Shifting party goals: Party electoral support and legislative behavior in the majority and the minority

Abstract

While scholars agree that parties are interested in both pragmatic (electoral) and programmatic (policy) goals, they disagree about the relative importance of those goals. How parties weight these goals has implications for the effect of party involvement on legislative behavior. We argue that parties emphasize these goals differently based on whether they are in the majority or minority. We examine links between party support in primary elections for the US Congress and subsequent legislative behaviors, finding that candidates who received more party support during the primary election were more likely to engage in partisan efforts in the next Congress. Further, party support of incoming legislators is linked to increased partisan behavior through leapfrog representation. We find that these relationships are stronger for majority party candidates, suggesting that parties put a greater emphasis on winning majorities when in the minority but a greater emphasis on policy congruence when in the majority.

Political Oppositions in Democratic and Authoritarian Regimes: A State-of-the-Field(s) Review

“…Another recent study on the US found that partisan efforts in the legislative process are shaped by the amount of party support a candidate received during the primary election. ‘Members of Congress with more electoral support from the party are more likely to vote in line with their party's policy agenda’ (Ballard and Hassell 2021: 10), which suggests that there are major determinants beyond the type of government shaping the nature of legislative politics, and possibly giving rise to distinct majority–minority patterns in the legislative arena of presidential systems. Still, there continues to be very little recent research on the more particular subject of party-political opposition in the US and other presidential democracies.…”