President's Party Research Articles

The Speaker of the House: A Study of Leadership. By Matthew N. Green

The Speaker of the House: A Study of Leadership. By Matthew N. Green. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 292p. $30.00.In his book, Matthew N. Green investigates Speakers' purposive goals, tactical options, and legislative influence. The overriding thesis: Speakers' actions do not simply reflect “the majority of the majority's” interests and preferences, but rather emerge from a more diverse set of goals. As Green argues: “Speakers may exercise legislative leadership on behalf of the preferences of others besides the majority party in Congress [including] representing his or her own district … achieving his or her own preferred policy outcome … helping the party's president, the institutional presidency, or the House as a whole” (p. 17).

Inside the Democrat Party: Power, Politics and Conflict in Indonesia's Presidential Party

This article examines the development of the Democrat Party (Partai Demokrat, PD), which won the 2009 legislative elections in Indonesia. PD has received little scrutiny from observers of Indonesian politics, largely because of a commonly shared view that the party is nothing but a political vehicle for Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the country's President since 2004. A closer look at the internal dynamics of PD, however, challenges this conventional view, reveals the diversity of political orientations and interests among party elites, and elucidates the emerging new patterns of party politics in the age of democracy. This article illustrates these internal dynamics and discusses the party's prospects for the post-Yudhoyono era.

A Gubernatorial Helping Hand? How Governors Affect Presidential Elections

It is commonly argued that a presidential candidate is helped in a state by having a governor of the same party. There is however little research to support this claim. To address this question, we use a regression discontinuity design. The idea is that in very close elections the party of the governor is essentially decided by a coin flip. Focusing on these close elections allows the estimation of the effect of the gubernatorial party. We show that a governor of the same party actually hurts a presidential candidate. Using a similar methodology, we also show that voters punish the president's party when voting for governor in midterm years. Having established these relationships, we explore the possible reasons. One possibility is a variation of the ideological balancing argument, whereby voters' choices for one office are conditional on which party holds office at a different level.

Going Symbolic

Research into the American Presidents’ role in crime control policy has consistently found that they rely on symbolic rhetoric in their crime speeches. The research to date, however, has been confined to qualitative analysis and has not attempted to explain why presidents engage in symbolic rhetoric when it comes to crime policy. This study assesses presidential speeches related to crime from 1948 through 2010, and employs logistic regression to estimate the effects of the independent variables on the likelihood presidents will employ symbolic rhetoric. Findings suggest public opinion, presidential election year, party affiliation, and divided government, are significant factors in the likelihood presidents will engage in symbolic politics. The article concludes with a discussion of the study’s implication for the larger body of research on presidential crime rhetoric and the federal role in crime control.

The President's Economy: Parity in Presidential Party Performance

Have Democratic presidents since World War II had economic records that were superior to those of their Republican counterparts? In a previous study, I reported findings that there were no significant differences between the economic records of the presidential parties once the conditions of the economy they inherited from their predecessor were taken into account. Comiskey and Marsh challenged this finding with an analysis that controlled for business cycle effects. This article reexamines the issue and Comiskey and Marsh's analysis. The reexamination reaffirms my earlier findings that the presidential parties have not significantly differed in their economic records once the effects of inherited economic conditions are taken into account.

The President's Effect on Partisan Attitudes

The link between the president's job approval ratings and aggregate election outcomes is well established, but the processes forging the connection have received comparatively little attention. A variety of data from diverse sources across multiple administrations indicates that popular assessments of the president strongly affect how his party is evaluated, perceived, and adopted as an object of identification, which, in turn, helps to account for the president's influence on the electoral fates of his party's candidates. The data also suggest that opinions of Barack Obama have so far had an even larger effect on attitudes toward the president's party than did opinions of his predecessors, including G. W. Bush.

Republican Party-Building and Anti-Tax Policies

Our tax politics and policies are startlingly different than a generation ago. We have lost the balanced budget consensus and low levels of politicization tax policy used to receive. While some might point to exogenous economic factors, or ideational ones, the biggest driver of this shift is Republican party-building efforts. Looking at all major tax-cutting bills passed by Congress, the GOP shifts to an anti-tax position in 1978 and experiences remarkably few defections since. This paper uses mixed methods and multiple institutional settings (Congress and the Presidency) to investigate this phenomenon. The Presidential investigation includes party platforms (a critical juncture towards anti-tax policies is observed in 1980) as well as election materials for any credible challenge to this new orthodoxy. In keeping with the conference theme of representation, some NES data is also employed. Interestingly, not only does the impression of wasted taxes skyrocket after the late 1970s, but Republicans in the electorate become more concerned about this notion — but markedly more so when a Democrat holds the White House. Archival investigations also highlight the party-building strategy as it unfolds: the 1964 and 1981 cuts are used as case studies. It appears that the GOP has built a seemingly disparate coalition around a single issue — tax politics.

Moral Politics in the 2008 Presidential Convention Acceptance Speeches

This study examines the 2008 presidential party convention acceptance speeches from the perspective of George Lakoff's (1996, 2002) theory of moral politics, which argues that a metaphor of the nation as a family guides the adoption of a political ideology and facilitates persuasion. We coded speeches for instantiations of Strict Father and Nurturant Parent morality and for the social and political issues they contained. We found, as expected, that Democrats referenced more Nurturant Parent themes than Strict Father themes but that Republicans used instantiations from both moral worldviews at similar rates. Democrats, but not Republicans, framed party-owned issues in terms of their corresponding moral worldview. We discuss implications for Lakoff's theory and avenues for future research.

Family and favour at the court of Jacob Zuma

Jacob Zuma's role as both state and party president is significantly underpinned by those who pay court to him on the basis of personal loyalty, patriarchal fealty and hope for personal gain, his f...

Ruling against the Executive in Amparo Cases: Evidence from the Peruvian Constitutional Tribunal

In this paper, we systematically analyze decisions made by the Peruvian Constitutional Tribunal from 1996 to 2006 in amparo cases, which significantly impact individual rights. We ask the following question: in these types of cases, what conditions led the Tribunal to assert itself against the executive? Through an analysis of Tribunal decisions during the presidencies of Alberto Fujimori and Alejandro Toledo, we find that the Tribunal is more likely to rule against the executive, as the public's confidence in the executive decreases and as the share of congressional seats of the president's party declines. Further, the Tribunal is more willing to decide cases against the executive in areas that most pervade its docket, specifically in the areas of pensions and employment. These findings add to the comparative and American judicial politics literature by showing that high courts, even relatively weak ones, follow politics, but that case subject area and prevalence may temper this tendency.

Balancing in the U.S. States, 1978–2009

AbstractSince the Civil War, the president's party has lost seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in all but three midterm election cycles. Many attribute this pattern to “balancing” by moderate voters who prefer a Democratic Congress when Republicans control the White House, and vice versa. Although a number of scholars have tested the balancing hypothesis, the debate remains unsettled. We argue that the U.S. states provide an excellent way to analyze the issue further. Similar to the national government, states feature an executive and (in most cases) a bicameral legislature whose members come up for election in both gubernatorial and state midterm years. If voters balance, one should observe such behavior in state elections when an executive's partisanship is known and a legislative choice is necessary. We examine state legislative elections from 1978 to 2009 and find evidence consistent with the balancing hypothesis.

Is the 60-40 Stock-Bond Pension Fund Rule Wise?

Pension funds typically suggest the 60-40 stock-bond rule to lower risk as during stock market declines bonds tend to rise. However, US investment returns have been presidential party dependent; and returns in the last two years of all administrations exceed those in the first two years. The strategies small cap stocks with Democrats and intermediate bonds or large cap stocks with Republicans yields final wealth about six times the large cap index, 50% more than small caps and more than twenty times the 60-40 mix since 1942.

When politicians attack: party cohesion in the media

Fostering a positive brand name is the chief benefit parties provide for their members. They do this both by coordinating their activities in the legislative process and by communicating with voters. Whereas political scientists have generally focused on the former, dismissing partisan communication as cheap talk, this book argues that a party's ability to coordinate its communication has important implications for the study of politics. The macro-level institutional setting of a party's communication heavily influences that party's prospects for cohesive communication. Paradoxically, unified government presents the greatest challenge to unified communication within the president's party. As this book argues, the challenge stems primarily from two sources: the constitutional separation of powers and the intervening role of the news media.

The Economic Records of the Presidents: Party Differences and Inherited Economic Conditions

Several studies of the post-war American political economy find that Democratic presidents have been more successful than Republicans. Most recently, Bartels (2008) found that economic growth had been greater and that unemployment and income inequality had been lower under Democratic presidents since 1948. If true, these findings combined with the frequent success of Republicans in presidential elections pose a challenge to theories of retrospective voting and responsible party government. This reexamination of these findings indicates that they are an artifact of specification error. Previous estimates did not properly take into account the lagged effects of the economy. Once lagged economic effects are taken into account, party differences in economic performance are shown to be the effects of economic conditions inherited from the previous president and not the consequence of real policy differences. Specifically, the economy was in recession when Republican presidents became responsible for the economy in each of the four post-1948 transitions from Democratic to Republican presidents. This was not the case for the transitions from Republicans to Democrats. When economic conditions leading into a year are taken into account, there are no presidential party differences with respect to growth, unemployment, or income inequality.

Obstructing Agenda-Setting: Examining Blue Slip Behavior in the Senate

Senators increasingly use obstructive tactics to stall or kill legislation. Unfortunately, because senators can obstruct privately, scholars have little understanding of the conditions under which they do so. Using previously unreleased data from 2001-2009, we examine Senate obstruction by focusing on blue slipping behavior. We find that extreme members who do not belong to the president's party are most likely to employ negative blue slips. Thus, as moderate senators continue to be replaced by more extreme members, senators will increasingly use obstructive tactics.

Postmortems of the 2010 Midterm Election Forecasts: A Post-Mortem on “Will the Republicans Retake the House in 2010?”

A bare-bones, “economic performance” model of the number of seats won by the president's party in U.S. House of Representatives elections, estimated over the 1914–2008 period, yielded a point forecast of 227 seats for the Democrats, a net loss of 30 seats relative to what the party held at the start of the 111th Congress (if estimated with midterm elections only; 27 seats, if estimated with all elections). However, there was a great deal of uncertainty around that number, to the degree that there was “one chance in three or four that the Democrats [would] lose at least 40 seats,” enough to deprive them of a majority (Cuzán 2010a). Moreover, “the historical distribution of incumbent midterm losses” since 1914 suggested “that the odds of such an outcome occurring [were] around two in five,” so that “although the model forecasts lean against it, a change in party control cannot be dismissed tout court” (Cuzán 2010a, 640–41).

Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush by Daniel J. Galvin

Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush <i>by Daniel J. Galvin</i>

The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article highlights the president, who has extensive opportunities, both ex ante and ex post, to influence the distribution of federal outlays. We analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24-year period—the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled. Using district and county fixed-effects estimation strategies, we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays. We find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president's party represent them.

The Referendum Model: A 2010 Congressional Forecast

Congressional election forecasting has experienced steady growth. Currently fashionable models stress prediction over explanation. The independent variables do not offer a substantive account of the election outcome. Instead, these variables are tracking variables—that is, indicators that may trace the result but fail to explain it. The outstanding example is the generic ballot measure, which asks respondents for whom they plan to vote in the upcoming congressional race. While this variable correlates highly with presidential party House seat share, it is bereft of substance. The generic ballot measure is the archetypical tracking variable, and it holds pride of place in the Abramowitz (2010) model. Other examples of such tracking variables are exposed seats or lagged seats, features of the Campbell (2010) model. The difficulty with such tracking models is twofold. First, they are not based on a theory of the congressional vote. Second, because they are predictive models, they offer a suboptimal forecasting instrument when compared to models specified according to strong theory.

WINNING VOTES AND WEATHERING STORMS: THE 2009 EUROPEAN AND PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN GREECE

In 2007, the New Democracy (ND) party led by Kostas Karamanlis renewed its term in office, albeit with a very slim parliamentary majority (see Gemenis 2008). For the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) the result marked the fourth consecutive defeat in local, national and European elections and drove the party into a crisis. Although its president, George Papandreou, easily won the open primary with more than 55% of the vote, the party fell into a protracted internal party fighting which lasted several months. For the following nine months, the opinion polls indicated that disillusioned PASOK supporters were moving towards the Coalition of the Left, of Movements and Ecology, known as Synaspismos (SYN), which was experiencing a remarkable surge in its popularity (Figure 1). This popularity was also related to the election of the former party spokesman Alexis Tsipras as the new party president in the February 2008 party congress, which was devised as a strategy to make the party more appealing to young voters.