Partisan Environment Research Articles

Partisan Polarization and Congressional Accountability in House Elections

Early research led scholars to believe that institutional accountability in Congress is lacking because public evaluations of its collective performance do not affect the reelection of its members. However, a changed partisan environment along with new empirical evidence raises unanswered questions about the effect of congressional performance on incumbents' electoral outcomes over time. Analysis of House reelection races across the last several decades produces important findings: (1) low congressional approval ratings generally reduce the electoral margins of majority party incumbents and increase margins for minority party incumbents; (2) partisan polarization in the House increases the magnitude of this partisan differential, mainly through increased electoral accountability among majority party incumbents; (3) these electoral effects of congressional performance ratings hold largely irrespective of a member's individual party loyalty or seat safety. These findings carry significant implications for partisan theories of legislative organization and help explain salient features of recent Congresses.

Deracialization and Latino Politics

Deracialization literature has a rich history, but it has generally focused on local-level black candidates in nonpartisan environments. This article extends the deracialization literature to a competitive statewide context and focuses on Latino candidates, offering a broader partisan environment where established deracialization theory and voter response are tested at the individual level. Both John Salazar’s and Ken Salazar’s successful 2004 campaigns for national office are explored using qualitative and quantitative data. The combined approaches yield evidence that Latinos in competitive partisan environments are influenced to deracialize their campaigns and that conservative non-Latino voters are positively and significantly influenced by these nonracial messages.

Accountability through Intraparty Competition

Many scholarly commentators, led by Professors Samuel Issacharoff and Richard Pildes, have trumpeted the view that only through an appropriately competitive partisan environment can the policy outcomes of the political process be responsive to the interests and views of citizens. This preoccupation with interpartisan competition has had a strong influence on the debate about how legislators and judges should assess challenges to American political systems. But competition is only a means to an end; namely, it is only useful if it enhances the responsiveness of political leaders to the will of the electorate. It is the accountability-enhancing features of competition that make it a particularly useful and universal organizing principle for the law of democracy. This Paper's central thesis is that vigorous competition within the party structure can be an adequate - and sometimes superior - means for creating more representative, responsive, and responsible political leadership. In each of the three potential loci for intraparty competition - primary elections, legislative caucuses, and party organizations - I propose doctrinal and regulatory reforms that could be implemented to break down the barriers to competition that currently exist.

Of Time and the Development of Partisan Polarization

In this article we address the topic of increasing partisan polarization in the American mass public, focusing on the twin influences of individual‐level development and cohort replacement and the interaction between the two. We posit a model of individual development that consists of declining openness to change beyond young adulthood, an increase in party‐issue constraint as age advances, and cohort‐specific responsiveness to changes in the partisan environment. Results from a long‐term panel study provide initial evidence of these dynamics. We then use simulations to generate expectations about how these developmental processes play out across cohorts, issues, and time. These expectations are evaluated through a cohort analysis of National Election Studies data from 1972 to 2004. Overall, our results provide a new perspective on the dynamics of individual political development and their implications for the timing, extent, and future trajectory of partisan polarization in the U.S. electorate.

Experts Analyze Real Meaning of CATIE Study Findings

Experts Analyze Real Meaning of CATIE Study Findings

AMA Debates Coverage in SCHIP Legislation

AMA Debates Coverage in SCHIP Legislation

The Consequences of Presidential Battleground Strategies for Citizen Engagement

How consequential is residence in a presidential battleground state for how people engage in politics? I explore the effects of battleground strategies for campaign exposure, voter interest, political discussion, learning, and participation in the presidential campaign. I also consider the sources of battleground influence, including the campaign efforts of presidential candidates and particular partisan nature of battleground states. Using survey data from the 1992, 1996, and 2000 National Election Studies in conjunction with measures of state campaign context, I find that the effects of battleground environments are limited. Neither levels of campaign interest nor rates of political discussion are affected by presidential campaign intensity. While television advertising promotes learning and participation, battleground influence on the intention to vote reflects the partisan environment of a state rather than advertising or events sponsored by the presidential candidates.

Georgia: Rise and Fall of the Façade Democracy

Jaba Devdariani is founding director and chairman of the board of the United Nations Association (UNA) in Georgia.Georgia's revolution of roses, November 22-3, 2003, brought an unprecedented generational change in post-Soviet political leaderships, based on public support for the democracy. Like every revolution, it tells a story of reform.Gradual weakening of Eduard Shevardnadze's government has been observed both by national and international analysts who spoke of Georgia as a failed state. But, more important, Shevardnadze's inflexible style of governance acted as a straightjacket for the political environment that grew increasingly complex since Georgia's independence.On November 23, Eduard Shevardnadze was forced to resign his office, amid the wave of public protests against rigged parliamentary elections, after ruling the country for twelve consecutive years and being in the country's top leadership since the 1970s.Some observers refer to these events as a surprise breakthrough of democracy. Others point out that the leaders who deposed the president were among the top ten leaders of Shevardnadze's own Citizens Union of Georgia in the 1999 parliamentary elections. Thus, the critics say no significant political change has occurred.To put Georgia's revolution of roses in a proper context, it is necessary to analyze the pressures that the country's social and partisan environment put on the political system that personally became associated with Shevardnadze since the 1990s.Only by fusing both of these observations can we tell a story of emergence of the country's democratic institutions, party politics, and reform.PrefaceForty-five political entities, thirteen of which were the party blocs, participated in Georgia's 1999 parliamentary elections. While the general level of party pluralism in Georgia is acknowledged widely, researchers have noted several deficiencies that prevent the political process from becoming a robust and sustainable foundation for the country's democratic development.Among the most frequently mentioned are: 11. Lack of internal party democracy2. Little or no effort to develop meaningful party platforms3. Little attention to membership4. Weak constituency relations5. Failure to separate elected party representatives from the management responsibilities6. Confrontationalism and a propensity to fractionalize 2These political party deficiencies are characteristic of many post-socialist countries. In Georgia, however, the party system had to be recreated from scratch at least twice in the country's recent history, leading to abortive development.The political parties emerged in Georgia in a process broadly reminiscent of similar processes in post-Soviet space. The elitist groups in ideological opposition to communism, commonly known as dissident groups, preceded the modern parties. They did not strive to gain control of the government; hence they cannot, strictly speaking, be characterized as political parties. Many of the dissident leaders have played an active role in the new political parties, and some still remain in the political arena.The political groups aspiring to power today emerged in the late 1980s and formed a vanguard of the independence movement. They succeeded the Communist regime through elections in 1990 but had little time to develop organizationally. Most of these groups squandered popular support in a bloody coup that ousted President Zviad Gamsakhurdia in early 1992. As a result, the rules of the political game and the system of political parties have taken shape since 1995.Different from many other post-socialist states, the Communist Party almost has vanished from the political arena since 1989. The former Communist nomenklatura has maintained some of its influence and financial assets, but as an organizational entity, the Communist Party never has recovered, attracting the protest vote. …

EroG .v hsuB and Its Disguises: Freeing Bush v. Gore from Its Hall of Mirrors

eroG .v hsuB and Its Disguises: Freeing Bush v. Gore from Its Hall of Mirrors

Entrepreneurship Development and Tourism in Rural African Communities

The paper discusses the phenomenon of entrepreneurship development within the context of tourism. It examines factors that influence the probability that an individual will successfully engage in entrepreneurship, to help develop new insights about tourism entrepreneurship development in rural African communities. Significant issues identified, which require the attention of project managers in improving the prospects for tourism entrepreneurship development in that setting, were the appropriate identification of potential tourism entrepreneur and perception of entrepreneurial opportunities, the deeply partisan political environment and the process of transferring relevant managerial skills to potential entrepreneurs.

Party Cleavages and Welfare Effort in the American States

Attempts to determine the impact of party control on state welfare policy have produced mixed and inconclusive results, in part due to our inability to account for variations in the state partisan environments. I used CBS/New York Times surveys combined over the period 1976–88 to offer a detailed examination of the state party systems, resulting in a description of the dominant social group partisan cleavage in each state. This information is then used to examine the impact of party control on state welfare benefits. The findings show that the coalitional bases of the parties vary in important ways, both within and across the states. These differences in the state party systems have an important influence on the relationship between party control and state welfare effort. Specifically, party control has a significantly greater impact in states where partisan divisions reflect class-based New Deal-type coalitions. When examined in the context of state partisan environments, party control has a much greater impact on state welfare effort than has been suggested by previous studies.

Partisan Acquisition, Policy Relevant Parties and Realignments

C OHORT studies of partisan development have generally concluded that partisan acquisition and partisan intensity are both characterized by a mixture of life cycle, generational, and period effects (Abramson 1976; Knoke and Hout 1974; Claggett 1981a; Norpoth and Rusk 1982).1 These studies usually found that the older and/or Great Depression era cohorts were characterized by stronger pro-partisan generational effects than other cohorts. They attributed these strong pro-partisan generational effects to their exposure to a more partisan political environment during their youth. Furthermore, they generally equated pro-partisan environments with realignments so that experiencing (or not experiencing) a realignment while young became the explanation for the presence (or absence) of strong pro-partisan generational effects. But the specific aspect or feature of the political environment responsible for these effects, and which presumably varied in magnitude as realigning periods were replaced by normal and decay periods, was never clearly identified. A second feature left unspecified by these studies was the nature of the socialization process which linked the political environment to those generational effects. By building on the more theoretically oriented research into partisan development, which is largely based on cross-sectional (or shortterm panel) analysis of contemporary data, this study will examine several hypotheses concerning the specific aspect of the political environment responsible for these generational effects and the socialization process that might link it to enduring partisan acquisition. This will answer not only some questions about the historical dynamics of partisanship in the United States but will also broaden the supporting

Creative market planning in a partisan environment

Creative market planning in a partisan environment

Lobbying in the Nonpartisan Environment: the Case of Nebraska

mands within the clearly established democratic framework. Thus, interest groups and their representatives, the lobbyists, are seen as integral parts of the legislative system and their role and their influence have received a much more sophisticated interpretation. Lobbying within the legislative process has been viewed almost entirely in the context of a partisan environment, be it on the national or state scene. Little has been noted on the patterns of lobbying within the nonpartisan milieu, largely because most studies of lobbying patterns have focused on the state and national levels, and nonpartisan elected legislative bodies are mainly restricted to local governmental levels. Lobbying activity on the local governmental level has received scant attention to date. Thus, Nebraska, because of its nonpartisan Legislature, presents a situation of viewing lobbying activities within the nonpartisan milieu,