Ideological Primary Competition and Congressional Behavior

Abstract

Primary challenges on an incumbent’s more extreme flank have become increasingly common in congressional elections. We explore the consequences on the legislative behavior of successful incumbents following these types of challenges. We propose that the effect of extreme ideological primary challenges is conditioned on whether the member belongs to the majority or the minority party. We test our expectations on primary elections from 2000 to 2012 and corresponding changes in voting behavior in the next Congress. We find that incumbents in the majority party who have defeated an extreme ideological primary challenge are less likely to support their party, especially on key votes. We expect this reaction is because they fear appearing too moderate and thereby encouraging another extreme ideological primary challenge. We find that incumbents in the minority party who face an extreme ideological challenge do not change their general voting behavior, but are more likely to vote with their party on key votes.     

Political Parties and Women’s Success in Municipal Elections in 2005 in Montérégie and Montréal (Québec,Canada)

ABSTRACT

We examine the impact of political parties on the success of women and men candidates in the 2005 municipal elections of Québec’s two most populous regions, Montérégie and Montréal. We built the dataset by requesting documentation from each municipality separately. This original dataset supports our two hypotheses. First, we demonstrate that the presence of political parties did not affect the difference in percentages of votes obtained by women and men candidates. No matter the gender, candidates affiliated with a political party obtained more votes than independent ones. Second, we find that gender did not affect contributions. No matter the gender, the presence of political parties and the candidates’ affiliation had a positive impact on their contributions. Québec conforms to findings in the U.S. literature: women and men candidates, under similar circumstances, are equally likely to obtain votes and contributions.     

Roll Call Votes on Cabinet Confirmations

Studies of cabinet nominations by the Senate have focused on the process and the outcomes of cabinet confirmation votes in the Senate, while the individual votes of senators have received little attention. This study examines roll call votes on all cabinet nominations since 1969 in an effort to explore the effects political and personal factors have on senators' votes on cabinet confirmations. Three basic conclusions emerge: the most significant influences on senators' confirmation votes are personal factors, especially perceptions of the nominee being a policy extremist; negatives matter more than positives; and there are partisan differences, as presidential party senators have a higher probability of voting to confirm when allegations of wrongdoing are made.     

Outlook

Abstract

The heavy ion research described in these reviews focussed predominantly on collision energies around the nuclear Coulomb threshold. To put this energy in perspective one could say that the relative velocity of two nuclei impinging on each other is small compared to the so-called Fermi velocity at which individual nucleons move inside the nucleus. As a consequence nuclear matter tends to be in or close to thermal equilibrium at all times during the nuclear collisions because the energy is quickly dissipated inside the nucleus through moving nucleons. However, one may anticipate a change in this situation if the energy of the heavy ion beams increases further. Then a nucleus smashing into another nucleus may cause shock waves or the same phenomena which are observed if an airplane exceeds the speed of sound. Furthermore, nuclear compression and heating might be considerable. At even higher energies, the heavy ion exceeds many thresholds, like the one for the production of pions and other strange particles like lambda and sigma particle and even antiprotons. At the end of such a process the nuclear liquid may be compressed and heated so much that nucleons with their three quarks in a bag lose their individuality, quark are deconfined and form an extended bag of many quarks and gluons, according to today's knowledge of the ultimate constituents of matter. And even the atomic physics may b taken to the extreme by depriving uranium atom of all electrons, leaving a tripped and naked uranium nucleus behind.     

Electoral inequalities in the 1990 federal elections

Due to the concentration of Australian Labor Party voters, that party has to poll more votes than the Liberal and National Parties to win an election. That is not a gerrymander, for no matter how fairly the boundaries were drawn, Labor would still need to poll more votes than its opponents under the preferential, single‐member constituency voting system. Nevertheless, even under perfectly fair electoral redistributions, Labor is bound to come off worst because Labor voters are more highly concentrated than non‐Labor voters.     

当代加拿大华人精英参政模型分析

论文将当代加拿大华人精英的参政情况概括为五种模型：选举型和委任型、全国型和地方型、象征型和实在型、主流政党型和华人政党型及华人选票型和非华人选票型,并运用这五种参政模型对当代加拿大华人精英的参政情况进行归纳与分析。认为华人精英无论采取何种模型参与加拿大政治,只要能成功进入主流社会,对改善华人在加拿大社会的公共政治形象,提高他们的社会政治地位和维护他们的合法权利都十分有益,对华裔新生代未来参与政治的热情也是一个激励。     

Endocranial lesions in non‐adult skeletons: understanding their aetiology

Reactive new bone on the endocranial surface of the skull in non‐adults has recently received a lot of attention in the palaeopathological literature. These features appear as layers of new bone on the original cortical surface, expanding around meningeal vessels, as isolated plaques, ‘hair‐on‐end’ extensions of the diploë or, as ‘capillary’ impressions extending into the inner lamina of the cranium. These lesions are commonly found on the occipital bone, outlining the cruciate eminence, but have also been recorded on the parietal and frontal bones, and appear to follow the areas of venous drainage. Although recognized as resulting from haemorrhage or inflammation, their precise aetiology is still a matter of controversy. This paper outlines their possible causes and examines their nature and distribution in a group of non‐adults from four archaeological sites in England. It is recommended that, when recording these lesions in the future, additional skeletal pathologies, the age of the child, and nature and distribution of the lesions also be taken into account. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

中国人口寿命的时间变化和区域差异

本文论述了我国人口平均预期寿命的时间变化和区域差异,分析了我国"百岁寿星"的地理分布态势,提出了防治老年性疾病和艾滋病、增进延年益寿的积极意义。建国后,我国人口寿命的年度变化可分为快速增长和平缓增长两个时期,在区域差异上有明显的城乡差异,东、西部地区之间和民族地区之间的差异也比较明显。     

Decision-Making on Roll Call Votes in the House of Representatives

This article explores notions of contextual decision-making in congressional floor voting, based on structured interviews with 80 House Members. The research documents that congressmen make up their minds in different ways on different kinds of votes. Decision-making was found to be variegated; the major distinction is between high and low profile votes. The article also offers an optimistic assessment of the potential for constituency/representative linkages in House voting.     

Governed by Experience: Political Careers and Party Loyalty in the Senate

In this article, we study the U.S. Senate to understand how legislators' previous experiences in elected office influence their political behavior. We posit that, as a result of their experiences in office, former governors in the Senate are less partisan than their colleagues. We code the political jobs held by senators between 1983 and 2015 and analyze the effects of these careers on party loyalty in Senate floor votes. We find that gubernatorial service is associated with a 7–8% decrease in Party Unity. We test several hypotheses for the observed “governor effect” and find that, relative to their colleagues, former governors are supported by donor networks that are less ideologically extreme. We conclude that the unique experiences associated with serving as governor, along with the personalized nature of governors' electoral support coalitions, affect a senator's relationship with the party. Ultimately, our analysis illuminates how personal attributes, such as prior experience in elected office, can inform the study of legislative behavior.     

First Impressions:

They say first impressions always matter. Americans acquired an empire of tropical islands in the Pacific about which they knew little and cared even less. Yet they set to almost immediately to understand and harness these new environments for their own purposes. This paper looks at the processes through which these strange new worlds in the Philippines and Guam were incorporated and subordinated into a comprehensible imperial framework through the diaries of two environmental managers, Gifford Pinchot and William Safford. Both men wrote about their first encounters with the tropics, recording its strange flora and fauna, noting its seismic convulsions and climatic extremes, and trying to manage it by making sense of what they saw, heard, smelt and touched. As diarists, scientists and, above all, imperialists, they give us rare insight into the initial attitudes of the men who managed these new imperial landscapes.     

Disproportionality and bias in US Presidential Elections: How geography helped Bush defeat Gore but couldn't help Kerry beat Bush

The 2000 and 2004 US Presidential elections were closely fought contests, with in the first case victory in the Electoral College being denied to the candidate with the largest share of the popular vote. Disproportionality in the translation of votes into seats (in this case, from popular votes to votes in the Electoral College) is common to contests using a winner-takes-all electoral system. So is bias, whereby that disproportionality does not apply equally to each candidate. Analysis of the bias at those two elections shows that Bush was favoured at the first but not at the second. Identification of the bias components shows that Bush was advantaged by variations in the number of popular votes per Electoral College voter across the states, and also by variation in turnout. In 2000, his popular votes were also more efficiently distributed than Gore's; in 2004 they were less efficiently distributed than Kerry's, largely because of increased turnout – producing larger numbers of surplus votes – in states that were already safe for Bush.     

A GIS-based spatial analysis on neighborhood effects and voter turn-out:: a case study in College Station,Texas

This paper examines individual voter turn-out and its putative relationship with voting outcomes at the voting precinct level. Via a GIS-based address matching procedure, we were able to georeference individual voters (registered voters who casted their votes) and non-voters (those registered voters who did not cast their votes) for three recent local referenda in College Station, Texas. We then conducted a scale-sensitive, second-order spatial analysis for the spatial distribution of voter turn-outs, followed by a spatial clustering analysis of the voting results using Getis–Ord’s G_i statistic. We found that the extent of neighborhood effects in local elections is heavily influenced by the voter turn-out. If voter turn-out is clustered at intermediate and large scale, voting results tend to be clustered and also exhibit a sharp polarization between high and low values. If voter turn-out tends to be uniform/regular at intermediate scales but randomly distributed at both small and large scales, there appears to be less clustering in the voting results and thus lack of the neighborhood effect. If the voter turn-out pattern is mixed-uniform/regular at the small scale, random at the intermediate scale, but clustered at the large scale, the voting results show a stronger neighborhood effect.     

Globalization,robotization, and electoral outcomes: Evidence from spatial regressions for Italy

Criticism of economic globalization and technological progress has gained support in Italy in the last two decades. However, due to the differentiated exposure of local labor markets to this process, electoral outcomes have varied considerably across the country. By observing the local impact of three global economic phenomena (flows of migrants, foreign competition in international trade, and diffusion of robots) alongside with the patterns of local electoral outcomes potentially associated with discontent, this study analyzes the economic forces driving the evolution of general elections in 2001, 2008, and 2013 in Italy. The analysis reveals that all these global factors had an impact on political outcomes associated with discontent, albeit in different ways and changing over time. All three factors are associated with increases in votes for far‐right parties in the period 2001–2008, but only robotization continues to have such an impact in the following period, while immigration is associated with an increase in votes for the Five‐Star Movement at the expense of far‐right parties. The results and extensions exploiting recent advances in political geography, political economy, and spatial econometrics make it possible to draw some general and methodological conclusions. Global drivers interact with elements pertaining to the political supply that empirical researchers should not be oblivious about. Political spillovers across neighboring areas add to the direct impact of locally mediated economic factors. Finally, the adoption of shift–share instrumental variables to identify the impact of robotization may lack robustness.     

Extensions to the Hub Location Problem: Formulations and Numerical Examples

Although a tremendous amount of analytical research is being conducted on the hub location problem, few models exist that extend the number of characteristics found in actual hub-and-spoke networks. Four extensions are presented in this paper: (1) a capacitated network model; (2) a minimum threshold model; (3) a model that endogenously determines the number of open hubs for the network; and (4) a model that incorporates a flow-dependent cost function for the spokes as well as the interhub links. Both the capacitated and the minimum threshold models drop the assumption of a completely interconnected network commonly found in hub location models. Numerical results show that total network costs are often minimized by closing a few interhub links. The third extension is the first known hub location model to determine the optimal number of hubs based on the needs of the network. In this model, the number of open hubs depends on the distribution of flows in the network and how cost effectively the flows can be moved across the network. Previous models that endogenously determined the number of open hubs utilized a fixed cost for establishing each hub in order to limit the number of hubs in the network. The final extension recognizes the potential of all links to amalgamate flows and includes a separate flow-dependent cost function for the spokes in addition to the one for the interhub links. Numerical results are shown for all four models.     

Italian candidates under the Rosato mixed electoral system. In search of personal votes in the plurality tier?

The Rosato law has established a new electoral system featuring single-member districts (S.M.Ds) along with a prevailing proportional tier. S.M.Ds are typically associated with individual incentives to cultivate a personal vote and with a more direct link between representatives and their local constituency. This article investigates patterns of personalized votes in the Italian elections of March 2018 by analysing voting data about candidates for the Chamber of Deputies who ran in the plurality tier. Results reveal that only a minor – although not negligible – portion of Italian voters cast their ballot for an individual candidate only, and that these votes had almost no impact on the outcomes of competition in S.M.Ds. Moreover, some interesting differences across geographical areas, parties and coalitions emerge in the use of personalized vote.     

Congressional Position Votes in the Truman Administration, 1947–52: A View from the White House

Scholars have routinely overlooked Harry Truman in analyses of presidential position votes in Congress. The principal data source for longitudinal studies of executive-legislative relations, Congressional Quarterly, did not regularly begin compiling presidential position votes until 1953. Yet position votes for the Truman administration do exist. Archival research at the Harry Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, revealed that the president commissioned his White House staff to undertake an analysis of position votes spanning the 80th, 81st, and 82nd Congresses (1947–52). This research note analyzes Truman's success rate on this set of domestic and foreign policy votes and provides details on the 83 House and 99 Senate position votes for future use by researchers.     

Electoral Disproportionality and Bias Under the Alternative Vote: Elections to Australia's House of Representatives

Studies of electoral disproportionality and bias under Australia's alternative electoral system have mainly relied on the two-party preferred (2PP) vote totals for all electorates, irrespective of whether these are needed to determine the election outcome there. We argue that separate analyses should be undertaken for two groups of electorates – where the determination is made using the first-preference (FP) votes and where the 2PP redistributed votes are needed because no candidate wins a majority of FP votes, illustrating this with an analysis of the 2007 House of Representatives election results.     

Geography and Election Results: Disproportionality and Bias at the 1993–2004 Elections to the Australian House of Representatives

The Alternative Vote system used for elections to the Australian House of Representatives is generally believed to disadvantage the Australian Labor Party in contests with the Liberal and National parties. However, most analyses on which such conclusions are based over-simplify the situation by not separating out the translation of votes into seats according to whether the election outcome in a district is determined using the first-preference or two-party preferred (2PP) votes. Analyses of bias at five recent elections which recognise that separation find little bias against either party in the districts where the determination used the 2PP votes (i.e. no candidate received a majority of the first preferences), but considerable bias in those where the outcome was decided on first-preferences. Furthermore, that bias was not in one direction, but rather favoured the largest party in each of those contests. The reason for this is identified in the geography of support for the two parties, which produces the equivalent of a ‘cracked gerrymander’ in sufficient districts to have a significant impact on the outcome.     

Labour electoral landslides and the changing efficiency of voting distributions

The translation of votes into seats under first–past–the–post electoral systems with single–member constituencies invariably results in disproportional allocations of seats relative to votes among the main two parties. It also tends to produce biased outcomes, with one party getting a more disproportionate share of the seats with a given share of the votes than does its opponent. In Great Britain, these biases favoured the Conservative party until the 1980s, but now strongly favour Labour. Production of those biases results from a variety of influences involving the interaction of the geography of party support with that of constituency boundaries. Increasingly, that interaction has favoured Labour: without any explicit manipulation of the constituency map to its own ends, it now benefits substantially from the equivalent of the malapportionment and gerrymandering cartographic abuses typical of the United States, because of its ability to manipulate its vote distribution within the constituency system.