non-democratic states from 1946 to 2002 that examines the political uses of these institutions by dictators, Jennifer Gandhi finds that legislative and partisan institutions are an important component in the operation and survival of authoritarian regimes. She examines how and why these institutions are useful to dictatorships in maintaining power. In their efforts to neutralize threats to their power and to solicit cooperation from society, autocratic leaders use these institutions to organize concessions to potential opposition. The use of legislatures and parties to co-opt opposition results in significant institutional effects on policies and outcomes under dictatorship.
The identification of substantively similar policy proposals in legislation is important to scholars of public policy and legislative politics. Manual approaches are prohibitively costly in ...constructing datasets that accurately represent policymaking across policy domains, jurisdictions, or time. We propose the use of an algorithm that identifies similar sequences of text (i.e., text reuse), applied to legislative text, to measure the similarity of the policy proposals advanced by two bills. We study bills from U.S. state legislatures. We present three ground truth tests, applied to a corpus of 500,000 bills. First, we show that bills introduced by ideologically similar sponsors exhibit a high degree of text reuse, that bills classified by the National Conference of State Legislatures as covering the same policies exhibit a high degree of text reuse, and that rates of text reuse between states correlate with policy diffusion network ties between states. In an empirical application of our similarity measure, we find that Republican state legislators introduce legislation that is more similar to legislation introduced by Republicans in other states, than is legislation introduced by Democratic state legislators to legislation introduced by Democrats in other states.
Do businesspeople who win elected office use their positions to help their firms? Business leaders become politicians around the world, yet we know little about whether their commitment to public ...service trumps their own private interests. Using an original dataset of 2,703 firms in Russia, I employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of firm directors winning seats in subnational legislatures from 2004 to 2013. First, having a connection to a winning politician increases a firm’s revenue by 60% and profitability by 15% over a term in office. I then test between different mechanisms, finding that connected firms improve their performance by gaining access to bureaucrats and not by signaling legitimacy to financiers. The value of winning a seat increases in more politically competitive regions but falls markedly when more businesspeople win office in a convocation. Politically connected firms extract fewer benefits when faced with greater competition from other rent-seekers.
In the USA, governors became central figures in the fight against the novel coronavirus. In many cases, state leaders were forced to choose between preserving life and protecting economic livelihood. ...While prior research has underscored the important role that US governors played in implementing healthcare policies at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we know little about how characteristics of state leaders impacted self-employment. In this paper, we draw from upper echelons theory to examine how governor party and discretion impacted venture creation in the food and restaurant industry. Interestingly, we find no significant relationship between governor party and venture creation. However, we find that when the governor and legislature were unified in their political party — irrespective of party line — there were a higher number of new food and restaurant ventures created. We also found this effect to be strengthened when small business unemployment levels were higher. We explore the implications of these results for how unity of command may be beneficial during times of crisis.
Plain English Summary
During the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA, governors played a critical role in creating policy that either helped to preserve life or protect economic livelihood. Our research examines how two particularly important characteristics of governors and the political environment — party affiliation and discretion — impacted new venture creation within the food and restaurant industry, which is an important indicator of economic recovery. Using a publicly available, hand-collected dataset inclusive of all 50 states, we find that the political party of the governor has no effect on venture creation. However, we demonstrate that when the governorship and state legislature were aligned and led by members with the same party affiliation, the state experienced a greater number of new venture creation in the food and restaurant industry than when leaders of these two branches of government were not aligned. We further found that the effect of governor discretion was stronger when small business unemployment levels were higher. Our findings have implications for practice by suggesting that a unity of command government structure can be advantageous for economic outcomes during crises.
How political actors choose which politics to focus on helps shape the outcome of the policy process. While the policy agenda of the federal government has received widespread attention, there is ...much less known about the policy agendas of the U.S. states. In this paper, we describe how and why states choose to have similar agendas. We rely on the Twitter activity of every state legislator in America to measure the attention that states pay to the categories developed in the Policy Agenda Project (PAP). We develop machine learning tools to measure the proportion of tweets from every state legislature from 2017 in each of the PAP policy topics. Our results show that states that the public‐facing policy agenda of a state legislature is correlated with the level of legislative professionalism and the partisan and ideological politics of the state. These results further our understanding of state policymaking and agenda setting.
Resumen
La forma en que los actores políticos eligen en qué política enfocarse ayuda a dar forma al resultado del proceso de formulación de políticas. Si bien la agenda de políticas del gobierno federal ha recibido una atención generalizada, se sabe mucho menos sobre las agendas de políticas de los estados de EE. UU. En este documento, describimos cómo y por qué los estados eligen tener agendas similares. Confiamos en la actividad de Twitter de todos los legisladores estatales de Estados Unidos para medir la atención que los estados prestan a las categorías desarrolladas en el Proyecto de Agenda de Políticas (PAP). Desarrollamos herramientas de aprendizaje automático para medir la proporción de tweets de cada legislatura estatal desde 2017 en los temas de política de PAP. Nuestros resultados muestran que los estados que la agenda política de cara al público de una legislatura estatal está correlacionada con el nivel de profesionalismo legislativo y la política ideológica y partidista del estado. Estos resultados amplían nuestra comprensión de la formulación de políticas estatales y el establecimiento de la agenda.
摘要
政治行动者如何对哪些政治加以关注一事会影响政策过程的结果。虽然联邦政府的政策议程受到广泛关注，但很少有研究聚焦于美国各州的政策议程。本文中，我们描述了各州如何以及为何选择相似的议程。我们基于美国各州立法者的推特活动来衡量各州对政策议程计划(PAP)中制定的类别的关注程度。我们开发了机器学习工具来衡量从2017年起各州立法机构的推文在PAP政策主题中的比例。我们的研究结果表明，州立法机构面向公众的政策议程，与立法专业水平、州党派政治以及意识形态政治相关。这些结果加深了我们对州政策制定和议程设置的理解。
Are men and women legislators equally loyal to their parties? We theorize that parties select candidates based on gendered criteria, leading to the (s)election of more disciplined women. Moreover, we ...argue that gendered expectations about proper behavior limit women legislators’ ability to act independently from their parties. Using surveys from over 800 parliamentarians across 17 African legislatures, we find that women report significantly higher levels of party discipline than do their men copartisans. From this survey data and new legislative speech data, we also find support for our proposed causal mechanisms. Further, we find that among women parliamentarians, party discipline is negatively correlated with the prioritization of womens rights. A qualitative case study of the Namibian Parliament illustrates our findings. We discuss the implications of our results for women’s legislative effectiveness, for the substantive representation of women’s interests in policy making, and for the continued democratization of emerging party systems.
Sunset provisions are clauses embedded in legislation that cause a piece of legislation or a regulatory board to expire on a certain date unless the legislature takes affirmative action to renew the ...legislation or board. Supporters and legislators offer several reasons why sunset laws are valuable and useful. An article by Baugus and Bose (2015), reported on the king‐and‐council model of Congleton (2001), suggests that sunset laws are a key tool legislatures use in asserting themselves against an executive branch that often dominates state government. We investigate this possibility using empirical analysis, which suggests that part‐time legislatures, specifically, a form of part‐time legislature referred to as hybrid legislatures, are more prone to use sunset legislation as a tool to keep the executive preferences in check.
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