Parties control the public behavior of their office holders by acting as gatekeepers to political office
The debate on the influence of political parties on the political process until recently has been restricted to parties in government. Scholars have focused their debate primarily on the impact of party on the actions of a legislator in the legislature.
Masket [...]
“For many Americans, there is no rational basis to suppose that one party is better than the other at managing the economy.” If that’s true, is our entire democratic process a farce?
We know that partisanship influences economic evaluations. In survey after survey, we have found that Republicans and Democrats rate the economy differently, yet we [...]
The authors have identified a cheap, easy way to capture a fuller sample of current campaign messages.
We’ve long known that most voters pay little attention to campaign rhetoric; they pay far more attention to partisanship, incumbency, and other easily accessible considerations (although rhetoric certainly has its place). Still, candidates work hard to develop arguments that, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In every case, he was startlingly correct; as predicted, the nation’s ideological mood reversed about every 15 years.
In 1924, Arthur Schlesinger famously predicted that “Coolidge-style conservatism would last till about 1932.” Later, he added that the “prevailing liberal mood would run its course in about 1947.” In 1949, he predicted once again that “the recession [...]
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