Americans For Democratic Action Research Articles

Electoral Competition and Roll-Call Voting

How does electoral competition affect the preferences expressed by representatives in their roll-call votes? Literature on representative-constituency relations suggests two contradictory hypotheses on this issue. One hypothesis is that intense electoral competition induces more ideologically extreme behavior on the part of representatives, because competition increases their need for the electoral resources provided by committed activists. The other is that competition provides incentive for more moderate legislative behavior, as a means of gaining marginal votes outside the representative's activist base. Using the measure of liberal policy agreement computed by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), this article reports that competition is more frequently a polarizing than a moderating influence on roll-call behavior. The analysis also reveals some peculiar partisan and regional differences that can produce further insight concerning the impact of elections on legislative behavior.

Making Room for Liberals in the Antiwar Movement: The Americans for Democratic Action and the Dilemma of Liberal Opposition to the Vietnam War

The opposition of American liberals to the Vietnam War has often been seen as suspect by historians who compare their actions and positions unfavorably with the passionate dissent of the New Left and its straightforward call for the unilateral withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Southeast Asia. This article argues that when it is evaluated on its own merits, the antiwar activism of prominent liberals from the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) does not represent a less “pure” version of the dissent mounted by the New Left, but a dedicated, if less than effective, opposition to U.S. military intervention in a distant civil war. By making room for liberals—both within and outside of the ADA—in the antiwar movement, we gain a more complete picture of both postwar liberalism and the complex dynamics of the largest antiwar movement in American history.

More Than a Score: Interest Group Ratings and Polarized Politics

This article examines the origins and influence of ideological index scores—where liberal and conservative interest groups rate legislator performance on selected roll call votes. Two such groups founded in the mid-twentieth century—the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA)—were crucial to the development of this type of metric, transforming roll call analysis from detailed tabular scorecards into streamlined percentage scores showing how often a lawmaker voted “right.” ADA and ACA scores have been heavily utilized in political science as proxies for liberalism and conservatism and used to demonstrate the growing polarization of the congressional parties. Archival evidence suggests, however, that those scores were intended to create the very phenomenon they have been used to measure. They were deeply political rather than objective metrics, which the ADA and ACA used to guide their electoral activities in accordance with an increasingly partisan strategic plan. Each group directed campaign resources toward incumbent lawmakers they rated highly, but they did so unevenly—with the ADA favoring liberal Democrats over Republicans and the ACA showing a preference for conservative Republicans over time. By rewarding favored lawmakers in their preferred party, and using scores to highlight and discourage ideological outliers, they hoped to reshape the parties along more distinct and divided ideological lines—to create more “responsible” parties, as prominent political scientists then desired.

Rethinking postwar liberalism: the Americans for democratic action, social democracy, and the struggle for racial equality

Historians have frequently characterized postwar liberalism by the limitations placed upon it by a rigid anticommunist framework and an abandonment of the social democratic currents found in the New Deal that left it with little more to stand on than a commitment to the piecemeal reforms of the Fair Deal and the enshrinement of civil and voting rights into law. Such characterizations describe more than a few postwar liberals, but they stand at odds with the leading figures of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and their insistence during the 1960s on social democratic solutions to the deeply interconnected problems of economic and racial inequality. This article argues that if the prevailing depictions of the postwar liberal tradition fail to fully account for the ADA—an organization frequently taken to be the quintessential representative of postwar liberalism—then surely historians need to rethink both the limitations and potential of that tradition. Examining the social democratic turn of the ADA during the 1960s allows this article to demonstrate that in contrast to the limitations of postwar liberalism stressed in existing scholarship, the postwar liberal tradition embodied by the ADA could provide an intellectual and political foundation for American social democracy.

Substantive Black Political Representation: Evidence from Matching Estimates in the United States House of Representatives

I seek to determine whether race is a factor in how black representatives vote in the United States House of Representatives; if so, this suggests electing more black representatives may improve the economic and political position of blacks if policy positions taken by black representatives on bills that fail to pass would provide tangible positive impacts to members of the black community if passed. Confounding the impact of legislator race, districts represented by blacks on average are quite different than those represented by whites. While past research on this topic uses linear regression techniques with undesirable properties, I improve on past research using matching techniques with more desirable properties. Utilizing a combination of Mahalanobis and propensity score matching, within-caliper matching, and exact matching using data from the 100th–113th Congress, I show black representatives are more likely to vote in agreement with the majority of the Congressional Black Caucus on all votes and on Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Americans for Democratic Action, and Congressional Quarterly key votes, indicating a substantive racial impact on roll-call voting.

Comparing Ideal Points Across Institutions and Time

Many spatial theories of policymaking in the context of a system of checks and balances require the estimation of ideal points which are comparable across institutions. This analysis evaluates comparisons between the president, Senate, and House. For applications which presume that legislators change their positions over time, the most commonly used estimates impose too many restrictions on the ideal points. I consider an alternative approach to creating a common scale by using interest groups (American Conservative Union [ACU] and Americans for Democratic Action [ADA]) as reference actors and incorporating “bridge votes,” roll calls on which the House and Senate vote on identical text. The analysis demonstrates this approach can produce comparable estimates across time and chamber.

Living the New Deal: David Ginsburg (1912-2010)

David Ginsburg, who died at age 98 on May 23, 2010, was, to my knowledge, the last living official who served at senior levels in the early Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration.Ginsburg, after growing up in West Virginia and graduating from college, attended Harvard Law School and became a protege of Professor Felix Frankfurter. In 1935, he helped Ginsburg get a position at the new Securities & Exchange Commission, where his work included defending the constitutionality of the Public Utility Holding Company Act and, as borrowed personnel, researching speeches for President Roosevelt. In 1938, Ginsburg worked as newly appointed Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s first law clerk. In 1939, Ginsburg returned to the executive branch, working on various aspects of national defense, ultimately becoming general counsel of the Office of Price Administration. In 1943, Ginsburg joined the U.S. Army as a private. He served in Europe and, after the war, remained in Germany to work in the U.S. occupation government. In later decades, he headed one of Washington, D.C.’s great law firms (Ginsburg, Feldman & Bress), was a co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action, and was appointed by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to significant positions. In 1967, LBJ, responding to riots and racial unrest, created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known popularly as the Kerner Commission, and appointed Ginsburg its executive director. He in large part wrote its March 1968 final report.This eulogy, delivered at a memorial gathering in September 2010 and based in research in Ginsburg’s newly available papers in the Library of Congress, describes his paths and his work in the New Deal and World War II periods.

Without Heirs? Assessing the Decline of Establishment Internationalism in U.S. Foreign Policy

Is establishment internationalism in decline? Conventional wisdom is becoming that structural shifts in the international environment along with generational, demographic, and cultural changes within the United States are inexorably leading to the decline of the broad, post-war internationalist consensus that dominated American foreign policy after 1945. Despite the frequent assertion that this change has taken place, very few studies have analyzed the extent to which establishment internationalism is in fact in decline. To answer this question, we first track trends in congressional foreign policy votes from the American Conservative Union (1970–2004) and Americans for Democratic Action (1948–2004). Our second set of indicators tracks the state of birth, educational profile, and formative international experience of a cross section of the U.S. foreign policy elite. Our third and fourth sets of indicators track elite attitudes as represented by presidential State of the Union addresses and major party platforms. We find support for increasing partisan polarization in Congress on foreign policy as well as increasing regional concentration of the parties. However, there is only mixed evidence to suggest that internationalism has experienced a secular decline overall. Support for international engagement and multilateral institutions remain important parts of elite foreign policy rhetoric. Moreover, we find that social backgrounds of U.S. foreign policy elites—save for military service—have not substantially changed from the height of the internationalist era.

The Decline and Rise of Party Polarization in Congress During the 20th Century

In 1984 Howard Rosenthal and I published a paper in the Journal of Politics titled Polarization of American Politics. We found that beginning in the mid-1970s, American politics became much more divisive. More Democrats staked out consistently liberal positions, and more Republicans supported wholly conservative ones. The primary evidence in that study, which focused exclusively on the Senate, were ratings issued by interest groups such as the Americans for Democratic Action and the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Meet the Press Congressional Guests, 1947-2004

The authors analyze all 1,582 Meet the Presscongressional guests from the program's inception in 1947 until 2004. The guests were coded in terms of gender, state, party, and ideological orientation as measured by Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). The program generally followed the partisan and ideological patterns of the Congress itself in who showed up as guests. There was a clear tendency to exaggerate partisan differences, meaning slightly more liberal than typical Democratic guests and slightly more conservative than typical Republican guests. The program also drew heavily from a “golden rolodex” of predictable and frequent guests, often members of Congress with leadership titles.

ADA policies and the editorial positions of four publications

This article explores the utility of using editorials as measures of ideology and as a mechanism for linking ideology with public policy formulation. It relates editorial positions taken by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and National Review to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores on domestic policy, highlighting the advantages inherent in the use of editorials. It also answers critiques that the Times and Post are not liberal in orientation.

A Measure of Media Bias

In this paper we estimate ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) scores for major media outlets such as the New York Times, USA Today, Fox News Special Report, and all three network television news shows. Our estimates allow us to answer such questions as Is the average article in the New York Times more liberal than the average speech by Tom Daschle? or Is the average story on Fox News more conservative than the average speech by Bill Frist? To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks and other policy groups. We compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same groups in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns we construct an ADA score. As a simplified example, imagine that there were only two think tanks, and suppose that the New York Times cited the first think tank twice as often as the second. Our method asks: What is the typical ADA score of members of Congress who exhibit the same frequency (2:1) in their speeches? This is the score that we would assign to the New York Times. Our results show a strong liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report and the Washington Times received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Consistent with many conservative critics, CBS Evening News and the New York Times received a score far left of center. Outlets such as USA Today, NPRs Morning Edition, NBCs Nightly News and ABCs World News Tonight were moderately left. The most centrist outlets (but still left-leaning) by our measure were the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, CNNs NewsNight with Aaron Brown, and ABCs Good Morning America. Fox News Special Report, while right of center, was closer to the center than any of the three major networks evening news broadcasts. All of our findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample.

Ronald Reagan and the Struggle for Black Dignity in Cinema, 1937-1953

Previous articleNext article No AccessRonald Reagan and the Struggle for Black Dignity in Cinema, 1937-1953Stephen VaughnStephen Vaughn Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 87, Number 1Winter 2002The Past Before Us A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JAAHv87n1p83 Views: 36Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

REPRESENTATIVE IDEOLOGY AND THE VOTE FOR WELFARE REFORM

ABSTRACTThis article examines the congressional vote for HR3734, The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The primary concern is to identify the factors that had a significant influence over the voting decision, paying special attention to representative ideology measured by Americans for Democratic Action and American Conservative Union voting scores. An empirical model is developed and estimated using logistic regression. The model incorporates proxies for representative ideology, constituent ideology, constituent economic interests, and the potential for legislative shirking. The results indicate that representative ideology was an important factor in the vote, but that constituent ideology and interests were also influential. Knowledge of the pattern of voting on the original legislation should prove useful to policymakers as the need for further refinement of the welfare system becomes evident, as it almost surely will.

Racial Redistricting and Ideological Polarization in Southern U.S. House Delegations

This study consists of an analysis of representation from southern states to determine if the creation of majority‐minority districts resulted in more ideologically polarized southern U.S. House delegations. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores indicate that the standard deviation of ADA scores are larger in the eight states that engaged in racial redistricting. The influx of conservative Republicans and African‐American Democrats in 1992 created the more polarized patterns. Polarization was still present after the 1996 elections, although the redistricting effect was muted as other southern states picked up Republican representatives after both the 1994 election and Louisiana's substantial modification of one of its black majority districts prior to the 1996 election. Racial redistricting would seem to make centrist coalition building more difficult, but in some states it also weakens the increasingly conservative voting patterns experienced by most of the South in the 1990s.

Is Political Ideology Endogenous? Evidence from the Business Cycle

We construct a time series of political party ideology, based on Poole and Rosenthal's (1997) NOMINATE scores, for the 1950-98 period. The results show that (1) party ideology has become increasingly more polarized over this period; and (2) that it is very sensitive to business cycle conditions. In particular, a worsening of economic conditions (e.g. higher inflation or unemployment) is associated with a decline of the relative difference in party ideology scores. Republicans tend to become less conservative relative to Democrats when either the unemployment or inflation rate increases. We obtain the same results using an equivalent time series based on ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) scores. That there is an important economic component in ADA and NOMINATE scores questions the ability to interpret these scores as proxies of legislator ideology. But the finding that political parties' platforms tend to converge during economic downturns is not inconsistent with the traditional Downsian-type approach of modeling party behavior.

Cutpoint-Adjusted Interest Group Ratings

While it is very common for Congressional researchers to use interest group ratings as measures of legislator policy preferences, this paper argues that the manner in which such ratings are calculated implies that they may poorly approximate the underlying legislator preferences on which they are based. In light of this, the paper develops a technique designed to adjust interest group ratings so that they more closely correlate with legislator preferences. It argues based on Monte Carlo simulations that the technique produces adjusted ratings that improve on unadjusted ratings, and it applies the adjustment technique to historical ratings published by the Americans for Democratic Action.

Measuring Congressional Support for the President: Evaluating NOMINATE Scores

Assessing presidential influence in Congress requires accurate measures of legislators' baseline preferences. Common strategies extract preferences from roll‐call votes. One approach selects votes most likely to reveal uncorrupted, sincere preferences, and the other, NOMINATE, derives summaries of members' positions from large samples of votes. This article finds that NOMINATE scores do not accurately recover the relative positions of members in simulated legislatures. Errors increase with the number of policy dimensions and do not depend on agenda control or on vote trading. However useful NOMINATE is for summarizing voting patterns, this article cautions against this approach to measuring legislators' preferences.

The dynamics of committee outliers: Evidence from the house of representatives, 1951–90

In this study, we enter the on‐going debate on committee outliers by addressing two important points. First, we dispute the conventional wisdom that committee outliers are best identified and evaluated using traditional tests of statistical significance. Contesting the appropriateness of such tests, we contend that any observed difference between chamber behaviour and floor behaviour may be substantively significant and use raw mean differences between Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores to examine differences between the full House of Representatives and its committees. Second, we attempt to integrate the committee outlier literature into the broader literature on the historical development of the House by using data from 20 Congresses over four decades (1951–90). This longitudinal analysis indicates that there have been interesting dynamic changes in the prevalence of committee outliers across time and committee types in patterns that are consistent with both the principal‐agent framework and the more general literature on congressional change and reform. Many of these important changes are not obvious when relying solely on traditional tests of statistical significance to examine committee outliers.

Voting Behavior in the US House and Senate

If we want to know what is happening to political parties today, the answer depends in part on how we define the term `party' and in part on the time frame used for analysis. In this paper we focus on parties as voting coalitions in the US House and the Senate over the last 40 years. To assess the ideological placement and cohesiveness of each party in the House and Senate, we use adjusted scores issued by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Our adjustment corrects for changes in the ADA's scale from year to year. The analysis is carried out by focusing on each of the four main regional factions comprising the parties. The cross-chamber comparisons for the Republicans show a high degree of stability with respect to ideological placement and cohesiveness; eastern Republicans maintain a more liberal stance throughout the period of analysis. For Democrats in both chambers there has been a liberal shift in recent years and an increase in cohesiveness overall; the southern Democrats are distinctively more conservative than the rest of the party, although less so in recent years. Both of the `outlier' factions (eastern Republicans and southern Democrats) unexpectedly display less cohesiveness than do the mainline factions of their respective parties. The paper concludes with some discussion of why this may be the case, what the future holds for outlier cohesiveness, and implications for responsible parties in the United States.