No abstract

As states across the country have adopted term limits provisions for their state legislatures, political scientists have analyzed how mass unseatings of incumbents are affecting legislative composition, capacity, and activity. Yet this reform may impact legislatures not only directly through forced retirements, but also indirectly by changing the incentives to prospective candidates. Following hypotheses suggested by Fiorina (1994Fiorina ( , 1996, we argue that term limits have changed the incentive structure for typical Democratic candidates in some legislatures. This change in incentives has, in turn, affected the partisan composition of statehouses just as the professionalization movement affected incentives and partisan composition a generation ago. We provide quantitative evidence that supports Fiorina's conjectures about term limits, suggesting that the presence of term limits provisions even before they take effect creates an environment that is less attractive to Democratic candidates.

The author argues that direct election intensified existing electoral incentives in the early-twentieth-century Senate, shifting the audience for senators' reelection efforts with measurable behavioral consequences. The author examines patterns of bill sponsorship, roll-call participation, and party voting in the decades surrounding the Seventeenth Amendment's ratification, a time when originally elected and originally selected senators served side by side. The author finds evidence of increased sponsorship and participation among originally elected senators. Comparing behavioral patterns before and after the constitutional amendment also reveals other important behavioral shifts toward a mass audience in the postamendment period, including a tendency to increase constituency bill sponsorship immediately before reelection and a strengthening of the link between state partisanship and senators' party support voting.

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the consequences of delegate selection rules for presidential nominations, yet few have sought an explanation for the variance in these rules across the states and over time. In this article, we ask why state party elites would open their processes of delegate selection to a large and potentially ideologically diverse constituency by holding primary elections rather than caucuses. We develop an account of endogenous institutional choice that suggests elites ought to be increasingly likely to open their delegate selection rules as the ideological nature of the party and the state's electorate converge. We test this claim using a new data set on Democratic Party selection rules between 1972 and 2000 and find that the degree of ideological convergence is a strong predictor of state party choices to open the process of delegate selection. These results provide additional support for general theoretical claims that characterize political institutions as fundamentally endogenous to the politics they regulate.

Although members of Congress exhibit considerable stability in their voting decisions on similar, recurring issues, members' long‐term voting histories reveal evidence of systematic instability as well. I argue that members reverse positions in predictable ways when the vote history loses value as a decision cue, and I present empirical evidence for this behavior in the context of the highly salient and regularly repeated House decisions on increasing the federal minimum wage. The empirical findings suggest that reversals of member positions are related to institutional, electoral, and constituency factors. I conclude by discussing the importance of these findings to understanding congressional decision making and representation.