Our main contributor (me) is in the midst of buying a house and having a baby, so you may have noticed a lack of posts in the past couple weeks. Keep us in your RSS reader; we’ll be back in the saddle soon.
In the meantime, we invite our readers to write reviews of their own.
Yes, voting is habit-forming, but to a lesser extent than reported previously.
Denny and Doyle have a straightforward point in this article: Yes, voting is habit-forming, but to a lesser extent than reported previously. In a widely discussed article, Gerber, Green, and Shachar (2003) reported that voting in one election raises the probability of voting in subsequent elections by 47%.1 Denny and Doyle argue that the correct figure is closer to 13%. The difference, they claim, arises from methodological problems in the Gerber et al. article.
Given that this dispute revolves mostly around methodological (not theoretical) differences, one wonders why this article did not appear as a reply to Gerber et al, followed by a response from the original authors. As my critique at the end of this review will make clear, there are many holes that Gerber et al could poke in Denny and Doyle’s approach. Read More
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When a minority party gains tenuous control of the legislature, or when a majority feels that it might become the minority soon, then legislators gain an incentive to weaken the legislature by empowering the median voter.
Today, voters in 24 states can make policy directly through the initiative process. In most of these states, the initiative process was first adopted between 1898 and 1918. Smith and Fridkin seek to explain why only these states, and not others, adopted the initiative.
Because most of the states that adopted the initiative in this period were agrarian, western, and mostly white, historians have traditionally answered this question by claiming that the initiative was most likely to be adopted in “younger states with a strong history of populism and antimonopoly sentiments, more homoegenous [white] populations…, more radical (but weaker) political parties, and stronger interest groups” (pg 334).Smith and Fridkin contend that these conclusions have been based on deeply flawed logic and methods.1In particular, scholars have erred in asking why some states adopted the initiative and others did not; since the initiative is usually adopted via legislative referendum, scholars should instead be asking why legislators in some states chose to offer the initiative to voters, while legislators elsewhere did not.2
Smith and Fridkin argue that legislators were most likely to offer the initiative when states experienced close partisan competition. When a minority party gains tenuous control of the legislature, or when a majority feels that it might become the minority soon, then legislators gain an incentive to weaken the legislature by empowering the median voter. This is their main causal argument, which is supported by an event history analysis. Read More
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Much of the empirical work to date has not adequately distinguished [game-theoretic] learning-based policy diffusion from [decision-theoretic] myopic individual adoptions.
Those who advocate federalism argue that devolution improves policy outcomes nationwide by providing opportunities for local experimentation. In the words of Louis Brandeis, justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1932):
It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
These claims have inspired a literature on “diffusion,” mostly focused on the American states, that has asked whether there is evidence that the states do, in fact, learn from one another. For the most part, the existing literature has concluded that diffusion occurs regularly among the American states, although there is some disagreement as to the mechanism.1
Volden, Ting, and Carpenter argue that none of the existing work (including their own previous work, apparently) has provided any evidence of policy diffusion. The methods and assumptions used in previous research cannot differentiate between innovation (isolated experimentation by myopic states) and diffusion (learning from experiments in other states). Read More
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The lengthy previous literature on candidate positioning has failed to distinguish empirically between these three theories–something that Tomz and Van Houweling (claim to) do in this article.
Issue-based voting seems simple enough on its face: Support the candidate who will produce the policies you want. Simple as it sounds, though, there are three competing theories as to how voters actually make this decision. The lengthy previous literature on candidate positioning has failed to distinguish empirically between these three theories–something that Tomz and Van Houweling (claim to) do in this article.
Proximity theory is the best-known of these three theories. It makes a basic claim: If you line up all the candidates from most liberal to most conservative, voters will pick the candidate whose ideology is most similar to their own. This theory serves as a basic assumption of the median voter theorem and other spatial models. Read More
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Terrorism within a particular locality exerts a strong effect, particularly if it occurs within three months of election day. In general, support for right-bloc parties tends to rise in localities that experience terror attacks.
Since 1984 Israeli has endured over 500 terrorist attacks, resulting in over 1000 fatalities. These attacks, together with the frequency of parliamentary elections, enables the authors to conduct a rigorous quantatitive analysis to answer a simple questions: Are voters sensitive to terrorism?1
At first blush, one might find the question simple: Of course voters are sensitive to terrorism. After all, the 2004 Madrid train bombings are widely credited with changing the outcome of Spain’s elections, to the point that the ever-reliable Wikipedia reports this as fact.2 But Berrebi and Klor go well beyond the elementary question of whether terrorism matters–they tell us exactly how it matters.
In brief: Terrorism within a particular locality exerts a strong effect, particularly if it occurs within three months of election day. In general, support for right-bloc parties tends to rise in localities that experience terror attacks.3 This shift towards the right happens regardless of who is currently in power. Read More
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Democratic governments tax the most; Republicans tax the least; divided governments are in the middle. But here’s the rub: these relationships disappear in states with direct democracy.
When Progressive reformers first championed adoption of the citizen initiative and other direct democracy institutions, a major reason was to limit the ability of political parties to pursue extreme policies.
In the absence of direct democracy, political parties might not have much reason to promote moderate policies. Republican legislators would generally prefer policies to the right of the median, while Democratic legislators would prefer policies to the left. Whichever party has the legislative majority has a variety of tools at its disposal to help it push policy away from the median and towards its own ideal point. These tools include control of the legislative agenda, control of committee chairmanships, and so on. In addition, the need to appease major campaign donors and partisan activists increases the incentive to use these tools. As a result, it is not the legislative majority that governs; it is the majority of the majority party that governs. When legislative control shifts from Republicans to Democrats, you might see a large shift in policy outcomes–even if only a couple of legislative seats changed hands.
But this is exactly the sort of thing that the Progressive movement sought to end. A purpose of direct democracy was to force legislators to produce policy outcomes closer to what the median voter would want–regardless of which party has the legislative majority. Read More
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