Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article highlights the president, who has extensive opportunities, both ex ante and ex post, to influence the distribution of federal outlays. We analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24-year period—the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled. Using district and county fixed-effects estimation strategies, we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays. We find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president's party represent them.

Theory suggests that three factors – the importance of ideology to primary voters, costly movement due to candidate reputations and lack of competition – all contribute to candidate divergence in US congressional elections. These predictions are analysed with new data from a 2000 mail survey that asked congressional candidates to place themselves on a left–right ideological scale. The data reveal that candidates often diverge, but that the degree of candidate polarization is variable and may be explained by factors in the theory. Candidates with firm public reputations, those who face weak general election competition, and those who experience stiff primary competition are all more likely to deviate from the median voter's position. Perhaps more importantly, the locations that candidates adopt have clear effects on their vote shares.

This article argues that administrative burden—that is, an individual's experience of policy implementation as onerous—is an important consideration for administrators and influences their views on policy and governance options. The authors test this proposition in the policy area of election administration using a mixed‐method assessment of local election officials. They find that the perceived administrative burden of policies is associated with a preference to shift responsibilities to others, perceptions of greater flaws and lesser merit in policies that have created the burden (to the point that such judgments are demonstrably wrong), and opposition to related policy innovations.

Though the overreporting of voter turnout in the National Election Study (NES) is widely known, this article shows that the problem has become increasingly severe. The gap between NES and official estimates of presidential election turnout has more than doubled in a nearly linear fashion, from 11 points in 1952 to 24 points in 1996. This occurred because official voter turnout fell steadily from 1960 onward, while NES turnout did not. In contrast, the bias in House election turnout is always smaller and has increased only marginally. Using simple bivariate statistics, I find that worsening presidential turnout estimates are the result mostly of declining response rates rather than instrumentation, question wording changes, or other factors. As more peripheral voters have eluded interviewers in recent years, the sample became more saturated with self-reported voters, thus inflating reported turnout.

While many scholars have focused on the production of legislation, we explore life after enactment. Contrary to the prevailing view that federal programs are indissoluble, we show that programmatic restructurings and terminations are commonplace. In addition, we observe significant changes in programmatic appropriations. We suggest that a sitting congress is most likely to transform, kill, or cut programs inherited from an enacting congress when its partisan composition differs substantially. To test this claim, we examine the postenactment histories of every federal domestic program established between 1971 and 2003, using a new dataset that distinguishes program death from restructuring. Consistent with our predictions, we find that changes in the partisan composition of congresses have a strong influence on program durability and size. We thus dispel the notion that federal programs are everlasting while providing a plausible coalition-based account for their evolution. I f government's fundamental task is, as Harold Lasswell famously asserted (1936), to decide "who gets what, when, and how," then we should add, "and for how long." While much recent scholarship has focused on the production of legislation, relatively little has considered what happens to a program once elected officials have enacted it. It is not enough to characterize the course that a particular group of policy makers initially set. Scholars need to identify the enduring effects of policy makers' actions. We need to know whether their footprints were quickly washed away or left lasting imprints. Unfortunately, existing research yields few and often misleading conclusions about the trajectory of government programs.This article analyzes the durability and size of government programs, focusing on the effects of changes in the partisan composition of congresses over time. for helpful feedback on earlier drafts. We are indebted to Kenneth Bickers and Robert Stein for sharing their CFDA database. when the partisan compositions of the enacting and current congresses look much alike, a program should be less susceptible to legislative tinkering. However intuitive this logic might be, it runs against a long literature in public administration and so deserves careful empirical scrutiny.We therefore examine the size and survival of all federal government domestic programs established between 1971 and 2003 (2,059 programs in total, yielding 20,159 program-year observations). Consistent with our predictions, we find that changes in the partisan composition of congresses have a strong influence on both program durability and spending levels. Moreover, these effects are asymmetric: program life spans are regularly shortened by partisan losses, but lengthened by partisan gains; similarly, programmatic spending predictably declines after partisan losses, but increases after partisan gains. We thus dispel the dominant notion that federal programs are "immortal" while providing a plausible coalitionbased account of their varying life spans and spending traje...

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Physical and mental health is known to have wide influence over most aspects of social life—be it schooling and employment or marriage and broader social engagement—but has received limited attention in explaining different forms of political participation. We analyze a unique dataset with a rich array of objective measures of cognitive and physical well-being and two objective measures of political participation, voting and contributing money to campaigns and parties. For voting, each aspect of health has a powerful effect on par with traditional predictors of participation such as education. In contrast, health has little to no effect on making campaign contributions. We recommend additional attention to the multifaceted affects of health on different forms of political participation.