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News media play a central role in democratic politics, yet we know little about how media affect the behavior of policy makers. To understand the conditions under which news media influence political elites, we advance a theory of strategic responsiveness, which contends that elected representatives are more likely to heed their constituents' preferences when voters are attentive. Accordingly, news media's influence on legislative behavior should be most apparent near elections and dependent on the partisan composition of the constituency. We capitalize on the incremental rollout of the conservative Fox News Channel in the late 1990s to evaluate our theoretical predictions. Fox News caused both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to increase support for the Republican Party position on divisive votes, but only in the waning months of the election cycle and among those members who represent districts with a sizable portion of Republican voters.

The voting behavior literature has advanced two prominent theoretical models of partisanship: the social psychological and rational models. Implicit to both stylized models is the assumption that all partisans process information similarly. Yet, growing research in psychology suggests that individuals possess different motivations when evaluating information. We propose that the applicability of the stylized models of partisanship is conditioned on individuals' need for cognition (NFC) and need for affect (NFA), with the social psychological model being most applicable to individuals who have a high NFA and the rational model most applicable to those with a high NFC. To test this proposition, we fielded a survey in which respondents who identified with the two major political parties in the United States (Democrat or Republican) were randomly assigned factual information that depicted either their party or their opposing party in a negative light. Respondents were then asked to assess the actions of that party and subsequently evaluate both political parties. We find evidence that is generally consistent with the proposition that the stylized models of partisanship are conditionally dependent on the extent to which individuals possess a need to engage in effortful thinking or a need to seek out emotions.

Parties value unity, yet members of parliament have incentives to deviate from the party line. This article examines how members of the European Parliament (EP) respond to competing demands from national parties and European party groups. We examine ideological shifts within a single parliamentary term to assess how election proximity affects party group cohesion. Our formal model of legislative behavior suggests that when EP elections are proximate, national party delegations shift toward national party positions, thus weakening EP party group cohesion. Our Bayesian item‐response analysis of roll calls in the 5th EP supports our theoretical predictions.

Legislative politics, Legislative institutions, Elections, U.S. Congress, U.S. Senate, Shirking, D72, D82,

Parliamentary institutions and partisan norms are complex and new members of parliament are unlikely to possess an innate awareness of optimal behaviour. This paper examines how new legislators adopt the behavioural patterns of incumbent members in the Sixth European Parliament. The latter provides an excellent opportunity to study such adaptive behaviour; in addition to newly elected members from 15 former states, new members from ten accession countries took seats for the first time. We examine how voting behaviour differs between new members from the 15 former states, new members from accession countries, and incumbent members. Our analysis shows that new members from former states defect less from their European political group than incumbents, while new accession country members defect more. Over time, the differences between these groups disappear.

This paper replicates the findings that appeared in the article “Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress,” published in theAmerican Journal of Political Science(44:316–325), in which Lawrence Rothenberg and Mitchell Sanders incorporated a new research design and, contrary to all previous studies, found evidence of ideological shirking in the U.S. House of Representatives. We investigate the robustness of their results by reestimating their model with Congress-specific fixed effects and find that their results no longer hold.

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