The Impact of Party on Voting Behavior in a Nonpartisan Legislature

Welch, Susan; Carlson, Eric M.

doi:10.2307/1958629

Cited by 56 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Indeed, though party organizations may not be formally part of the electoral and governing system in nonpartisan governments, with the strength of modern partisanship nationally and the increasingly ideological direction of politics locally, simply being in an area that is evenly split between the parties may be sufficient to make partisanship a salient feature of electoral competition. While this hypothesis contrasts with early work finding relatively disorganized, highdimensional voting behavior in both the nonpartisan Confederate Congress and nonpartisan Nebraska legislature (Jenkins 1999;Welch and Carlson 1973;Wright and Schaffner 2002), it is consistent with both empirical evidence from more recent terms of the Nebraska legislature demonstrating an increase in partisan polarization (Masket and Shor 2015) and theoretical work examining the conditions under which party in the electorate can translate into partisan outcomes under nonpartisanship (Krehbiel, Meirowitz, and Romer 2005).…”

Section: Party Competition In Partisan and Nonpartisan Governmentscontrasting

confidence: 54%

Party Competition and Coalitional Stability: Evidence from American Local Government

Bucchianeri

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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For decades, political scientists have argued that competition is a fundamental component of a responsible party system, such that when one party dominates politics, legislative coalitions destabilize and democratic accountability suffers. In this paper, I evaluate these predictions in an important but largely unexplored legislative environment: American local government. Using an original collection of roll-call records from 151 municipal councils, I show that legislative behavior is more one-dimensional when elections are partisan and the electorate is evenly balanced between the parties. When either of these features is absent, however, elite behavior remains unstructured, with coalitions shifting over time and across issues. These differences across institutional and competitive contexts suggest that partisan elections—and the party organizations that nearly always come with them—are critical for translating electoral insecurity into organized government, raising questions about the capacity for electoral accountability in a growing set of one-party dominant governments across the country.

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Section: Party Competition In Partisan and Nonpartisan Governmentscontrasting

confidence: 54%

Party Competition and Coalitional Stability: Evidence from American Local Government

Bucchianeri

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…Jenkins (1999; uses data from the Confederate Congress to show that, in the absence of strong political parties, the structure, stability, and low-dimensionality of the roll-call record evaporates. Similar findings exist for state legislatures without strong twoparty systems (Welch and Carlson 1973;Wright and Schaffner 2002). In a comprehensive review of the content of roll calls in the US Senate, Lee (2009) argues that much of the structure of scaling estimates -including the evidence supporting low dimensionality -is a result of partisan "teamsmanship" and may have little to do with members' ideology.…”

Section: Does the Basic Space Of Congress Have One Dimension Or Many?mentioning

confidence: 85%

Polarization and Ideology: Partisan Sources of Low Dimensionality in Scaled Roll Call Analyses

2014

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In this article, we challenge the conclusion that the preferences of members of Congress are best represented as existing in a low-dimensional space. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations altering assumptions regarding the dimensionality and distribution of member preferences and scale the resulting roll call matrices. Our simulations show that party polarization generates misleading evidence in favor of low dimensionality. This suggests that the increasing levels of party polarization in recent Congresses may have produced false evidence in favor of a low-dimensional policy space. However, we show that focusing more narrowly on each party caucus in isolation can help researchers discern the true dimensionality of the policy space in the context of significant party polarization. We re-examine the historical roll call record and find evidence suggesting that the low dimensionality of the contemporary Congress may reflect party polarization rather than changes in the dimensionality of policy conflict.

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“…Jenkins (1999Jenkins ( , 2000 finds less structure and less ideological polarization in roll call voting in the Confederate House, which did not have political parties, than in the U.S. House during the Civil War. Welch and Carlson (1973) examine five sessions of the Nebraska legislature distributed across a 50-year period. Using Guttman Scales to establish roll call dimensions, they find a lot of small dimensions, none very strong, that do not correlate with much of anything.…”

Section: Designmentioning

confidence: 99%