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This article examines the 1996 press releases issued by Republican presidential nominee candidates during the invisible primary and the subsequent stories generated by these press releases in newspapers. We systematically examine how campaigns structure their messages, which messages are transmitted by the press to the voting public, and what factors influence the transmission of the campaign's message. We find that campaign organizations disseminate a variety of messages to the media. Our analysis demonstrates that national media organizations are most receptive to informative (logistical) messages disseminated by candidates who are at the head of the field and most hostile to substantive (issue-oriented) messages regardless of their campaign of origin. By contrast, the state press is most open to substantive messages issued by lower-tier candidates. It appears from our results that the media, more than the campaign, bear the responsibility for the emphasis on the horse race.We focus our analysis on the role of both media norms and routines and the campaign process itself in shaping the campaign information environment. Determining which campaign messages are more likely to reach the public through the news media provides insight into the effect each of these institutions has on the election process; specifically we should arrive at a better understanding of how campaigns and news organizations interact to structure the campaign agenda. In the next section we discuss the theoretical underpinnings and research pertaining to the nature of campaign messages, media norms and routines, and the interplay between them. Theory and Evidence The Invisible PrimaryThe collapse of the primary season has made the invisible primary 2 an increasingly critical period for campaigns. It

The elevated levels of party polarization observed in the contemporary Congress have been attributed to a variety of factors. One of the more commonly recurring themes among observers of congressional politics is that changes in district boundaries resulting from the redistricting process are a root cause. Using a new data set linking congressional districts from 1962 to 2002, we offer a direct test of this claim. Our results show that although there is an overall trend of increasing polarization, districts that have undergone significant changes as a result of redistricting have become even more polarized. Although the effect is relatively modest, it suggests that redistricting is one among other factors that produce party polarization in the House and may help to explain the elevated levels of polarization in the House relative to the Senate.

Legislative redistricting in the states is highly contentious due, at least in part, to its partisan implications. But does the method by which states draw legislative districts affect partisan competition in the elections that are held in these districts? We examine the effects of three methods used by states to draw district boundaries on competition in congressional elections. Specifically, we evaluate the effects on competition of legislative, judicial, and commission redistricting plans enacted prior to the 1992 and 2002 congressional elections. We find that more competitive elections occur when courts and commissions are directly involved in the redistricting process, as opposed to when redistricting is handled only in the state legislative process.

The authors revisit the gender gap in campaign finance and find an advantage for women candidates in earning donations from individual donors due to the activities of female donor networks and the changing congressional donor pool. Women supported by these networks, especially Democratic women, receive a boost in campaign fundraising compared to their male counterparts, whereas women not supported by these networks receive significantly less. The ideological leanings of congressional donors also advantage Democratic women. Substantial partisan gender differences in this area of campaign finance persist, and this fund-raising gap may contribute to the growing partisan gender gap in Congress.

One of the fundamental findings in the congressional literature is that one or sometimes two dimensions can successfully describe roll-call voting. In this paper we investigate if we can reach the same conclusions about low dimensionality when we divide the roll-call agenda into subsets of relatively homogeneous subject matter. We are primarily interested in the degree to which the same ordering of representatives is yielded across these different groups of votes. To conduct our analysis we focus on all roll calls on the 13 annual appropriations bills across eight congresses. When we concentrate on these smaller issue areas, we find that voting is multidimensional and members do not vote in a consistent ideological fashion across all issue areas.

We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predictions from the party cartel theory (Cox and McCubbins 1993. We gain leverage on the question of party influence in Congress by focusing on three types of House members: reelection seekers, higher-office seekers, and retiring members. We argue that retiring House members are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect means (when compared to higher-office seekers and reelection seekers) to determine the existence of party influence. Results from a pooled, cross-sectional analysis of the 94th through 105th Congresses (1975-98) suggest that party influence is indeed present in Congress, especially where the party cartel theory predicts: on procedural, rather than final-passage, votes. Moreover, we find that procedural party influence is almost exclusively the domain of the majority party. This latter finding is especially important because most prior studies have been limited to investigating interparty influence only.

In recent years, considerable scholarly attention has focused on earmarks, the quintessential example of pork barrel politics. We assess the degree to which existing theories can explain the distribution of earmarks in the U.S. House of Representatives. First, drawing on informal interviews with individuals on Capitol Hill regarding the earmark process, we argue that assessing institutional and constituency-level factors that affect the earmark receipts of individual members requires examination at the level of the Appropriations subcommittees. Second, we demonstrate that both distributive and partisan theories of legislative organization are applicable to the distribution of earmarks. Finally, we present results indicating that contrary to the conventional wisdom, most subcommittees do not distribute pork based on electoral vulnerability. Rather, legislators' status in the appropriations process has the most influence. These findings offer insights into the path forward as debate continues over congressionally directed spending.