Scholars typically assume that congressional party leaders whip their members and influence their voting behavior, but little evidence convincingly separates the effects of party leaders from the selection of members into parties. I find that a switch from a relatively moderate to a relatively extreme party leader causes rank-and-file members to cast more extreme roll-call votes (and vice versa). I further find that party leaders even influence the members who did not support their leadership bid, and rank-and-file members are less likely to cast partisan votes when there is no party leader. This study also sheds light on a historically anomalous period of Republican moderation, and it helps to explain the increase in congressional polarization over the past 50 years.

Members of the majority party in Congress sometimes vote against bills that they prefer over the status quo. We estimate a model of congressional roll-call voting that allows for this kind of non-ideological protest voting. We find that protest voting has significant implications for roll-call-based estimates of ideology and other analyses that rely upon them. For example, a traditional item response theory model curiously identifies members of the Squad as relatively moderate Democrats, but our protest-voting-adjusted scores identify them as the most liberal members of Congress. We also find that previous studies may have underestimated responsiveness, the effects of ideology in elections, the utility of non-roll-call-based measures of ideology, and the increase in congressional polarization. Although the implications for most substantive applications are likely modest, our analyses suggest that future researchers can better measure legislative ideology by accounting for a small number of non-ideological votes.

Polarization is typically greater in legislatures in which control of the majority is closely contested. Lee (2016) argues that this is because parties engage in more partisan behavior when they are focused on gaining or retaining majority control. This study offers an alternative explanation for this phenomenon that is more consistent with the existing theory and evidence on ideology and elections. When a party holds a clear minority, it moderates with the goal of winning more seats. Party positioning across state legislatures is more consistent with the hypothesis that clear minorities moderate than the hypothesis that parties in closely contested chambers polarize.

Some argue that the American public is extreme and polarized along party lines. Paradoxically, others argue that members of the public lack meaningful policy preferences and exhibit low constraint across issues. These conclusions are typically drawn from binary policy questions or scales with ambiguous values, both of which are ill-suited for measuring extremism, polarization, or constraint. In this paper, I reassess these claims by analyzing policy questions that allow respondents to express their preferences on a well-defined continuum. Across a wide range of issues, most Americans appear to have moderate preferences over policy. As expected, Democrats tend to be more liberal than Republicans, but there is significant overlap on every issue, and the average extent of disagreement is modest. Lastly, positions across issues appear more constrained than standard tests suggest.

Political scientists often claim that partisanship is explained by nonpolicy factors such as early childhood experiences, parental influence, and group membership. In this paper, we use open-ended survey questions to elicit partisan Americans' own explanations for their affiliations as well as their attitudes toward the opposite party. Policy, values, and ideology are the most common reasons Americans say they identify as a Democrat or Republican and feel the way they do about members of the other party. The rate at which these reasons are cited far exceeds expectations of published scholars of partisanship. Findings do not vary meaningfully across party, region, gender, race, age, or socioeconomic status.

The state of American politics would be improved, many argue, if more moderate and qualified people served in government. We investigate what draws such individuals to run, focusing on a dimension of politics that has received scant attention within the candidate-entry literature-the ability of candidates, once elected, to exercise meaningful influence over policy. In a conjoint experiment, we find that the opportunity to wield greater authority differentially increases moderates' interest in seeking office, and that more qualified people express more interest in running for offices with greater authority, lower thresholds for passing legislation, and higher staff support. These findings have implications for political representation, government effectiveness, and the relationship between institutional reform and mass politics.

In this era of hyper-polarization and partisan animosity, do people incorporate the viewpoints of their political opponents? Perhaps not. An important body of research, in fact, finds that the provision of information about opponents' policy views leads survey respondents to reflexively adopt the opposite position. In this paper, we demonstrate that such findings arise from incomplete experimental designs and a particular measurement strategy. In a series of experiments that vary information about both parties' positions simultaneously and that solicit continuous, rather than discrete, policy positions, we find that partisans update their beliefs in accordance with the positions of Republican and Democratic leaders alike. Partisans are not perennially determined to disagree. Rather, they are often willing to incorporate opposing viewpoints about a wide range of policy issues.

Partisan Americans like members of their own party more than members of the opposing party. Scholars often interpret this as evidence that party identity or loyalty influence interpersonal affect. First, we reassess previous studies and demonstrate that prior results are also consistent with what we would predict if people cared only about policy agreement. Next, we demonstrate the difficulty of manipulating perceptions of party identity without also manipulating beliefs about policy agreement and vice versa. Finally, we show that partisans care much more about policy agreement than they do about party loyalty when the two come into conflict. Our analyses suggest that partisan Americans care about policy agreement; we have little convincing evidence that they care about partisan identity or loyalty per se, and scholars will have to find new research designs if they want to convincingly estimate the effects of identity or loyalty independent of policy substance.

Partisan Americans like members of their own party more than members of the opposing party. Scholars often interpret this as evidence that party identity or loyalty influence interpersonal affect. First, we reassess previous studies and demonstrate that prior results are also consistent with what we would predict if people cared only about policy agreement. Next, we demonstrate the difficulty of manipulating perceptions of party identity without also manipulating beliefs about policy agreement and vice versa. Finally, we show that partisans care much more about policy agreement than they do about party loyalty when the two come into conflict. Our analyses suggest that partisan Americans care about policy agreement; we have little convincing evidence that they care about partisan identity or loyalty per se, and scholars will have to find new research designs if they want to convincingly estimate the effects of identity or loyalty independent of policy substance.

Graham et al. (2023) attempt to reassess previous findings on the electoral effects of droughts, floods, tornadoes, and college football games. Reassessing previous findings by collecting new data, implementing new specifications, and preregistering these efforts is a valuable exercise, and we hope future researchers build on this model. This practice could be even more productive if researchers present independent evidence and think about how their various tests distinguish between different possibilities. We focus our discussion on the purported effect of college football games on elections in the United States. Although Graham et al. state that their results support the conclusion that college football games affect elections, we show why the new evidence they offer should decrease our beliefs that there is a genuine, substantively meaningful effect.

Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or holding views poorly summarized by a single liberal-conservative dimension. We find that a single ideological dimension accurately describes most, but not all, Americans' policy views. Using the classifications from our model, we demonstrate that moderates and those whose views are not well explained by a single dimension are especially consequential for electoral selection and accountability. These results suggest a need for renewed attention to the middle of the American political spectrum.

There has been much discussion recently about the implementation of independent board directors. But the issue of independence is more complex than it may first appear. Sally Wheeler argues that while independent thinking is important, there are additional factors to consider when appointing directors.

Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or holding views poorly summarized by a single liberal–conservative dimension. We find that a single ideological dimension accurately describes most, but not all, Americans’ policy views. Using the classifications from our model, we demonstrate that moderates and those whose views are not well explained by a single dimension are especially consequential for electoral selection and accountability. These results suggest a need for renewed attention to the middle of the American political spectrum.

Partisan voters tend to seek political news from media sources that match their predispositions. Scholars and pundits often attribute this partisan media sorting to psychological biases, and they typically assume that it leads voters to make worse decisions at the ballot box. To reinterpret this evidence and provide an alternative explanation, we develop two formal models of media choice—one in which voters only want to hear good news about their party and another in which voters only care about making good electoral decisions. Both models predict partisan media sorting, so sorting does not constitute evidence that voters are poorly informed or that they are driven by psychological biases. However, the models do produce competing predictions about when voters will consume more or less news and about whether signals from the news should influence vote choices. Reassessing the empirical literature, we find some support for both explanations.

AbstractTo learn about the effects of corporate campaign contributions, we study the potential influence of the insurance industry in US state politics. The insurance industry is one of the biggest players in state politics, and we have collected new data on objective measures of the industry's performance in each state over time. We exploit within-state changes in campaign finance regulations which can significantly restrict the ability of corporate contributors to give money and potentially influence elected officials. Across a range of outcomes and campaign finance reforms, we find little evidence that the ability to make corporate campaign contributions benefits the insurance industry in a state. Some results suggest that the ability to make campaign contributions may benefit the insurance industry in states with elected insurance commissioners, but overall, campaign contributions appear to have a little distortionary effect even in a setting where we would most expect to find it.

We estimate the effects of shelter-in-place (SIP) orders during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We do not find detectable effects of these policies on disease spread or deaths. We find small but measurable effects on mobility that dissipate over time. And we find small, delayed effects on unemployment. We conduct additional analyses that separately assess the effects of expanding versus withdrawing SIP orders and test whether there are spillover effects in other states. Our results are consistent with prior studies showing that SIP orders have accounted for a relatively small share of the mobility trends and economic disruptions associated with the pandemic. We reanalyze two prior studies purporting to show that SIP orders caused large reductions in disease prevalence, and show that those results are not reliable. Our results do not imply that social distancing behavior by individuals, as distinct from SIP policy, is ineffective.