Doctoral Dissertation Research: Electoral Uncertainty and Policy Change

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

How does electoral competition over majority control influence a legislature's ability to draft and pass meaningful legislation? Today, even the most casual observers of politics understand legislative gridlock to be a key feature of the modern legislative politics. Since at least the 1990s, scholars, media pundits, and even politicians have called attention to these institutions' lack of productivity, most often attributing the phenomenon to growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties. But while the widening gulf between the political parties --and the influence it likely has on policy change and legislative gridlock-- is undeniable, this project examines a crucial factor that most accounts of legislative gridlock have ignored: the rise in competition over majority control. This project develops a new theory of policy change that articulates and tests the conditions under which this sort of electoral competition encourages or stymies policy change, beyond what polarization alone might predict. Ultimately, the project would provide an explanation for why even popular legislation often fails to gain traction, and why polarization does not itself always predict a legislature's levels of productivity. Tying legislative productivity to electoral competition in this way would also carry with it potential normative, constitutional, and policy implications regarding topics such as the frequency of elections and the appropriateness of partisan agenda-setting. How does competition over majority control alter the strategic calculus of partisan agenda-setters in a legislature and what influence may it have on aggregate policy change? Beginning with Mayhew's (1973) seminal work, electoral dynamics have remained at the heart of nearly all modern analysis of legislative politics. Yet in spite of this centrality, and in spite of the sharp differences in electoral competitiveness over majority control American political history (Lee 2016), little theorizing or empirical research has delineated how electoral dynamics influence the policy change process. This project ties together key insights from both the electoral and policy change literatures in political science to create a new, elections-adjusted model of policy change and provide a series of novel empirical tests of this theory. First, using new data measuring contemporaneous beliefs regarding macro-level competitiveness, this project examines how well my elections-adjusted policy change model predicts legislative productivity since 1940, compared to current models (e.g., Krehbiel 1998, Cox and McCubbins 2005). Second, the project leverages the reauthorizations process and new, interest-group-based estimates of bill locations to examine whether and how macro-level competition influences bill-level decisionmaking regarding policy change. Finally, capitalizing on the broad coverage of bill location estimates (including locations of bills that failed to receive a roll call vote), this project examines how macro-level competition influences the agenda-setting decisions made by majority leaders. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.