President's Party Research Articles

Japan in 2018: Abe Administration Surviving Scandals, Consolidating Power

Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Shinzo won a third term as Liberal Democratic Party president in September 2018 despite two crony scandals. As Abe is likely to remain as prime minister till 2021, he is set to hike consumption tax in 2019, organise the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, raise defence spending and probably revise the constitution. Abe’s most significant legislative victory in 2018 was the revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law.

Waiving Goodbye to Congressional Constraints: Presidents and Subnational Policy Making

Presidents often find themselves frustrated by the legislative process and in need of an alternative policy‐making route. While most scholarship on the presidency focuses on unilateral action as the preferred alternative, I propose that subnational policy making can be an equally viable option. Specifically, evidence suggests that presidents have used a waiver strategy to pursue their agendas at the subnational level. I develop and test a proposition about the conditions under which presidents use waivers with an original data set of approved Section 1115 waivers in welfare and Medicaid from 1986 through 2012. I find that presidents approve waivers contingent not only on their ideological distance from Congress, as we might expect, but also on the share of the nation's governors in the president's party. While the president can use a waiver strategy to circumvent Congress, the division of authority in the federal system constrains the president's use of this strategy, as participation from governors is critical for success.

An “Authoritarian Spring?” Authoritarianism and the 2018 Midterm Elections

Abstract This paper examines the role of authoritarianism in the 2018 US congressional elections. In particular, we assess whether the issues that have historically been central to the authoritarian divide in the American electorate were salient in the campaigns of several important Senate races. We demonstrate that authoritarian attitudes played a consistent, significant role on presidential vote choice, party identification, and numerous policy areas in the 2016 presidential election using data from the American National Election Studies. Using case studies of six Senate races in the 2018 midterm elections, we find that authoritarianism was more muted than in 2016, and that the role of authoritarianism varied considerably depending upon the race. States with stronger Trump support in 2016 featured authoritarianism more heavily than states with less Trump support in 2016, but authoritarianism overall was not as prominent in 2018 as in 2016. Overall, Senate candidates relied on traditional campaign messages related to candidate qualifications, personal attacks, the economy, and other messages less central to authoritarianism.

Happy partisans and extreme political views: The impact of national versus local representation on well-being

The political party of elected officials can affect the happiness of the voting public through several different channels. Partisan voters will be happier whenever a member of their party controls political office regardless of the policies implemented. It is hypothesized that congruence between individual party identity and state politician affiliations should have a greater impact on citizen happiness than congruence with politicians at the national level due to results from the literature on Tiebout sorting. It is further hypothesized that individuals with extreme ideological views may report greater happiness as their ideology fulfills basic psychological needs for certainty and structure. Using data from the Generalized Social Survey the effect of party congruence of individuals with national and state politicians on happiness is estimated. The effect of extreme ideological political views on happiness is also estimated. Results find that congruence with presidential party affiliation has a much greater impact on happiness than congruence with national legislative affiliation, gubernatorial, or state legislative affiliation contradicting the hypothesis. Those who possess extreme political views are also found to report higher levels of happiness.

Watchdog Journalism in Japan Rebounds but Still Compromised

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's troubles in 2018 owe much to Japan's resilient liberal media. Between 2011 and 2017, the media was mostly on its back foot, losing credibility over its initial coverage about the Fukushima nuclear accident and withstanding heavy-handed efforts by Abe's government to pressure and intimidate the media into self-censorship (Kingston 2018a). Since early 2017, however, the liberal Asahi newspaper led the way in exposing two cronyism scandals involving private-school projects linked to Abe. It also exposed a series of cases revolving around information disclosure practices that revealed a culture of deception aimed at avoiding government accountability. These included a cover-up at the Defense Ministry regarding a Peace Keeping Operation (PKO) in South Sudan that violated legal constraints imposed by the Diet, and revelations about doctored data used to support Abe's proposed labor reforms. In these and other cases, the government's lack of transparency and mishandling of documents drew sharp public criticism. The press played its role of informing the public about these apparent transgressions while highlighting the arrogance of power that has undermined public trust in Abe; 80 percent do not believe his self-exonerating explanations about the cronyism scandals (Bloomberg 2018). Nonetheless, in September 2018 he won reelection to a third term as Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) president and is set to become Japan's longest serving prime minister. Popular support, however, is tepid, as monthly polls since 2013 by Japan's national broadcasting organization (NHK) indicate that about 50 percent of the public supports him due to a lack of alternatives rather than his virtues as a leader (about 15 percent) or the appeal of his policies (about 15 percent). Despite mixed reviews in the press, he has won a series of elections, and in politics that is what counts (Kingston 2018b).

Escaping collective responsibility in fluid party systems: Evidence from South Korea

How does the public evaluate politicians' reactions to crises that damage their party's image? Using an experimental survey design and the 2016 South Korean political scandal, we explore which strategies allow politicians to avoid electoral accountability for corruption in their party. The scandal prompted some politicians from the president's party to participate in protests calling for her impeachment, make statements criticizing her leadership, or join a new splinter party. We find that all of these strategies both increase electoral support and decrease perceptions of corruption. However, leaving the party is the least successful at increasing electability and politicians are more likely to gain votes if instead they take a clear position against corrupt politicians. Our findings have implications for accountability in weakly institutionalized party systems, where politicians, faced with a party brand crisis, have incentives to switch parties to escape electoral consequences, as opposed to reforming the party from within.

An Evaluation on New Governmental System Discussions and System Proposals in Turkey

AbstractHistorically, many countries have sought to establish a more stable governmental system. At world scale; it is seen that the most common systems of government in practice today are "presidential", "semi-presidential" and "parliamentary system". The obstacles in the governmental systems are instability in the administration which starts the search for new system. Along with the new governmental system proposals in Turkey, it was begun to be argued that the "Turkish Type", "Presidential Parliamentary System", "Half Presidency", "Presidency" and "Party Presidency" models in Turkey wanted a stable government. In Turkey, the influence of pressure groups such as the categorized business world and media have been included in the system discussions, though those discussions were not carried out in a comprehensive manner. Deficiencies in Turkey, especially in the culture of political reconciliation, political instability, ineffectiveness of members of the legislative body, can be seen as the factors that trigger the search for new systems. This study will focus on the new positional arguments in the context of the system discussions in Turkey on behalf of stable and long-term management, discussing the proposals of constitutional amendments in terms of probable deficiencies, political instability, and ineffectiveness of legislative members.

Invisible Coattails: Presidential Approval and Gubernatorial Elections, 1994–2014

Abstract Hoping to insulate their contests from national politics, thirty-six states hold their gubernatorial elections in national midterm election years. Many scholars have assessed whether presidential evaluations nevertheless have an effect on these races, though findings have varied. We offer a new approach to examining this question, relying on underutilized state-level presidential approval data preceding 143 gubernatorial races across six national midterm election cycles. Accounting for the effects of state ideology, gubernatorial approval, campaign spending, state economic performance, and incumbency, we report that presidential approval has a positive and significant effect on the performance of the presidential party in gubernatorial races. The substantive effects are modest, though still potentially meaningful. In the primary specification, an additional six points of presidential approval is associated with about one additional point of gubernatorial vote share.

Presidential Particularism: Distributing Funds between Alternative Objectives and Strategies

While recent empirical evidence supports the notion of presidential particularism?that presidents distribute federal funds to certain groups of voters in order to achieve their own political objectives?work associated with that evidence does not distinguish between presidents' alternative objectives, nor between their alternative strategies for attaining those objectives. Using monthly US data on project-grant awards in 2009 and 2010, we study which objectives presidents pursue in distributing resources. We also address theoretical and empirical ambiguities regarding when and which congressional districts receive distributive benefits. Our results show that core constituencies of the president's party receive more federal funding in both presidential and congressional elections. Districts represented by moderate members of both parties and partisan members of the president's party do not, however, benefit from funding advantages before votes on important legislation. These results indicate that the president attempts to use distributive benefits to influence presidential and congressional election votes, but not votes of federal legislators.

Fragmentation of presidential elections and governability crises in Latin America: a curvilinear relationship?

ABSTRACTPart of the literature views high numbers of presidential candidates as a threat to political stability in presidential democracies. A contradictory model proposes that an overconcentration of the presidential party system is problematic. Both models are hard to reconcile. We approach this puzzle by arguing that the relationship between the level of presidential election fragmentation and governability crises is curvilinear: both very low and very high effective numbers of presidential candidates increase the risk of governability crisis. We test this theoretical claim with ordered logit models drawing on a sample of 108 presidencies in Latin America between 1978 and 2013 and using an ordinal index of the intensity of crisis as the dependent variable. We explore the operation of the theorized causal mechanisms through case studies and argue that they are different at both extremes, high and low levels of fragmentation. Finally, we formulate implications for the design of presidential electoral rules drawing on the debate contrasting runoff and plurality rules.

Happy Partisans and Ideologues: State Versus National

The political party of elected officials can affect the happiness of the voting public through several different channels. Partisan voters will be happier whenever a member of their party controls political office regardless of the policies implemented. It is hypothesized that congruence between individual party identity and state politician affiliations should have a greater impact on citizen happiness than congruence with politicians at the national level due to results from the literature on Tiebout sorting. It is further hypothesized that individuals with extreme ideological views may report greater happiness as their ideology fulfills basic psychological needs for certainty and structure. Using data from the Generalized Social Survey the effect of party congruence of individuals with national and state politicians on happiness is estimated. The effect of extreme ideological political views on happiness is also estimated. Results find that congruence with presidential party affiliation has a much greater impact on happiness than congruence with national legislative affiliation, gubernatorial, or state legislative affiliation contradicting the hypothesis. Those who possess extreme political views are also found to report higher levels of happiness.

Maximizing presidential coattails: the impact of the electoral calendar on the composition of the National Assembly

Since 2000, the French presidential term has been shortened so that it is now the same as that of the National Assembly. What is more, legislative elections have been scheduled to follow immediately after the election of the president. This article assesses the magnitude of the presidential coattail effects on legislative elections. We show that the identity of the winner at the presidential election affects electoral outcomes in subsequent elections in favor of the presidents’ parties. This may happen through two channels. First, voters who have voted for losing candidates may abstain in the following election. Second, some voters—particularly those who do not strongly oppose the president—may join the winning side. Based on district-level electoral data from 2002 to 2017, we appraise the impact of presidential election results on turnout and voter choice in legislative elections. Our results highlight that winning the presidential election produces a 25% increase in the votes for the winning presidential parties in legislative elections. Furthermore, while the decline in turnout may partly explain this result, we provide some clues that swing voters contribute considerably to the increase for presidential parties. More generally, this article shows that the new electoral calendar weakens the parliament and considerably increases the power of French presidents.

After Regime Change: Corporatist Organisations and Political Parties in Mexico

This paper illustrates the divergent party alliances established by former corporatist organisations to influence policymaking after the demise of one-party rule in Mexico. Using a Most Similar Systems Design, the analysis suggests that variations in outcome owe to: a) the extent to which the organisation was relevant for advancing and implementing the agenda of the new presidential party and b) the ability of the organisation in question's leadership to loosen its formal ties with the PRI. The argument is grounded on three cases studies: the National Farm Workers' Confederation, the National Teachers' Union and the Confederation of Mexican Workers. The period under study is 2000–2012, which covers the first two non-PRI presidencies – of Vicente Fox (2000–2006) and then Felipe Calderón (2006–2012).

After Regime Change: Corporatist Organisations and Political Parties in Mexico

This paper illustrates the divergent party alliances established by former corporatist organisations to influence policymaking after the demise of one-party rule in Mexico. Using a Most Similar Systems Design, the analysis suggests that variations in outcome owe to: a) the extent to which the organisation was relevant for advancing and implementing the agenda of the new presidential party and b) the ability of the organisation in question's leadership to loosen its formal ties with the PRI. The argument is grounded on three cases studies: the National Farm Workers’ Confederation, the National Teachers’ Union and the Confederation of Mexican Workers. The period under study is 2000–2012, which covers the first two non-PRI presidencies – of Vicente Fox (2000–2006) and then Felipe Calderon (2006–2012).

How and when do presidents influence the duration of coalition bargaining in semi‐presidential systems?

AbstractHow and when do presidents influence the government formation process in semi‐presidential systems? Presidents have both a formal role and vested interest in the formation of the cabinet, yet their influence has been overlooked in studies of the duration of government formation. In this article, it is argued that the president's influence over government formation can be explained by his or her perceived legitimacy to act in the bargaining process and their partisanship. In this first case, it is argued that the legitimacy to act derives from a president's constitutional powers and more powerful presidents simplify cabinet bargaining, leading to shorter government formation periods. In the second case, it is proposed that presidents and their parties have overlapping preferences. Therefore, when the president's party holds greater bargaining power in government formation negotiations, the bargaining process is less uncertain and less complex. Thus, government formation processes will be shorter. Using survival models and data from 26 European democracies, both propositions are confirmed by the analysis. The results enhance our understanding of the dynamics of cabinet bargaining processes and contribute to the wider study of semi‐presidentialism and executive‐legislative relations. One broader implication of these results is that the president's party affiliation is an important motivation for them as political actors; this contrasts with some previous studies which conceive of presidents as non‐partisan actors.

Presidential Primary Turnout 1972–2016

ABSTRACTWe explore the implications of sequential presidential primary elections for turnout in selecting the presidential party nominees. Drawing from a micro-level theory of participation in sequential elections, we develop a set of aggregate-level hypotheses that tease out different ways that candidate mobilization efforts as well as the legal and institutional structures within a sequential contest influence turnout in presidential nomination contests. Using data from all state primary elections from 1972–2016, we find that electorates facing winnowed candidate pools, and those with contests after the effective endings to presidential contests have substantially reduced turnout that effectively disenfranchises voters in many states. Sequenced primary elections lead to lower overall turnout and less meaningful participation for many voters during presidential nominations contests.

When Political Gridlock Reigns in Presidential Foreign Policy: Policy Availability and the Role of Congress

There is an inherent connection between the party cover and policy availability theories that has been largely overlooked by the presidential use of force literature. Party cover views the president's party strength in Congress as the prominent structural source shaping presidential incentives by diffusing responsibility in foreign policy. But policy availability adds to this view by explaining how such domestic conditions shape the variety of choices (or tools) presidents have for demonstrating political leadership. Policy availability anticipates that presidential incentives to use the Constitution's Article II authority across foreign policy operations will vary depending on the president's relationship with Congress. This analysis provides insight into claims made by policy availability arguments regarding the role of Congress in explaining presidential decisions to initiate military interventions. The findings point to important differences in the effects of Congress on presidential decisions for low‐risk versus high‐risk military missions. We find that the president's ability to legislate decreases the likelihood of humanitarian interventions. In addition, we find that as the president's relationship with Congress becomes more legislatively productive, presidents seem significantly more drawn toward high‐ risk military interventions. We infer from these findings that policy availability represents a powerful motivation in the president's calculation to engage in foreign policy interventions.

The Presidency and Political Equality

When black Americans and white Americans want the president to do different things, who wins? When low-income earners prefer different government action than do middle and high-income earners, whose preferences are reflected in presidential behavior? Recent studies show that congressional behavior often most closely follows the preferences of the white and the wealthy, but we know relatively little about presidential behavior. Since the president and Congress make policy together, it is important to understand the extent of political equality in presidential behavior. We examine the degree to which presidents have provided equal representation to these groups over the past four decades. We compare the preferences of these groups for federal spending in various budget domains to presidents’ subsequent budget proposals in those domains from 1974 to 2010. Over this period, presidents’ proposals aligned more with the preferences of whites and high-income earners. However, Republican presidents are driving this overall pattern. Democratic presidents represent racial and income groups equally, but Republicans’ proposals are much more consistent with the spending preferences of whites and high-income earners. This pattern of representation reflects the composition of the president's party coalition and the spending preferences of groups within the party coalition.

Explaining Nationalist Political Views: The Case of Donald Trump

The 2016 US presidential nominee Donald Trump has broken with the policies of previous Republican Party presidents on trade, immigration, and war, in favor of a more nationalist and populist platform. Using detailed Gallup survey data for 125,000 American adults, we analyze the individual and geographic factors that predict a higher probability of viewing Trump favorably. The results show mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support. His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration. On the other hand, living in racially isolated communities with worse health outcomes, lower social mobility, less social capital, greater reliance on social security income and less reliance on capital income, predicts higher levels of Trump support. We confirm the theoretical results of our regression analysis using machine learning algorithms and an extensive set of additional variables.

Party Institutionalization and the Removal of Presidential Term Limits in Latin America

An explanation of the recent wave of constitutional changes in favor of more permissive reelection rules in Latin America is presented based on a principal-agent model of intraparty relations within the presidential party. The theoretical model suggests causal mechanisms through which institutionalized presidential parties constrain the decision to scrap term limits. The theoretical implications are tested using both quantitative and qualitative evidence. Results from logistic regression suggest that the likelihood of removing term limits in Latin American countries (1990-2013) significantly declines with the level of presidential party institutionalization. Case study evidence illustrates the operation of the theoretically-derived causal mechanisms.