Partisan Polarization and Congressional Accountability in House Elections

Abstract

Early research led scholars to believe that institutional accountability in

A More Responsible Two-Party System? Accountability for Majority and Minority Party Performance in a Polarized Congress

“…18 In addition, the effect of congressional performance evaluations on majority party fortunes appears to be growing as Congress polarizes along party lines. 19 On its face, these findings would appear to support the one-party model of accountability for Congress. Specifically, they are consistent with a story in which everything a citizen learns or feels about Congress is automatically associated with a single party: the majority.…”

Tarnishing Opponents, Polarizing Congress: The House Minority Party and the Construction of the Roll‐Call Record

“…One method used by scholars to determine levels of partisan conflict in voting is to simply calculate the number of “party votes,” or votes where at least half of one party opposed at least half of the other. If partisan conflict makes voters disapprove of Congress (Hibbing and Theiss‐Morse ; Ramirez ), and voters punish the majority party as a result of low approval (Jones ; Jones and McDermott ), members of the minority party should be more likely to request party votes than the majority party. Table breaks down vote requests by majority/minority party and whether the vote in question was a party vote…”

“…By measuring the quarterly proportion of congressional roll‐call votes where at least 75% of Democrats oppose 75% of Republicans, along with other indicators of conflict such as debt‐ceiling votes and Senate cloture votes, Ramirez demonstrates that approval in the aggregate does appear to be negatively affected by partisan conflict. Perhaps key for this discussion is the finding from Jones () and Jones and McDermott () that congressional approval electorally affects the parties differently. Specifically, when approval is high, voters reward the majority party; when approval is low, candidates of the congressional minority party tend to benefit.…”

Owning Valence Issues: The Impact of a “Culture of Corruption” on the 2006 Midterm Elections

“…While the challenges for candidates caught in a scandal are clear, the question of whether an entire political party can "own" corruption, stained by their association with crooked incumbents is unclear. Recent scholarship on congressional elections, however, suggests the possibility, showing that the electoral margins of majority party incumbents can be reduced by poor institutional judgments, regardless of their own individual popularity (Jones 2010;Lipinski, Bianco, and Work 2003).…”