Browsing by Subject "Political Parties"

Questions of party power and legislative outcomes are central to our understanding of Congress. And yet, our knowledge of these concepts has many gaps. We know little about exactly how parties negotiate legislative deals with their members—and hold them to their deals—or about how parties exert agenda control before bills reach the floor. We also have limited knowledge of how predictably the outcomes of bills are, particularly from their content. These questions remain unanswered largely because political scientists have traditionally not had data or methods at their disposal to answer them. In my dissertation, I provide some answers to these questions via a focus on text analysis.

In chapter one, I examine how parties make deals with recalcitrant members on landmark legislation, and more importantly, how members are held to their deals. Particularly, I argue that public statements are a tool wielded by the party, and when members are convinced to vote for a bill they are provided incentive to make a statement in support of the bill to lock them into their vote. Using a novel data set of all public statements made by members of Congress, and two pieces of landmark healthcare legislation (the Affordable Care Act in 2009-2010 and the American Health Care Act in 2017) I show that members of Congress do make public statements after they make deals to vote with the party, and that these statements are likely for the purpose of precommitting to vote with the party.

In chapter two, I seek to quantify the level of agenda control exerted by the majority party on bills that never reach a final passage vote. To do this, I present the first systematic estimates of how members would have voted on bills based on a characterization of bill content from bills’ text, would they have come to a final passage vote. I find that the majority party not only exercises negative agenda control, but also considerable positive agenda control. I also find that the minority party in the House is systematically and consistently shut out of the agenda process.

In chapter three, I investigate how predictable the outcome of bills is and whether bill content has a part to play in the predictability of bill outcomes. I find that I am able to predict where bills end up in the US House of Representatives with high accuracy, and that knowledge about the content of a bill has a sizable effect on how well I am able to predict bill outcomes.

What role do state party organizations play in twenty-first century American politics? What is the nature of the relationship between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections? These questions frame the three studies presented in this dissertation. More specifically, I examine the organizational development of the state party organizations and the strategic interactions and connections between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections.

In the first empirical chapter, I argue that the Internet Age represents a significant transitional period for state party organizations. Using data collected from surveys of state party leaders, this chapter reevaluates and updates existing theories of party organizational strength and demonstrates the importance of new indicators of party technological capacity to our understanding of party organizational development in the early twenty-first century. In the second chapter, I ask whether the national parties utilize different strategies in deciding how to allocate resources to state parties through fund transfers and through the 50-state-strategy party-building programs that both the Democratic and Republican National Committees advertised during the 2010 elections. Analyzing data collected from my 2011 state party survey and party-fund-transfer data collected from the Federal Election Commission, I find that the national parties considered a combination of state and national electoral concerns in directing assistance to the state parties through their 50-state strategies, as opposed to the strict battleground-state strategy that explains party fund transfers. In my last chapter, I examine the relationships between platforms issued by Democratic and Republican state and national parties and the strategic considerations that explain why state platforms vary in their degree of similarity to the national platform. I analyze an extensive platform dataset, using cluster analysis and document similarity measures to compare platform content across the 1952 to 2014 period. The analysis shows that, as a group, Democratic and Republican state platforms exhibit greater intra-party homogeneity and inter-party heterogeneity starting in the early 1990s, and state-national platform similarity is higher in states that are key players in presidential elections, among other factors. Together, these three studies demonstrate the significance of the state party organizations and the state-national party partnership in contemporary politics.

American voters understand that elections have consequences, but they have become so disillusioned by their political system that approximately 40 percent have self-selected out of the two-party circus, choosing instead to identify as independent or unaffiliated which often requires them to forego their primary election voting rights. They understand that the process no longer serves its intended purpose of providing for representative government. Nevertheless, when it comes to elections, Americans get it wrong in just about every way possible. They spend so much time debating which superficial features of the electoral system—voter ID laws, polling place hours and locations, voter registration deadlines, etc.—are destroying the political process that they overlook the real cause of its decay: that political parties exercise control over the rules of the electoral system.

At the end of the day, people want a government that works. It is quite clear that the political system we have now simply does not allow for that. Less obvious are exactly why this is so, and what can be done. The role of this paper, then, is as a sort of citizen’s primer to our electoral crisis. I begin by tracing the origins of American political parties and describe how they and their agents in government mold the electoral system to their advantage in getting and maintaining control of government. Next, I discuss the ways in which that system is so deleterious to stable, functioning government and “national attachment” in the body politic. I then propose an alternative electoral system that would allow for fair and effective representation of more people, helping to rebuild the necessary trust and confidence in our fundamental political institutions. Finally, I reflect on the dangers of continuing to use a system in which political parties—private organizations—abuse state power and the fundamental institution of democracy—the election—to protect and advance their private interests, and how institutional collapse might be avoided.