We argue that state legislative politics is qualitatively different from national congressional politics in the extent to which it focuses on localized and geographically specific legislation salient to subconstituencies within a legislative district. Whereas congressional politics focuses on casework benefits for individual constituents, state legislative politics is more oriented to the delivery of localized benefits for groups of citizens in specific areas within a district, fostering a geographically specific group connection. A primary way to build such targeted geographical support is for members to introduce particularistic legislation designed to aid their specific targeted geographical area within the district. We argue that this is primarily a function of electoral rules. Using original sponsorship data from U.S. state houses, we demonstrate that greater district magnitude and more inclusive selection procedures such as open primaries are associated with more particularism. Our findings provide strong support for a voter-group alignment model of electoral politics distinct from the personal vote/electoral connection model that characterizes U.S. congressional politics and is more akin to patterns of geographically specific group-oriented electoral politics found in Europe and throughout the world.
We investigate the relationship between electoral institutions and committee autonomy in the context of U.S. state legislatures. The distributive theories of legislative organization suggest that electoral rules that make personal reputations more important motivate legislators to decentralize power and enhance committee autonomy to be able to target particularistic goods to their local constituencies. We argue that the distributive theories have direct implications for the relationship between candidate selection procedures and committee autonomy. The need to reach out to a large number of voters and to amass significant financial resources in states with more inclusive candidate selection procedures such as the open primary makes representatives more dependent on special interests, which is conducive to legislative particularism and committee autonomy. We take advantage of the great variation across the American states to investigate the effects of candidate selection procedures, a factor neglected in the previous literature. Examining 24 state legislatures from 1955 to 1995, we find that the inclusiveness of the selectorate, or the body electing candidates, has a significant effect on committee autonomy with more inclusive primary elections leading to more autonomous committee systems. By contrast, however, term limits were not a significant predictor of committee autonomy. This contributes to our understanding of how legislators amend institutional arrangements to achieve their electoral goals.
It can be risky for governments to renege on exchange rate commitments, but it is misleading to characterize the costs as audience costs. While an audience costs approach assumes that the punishment for reneging is automatic, we model the choice of exchange rate policy in the shadow of elections as a signaling game between voters and governments, where governments have private information and voters are rational. We find that voters draw different inferences when they see reneging by different actors, and only Left governments are punished for breaking their promises. We test this hypothesis in the context of the post-Communist countries in the 1990s, and find that Left governments were more likely to fall if they reneged on exchange rate commitments, but Right governments were not.
Do voters punish left-wing parties that pursue neo-liberal policies? We address the question in the context of post-communist countries, where the left implemented significant and painful market-oriented reforms. For the left, owning these reforms means backing away from its popular image and policy platform and plausibly generates two electorally consequential outcomes: a 'brand dilution' effect that weakens voters' attachment to left parties and is magnified by the economic vulnerability of the left's core constituency; and an 'expectations effect' that increases demand for right-wing politicians. Overall, the left should lose votes, particularly when voters can easily attribute responsibility for policies. Our analysis uses updated data on the vote shares for all parties and elections in postcommunist democracies from 1991 to 2010. We find support for the theory: Incumbent left-wing parties of the chief executive are punished at the ballot box for moving to the right on economic policy. This, likely, comes from a 'brand dilution' effect, as we find that such vote losses feed the fortunes of non-incumbent left-wing and populist parties.
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