Elections and Divisiveness: Theory and Evidence

Abstract

This article provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of how politicians allocate their time across issues. When voters are uncertain about an incumbent's preferences, there is a pervasive incentive to "posture" by spending too much time on divisive issues (which are more informative about a politician's preferences) at the expense of time spent on common-values issues (which provide greater benefit to voters). Higher transparency over the politicians' choices can exacerbate the distortions. These theoretical results motivate an empirical study of how Members of the US Congress allocate time across issues in their floor speeches. We find that US senators spend more time on divisive issues when they are up for election, consistent with electorally induced posturing. In addition, we find that US house members spend more time on divisive issues in response to higher news transparency.Most citizens want a secure country, a healthy economy, safe neighborhoods, good schools, affordable health care, and good roads, parks, and other infrastructure. These issues do get discussed, of course, but a disproportionate amount of attention goes to issues like abortion, gun control, the Pledge of Allegiance, medical marijuana, and other narrow issues that simply do not motivate the great majority of Americans.-Fiorina, Adams, and Pope (2006, 202) Can't we wait on the things that we're going to yell at each other about and start on the things that we agree on? -Austan Goolsbee, Meet the Press, August 7, 2011 A s the above quotes illustrate, there is a widespread perception that the political process involves excessive amounts of time devoted to narrow and divisive issues. This raises the questions of why politicians spend so much time on these issues and if, as sometimes argued (e.g., Hillygus and Shields 2014), the focus on divisive issues is a response to electoral pressures. We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of electoral pressures in driving divisive politics.The first contribution of this article is theoretical. We provide a positive theory of incumbent politicians' allocation of time and resources across two policy issues. While commonvalues issues are more important to the voters, voters are unsure of the politician's preferences on divisive issues. The politician has an incentive to overprovide effort on divisive issues, at the expense of common-values issues, to signal that she holds preferences that make her more attractive to the majority of voters. Moreover, this incentive to "posture" is stronger with higher transparency-that is, when voters have more information on the politician's effort choices.The second contribution is empirical. We construct a measure of divisive effort for members of the US Congress using the text of their floor speeches. We then report two new empirical findings. First, we exploit variation in the time to re-election for US senators to demonstrate that senators spend more time on divisive issues when elections are more imminent. Second, we exploit variation in...

Case Vectors: Spatial Representations of the Law Using Document Embeddings

“…This section describes the approach for extracting and constructing statistical representations of tax legislation. Text is becoming an important data source for empirical work in economics and political science (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010;Quinn et al, 2010;Jensen et al, 2012;Hansen et al, 2014;Gentzkow et al, 2015;Ash et al, 2015). This paper builds on this previous work.…”

“…As there are improvements in storage and computer processing power, more refined representations of language may be useful in future research. 11 The basic methods on tokenizing text and representing documents as frequency distributions over tokens has become relatively standardized in the literature on political text analysis (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010;Quinn et al, 2010;Jensen et al, 2012;Gentzkow et al, 2014;Ash et al, 2015;Gentzkow et al, 2015;Jelveh et al, 2015). A script removes upper-case, splits text into sentences, and removes punctuation.…”

Conflict and Competition over Multi-Issues

“…Consequently, a candidate may be forced to spend a large amount of resources to defend an issue in which she has no comparative advantage. This behavior diverts political focus from "common values" towards "divisive issues" (Ash et al, 2015). On the contrary, Berliant and Konishi (2005) argue that candidates prefer to campaign on all issues.…”

“…In other elections, candidates attempt to drive the political debate to the issue in which they have a comparative advantage. The latter scenario relates to the idea of "issue ownership" (Aragonès et al, 2015;Denter, 2016;Petrocik, 1996;Riker, 1996), "divisive issues" (Dragu and Fan, 2016;Ash et al, 2015) and "issue divergence" (Amorós and Socorro Puy, 2007;Colomer and Llavador, 2011;Egorov, 2015), as in our model under increasing returns to e¤ort.…”

“…We also found that if issues have di¤erent weight in the …nal decision, strategic behavior becomes simultaneously driven by comparative advantages and by the value attached to each issue. In this context, we may observe "issue convergence" (Amorós and Socorro Puy, 2007;Colomer and Llavador, 2011;Egorov, 2015) towards "common value issues" (Ash et al, 2015). For instance, in the academia, tenure candidates tend to direct their e¤orts to research, not necessarily because they hold a comparative advantage in that issue, but because it is the issue with largest weight in the …nal outcome.…”