This chapter uses investigative activity during the Obama administration as a lens for evaluating presidential–congressional relations in the early twenty-first century. Investigative activity declined in intensity in the late 1980s... more
This chapter uses investigative activity during the Obama administration as a lens for evaluating presidential–congressional relations in the early twenty-first century. Investigative activity declined in intensity in the late 1980s through the first decade of the new century, but Republicans’ takeover of the House of Representatives in 2010 sparked a series of high-profile probes. None of these investigations hit their mark and became the next Watergate or provided the impetus for major policy changes. However, collectively they demonstrate the continued vitality of investigations as a mechanism for members of Congress to inflict damage upon the executive branch. In the intensely polarized contemporary era, forcing major direct policy change may have become increasingly difficult, but investigators in divided government have focused their investigative energies on imposing political costs on the president, and they have regularly achieved this goal to considerable effect.
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This chapter explores the forces driving variation in congressional willingness to use its investigative powers over time. Marshaling an original dataset identifying more than 11,900 days of investigative hearings held in the House and... more
This chapter explores the forces driving variation in congressional willingness to use its investigative powers over time. Marshaling an original dataset identifying more than 11,900 days of investigative hearings held in the House and Senate from 1898 to 2014, it examines the institutional, partisan, and ideological forces that drive the considerable temporal variation in the frequency with which Congress exercises its investigative powers over more than a century of American political history. It shows that both partisan forces and policy disagreements drive variation in investigative activity. These effects are most robust in the House of Representatives, where there is a strong, consistent relationship between divided government and investigative activity, and where heightened polarization boosts the impact of divided party control.
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We elaborate a general workflow of weighting-based survey inference, decomposing it into two main tasks. The first is the estimation of population targets from one or more sources of auxiliary information. The second is the construction... more
We elaborate a general workflow of weighting-based survey inference, decomposing it into two main tasks. The first is the estimation of population targets from one or more sources of auxiliary information. The second is the construction of weights that calibrate the survey sample to the population targets. We emphasize that these tasks are predicated on models of the measurement, sampling, and nonresponse process whose assumptions cannot be fully tested. After describing this workflow in abstract terms, we then describe in detail how it can be applied to the analysis of historical and contemporary opinion polls. We also discuss extensions of the basic workflow, particularly inference for causal quantities and multilevel regression and poststratification.
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Many political observers have expressed doubts as to whether America's leaders are up to the task of addressing major policy challenges. Yet much of the critical commentary lacks grounding in the systematic analysis of the core... more
Many political observers have expressed doubts as to whether America's leaders are up to the task of addressing major policy challenges. Yet much of the critical commentary lacks grounding in the systematic analysis of the core institutions of the American political system including elections, representation, and the law-making process. Governing in a Polarized Age brings together more than a dozen leading scholars to provide an in-depth examination of representation and legislative performance. Drawing upon the seminal work of David Mayhew as a point of departure, these essays explore the dynamics of incumbency advantage in today's polarized Congress, asking whether the focus on individual re-election that was the hallmark of Mayhew's ground-breaking book, Congress: The Electoral Connection, remains useful for understanding today's Congress. The essays link the study of elections with close analysis of changes in party organization and with a series of systematic as...
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R code for Chapter 5 of "Target Estimation and Adjustment Weighting for Unrepresentative Survey Samples" (Cambridge Elements)
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This chapter discusses the incorporation of civil rights into the program of state Democratic parties in the North and compares their stance to that of state Republican parties. The main evidence is a collection of approximately a... more
This chapter discusses the incorporation of civil rights into the program of state Democratic parties in the North and compares their stance to that of state Republican parties. The main evidence is a collection of approximately a thousand state party platforms from 1920 to 1968. The platforms show that neither party paid much attention to civil rights prior to the late 1930s, but starting in the 1930s and accelerating in the 1940s, northern state Democratic parties moved to the left on civil rights. Their civil rights positions were generally more liberal than those of their same-state GOP counterparts by 1944–1946. Pro-civil rights positions were also more prevalent in states with a substantial African American population, high levels of urbanization, union density, and Jewish population. Thus, the same variables that were linked to strong support for New Deal liberalism after 1937 also came to be associated with state parties taking a strongly pro-civil rights position.
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<p>This chapter traces the mass-level story of civil rights realignment among whites. The conventional understanding is that New Deal economic liberalism and racial liberalism were not related among whites until the 1960s or perhaps... more
<p>This chapter traces the mass-level story of civil rights realignment among whites. The conventional understanding is that New Deal economic liberalism and racial liberalism were not related among whites until the 1960s or perhaps the late 1950s. The chapter shows that among northern whites, both Democratic partisanship and economic liberalism were linked to support for the major civil rights initiatives on the agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. Although partisanship was uncorrelated with civil rights views among southern whites, economic conservatism was related to more conservative civil rights views. This connection between economic and racial conservatism in the South provided fertile ground for the GOP's eventual "southern strategy." Ultimately, economically liberal northern Democrats provided much stronger support for most of the leading civil rights policy initiatives on the agenda than did economically conservative Republicans.</p>
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<p>This chapter examines the battle for control of the national GOP. The idea of a realignment premised on Republican appeals to disaffected southern conservatives had been a topic of political conversation from 1937 onward.... more
<p>This chapter examines the battle for control of the national GOP. The idea of a realignment premised on Republican appeals to disaffected southern conservatives had been a topic of political conversation from 1937 onward. However, many national leaders were wary of such a shift, which would tip the balance of power in the party decisively toward its conservative wing, risking a loss of support in urban, liberal states. The chapter then analyzes GOP strategy toward civil rights in the 1940s–1950s, as party leaders sought to balance the rank- and-file's general lack of interest in pursuing vigorous action with the perceived need to appear at least mildly supportive in order to avoid alienating moderate voters in states like New York and Illinois.</p>
This paper begins to leverage the roughly 450 public opinion surveys conducted from 1936-45 to explore the relationship between public opinion and the limits of New Deal liberalism. The rise of the conservative coalition in Congress in... more
This paper begins to leverage the roughly 450 public opinion surveys conducted from 1936-45 to explore the relationship between public opinion and the limits of New Deal liberalism. The rise of the conservative coalition in Congress in the late 1930s left in place many of the liberal policy gains enacted in 1933-35, but it did stall proposals for a more expansive, socially democratic welfare state. Prior work has explored the south’s potentially pivotal role in limiting New Deal liberalism (see, e.g., Katznelson and Farhang) and the internal dynamics of the conservative coalition within Congress, but the interplay between mass politics and the conservative coalition has received much less attention. Yet the ability of Republicans to compete successfully in the north after 1938 is a major reason why northern liberals were so dependent on southern support for their initiatives. This paper provides a first cut tracing the dynamics of public opinion concerning the liberal policy agenda ...
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<p>This chapter analyzes the battle for control of the national Democratic Party as the players empowered by the coalitional and ideological changes after 1937 battled not just against southern Democrats but also against national... more
<p>This chapter analyzes the battle for control of the national Democratic Party as the players empowered by the coalitional and ideological changes after 1937 battled not just against southern Democrats but also against national party leaders desperate to hold together the fragile North–South coalition. The bland national platforms that Democrats adopted in the 1940s and 1950s belied the vigorous efforts by the liberal civil rights coalition to push for a strong platform plank, which became a regular focal point of dispute starting in 1944. The national platform fights exemplify both the much stronger push for civil rights on the part of important Democratic constituencies (compared to Republicans) and the efforts of national party leaders to avoid a clear stand. A survey of convention delegates from 1956 shows that despite the two parties' similar national platforms, the distribution of delegate preferences was decidedly more pro-civil rights among Democrats.</p>
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Many contend that U.S. state parties are increasingly polarized and nationalized, meaning that they have adopted divergent positions matching their national counterparts’. Yet, the relationship between these trends and the mechanisms... more
Many contend that U.S. state parties are increasingly polarized and nationalized, meaning that they have adopted divergent positions matching their national counterparts’. Yet, the relationship between these trends and the mechanisms underpinning them remain open questions. We introduce a data set of 1,783 state party platforms between 1918 and 2017 to assess these dynamics. Applying tools from automated and manual content analysis, we find that innovative phrases increasingly debut in state (not national) platforms. We also document a dramatic divergence in the topics emphasized by Democrats and Republicans starting in the mid-1990s, just as congressional speech polarized. During this period, cross-state differences in issues decreased and regional/sectoral issues became less prominent, suggesting tight connections between polarization, nationalization, and state agendas. Overall, the evidence undercuts claims of top-down nationalization and is consistent with the view that polarization coincides with the development of an integrated network of activists spanning multiple levels of the polity.
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We review debates concerning the evolution and impact of parliamentary obstruction in the U.S. Senate, focusing on path dependency versus remote majoritarian perspectives. We consider the viability of circumventing supermajority... more
We review debates concerning the evolution and impact of parliamentary obstruction in the U.S. Senate, focusing on path dependency versus remote majoritarian perspectives. We consider the viability of circumventing supermajority requirements for rules changes by using rulings from the chair to establish precedents. Because the viability of this approach depends, at least in part, on the anticipated reaction of the public, we conduct a preliminary analysis of public opinion data from the 1940s through the 1960s and from the showdown over the obstruction of judicial nominees in 2005. We contend that the balance of the evidence favors the position that senators have generally supported the maintenance of the filibuster and have been able to make procedural adjustments when obstruction threatened a committed majority's top priorities, although we offer some important refinements required in comparing the historical operation of obstruction to its impact in today's Senate.
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An interview with Theda Skocpol took place at Harvard University in December 2017. Professor Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. Skocpol is the author of numerous books and articles... more
An interview with Theda Skocpol took place at Harvard University in December 2017. Professor Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. Skocpol is the author of numerous books and articles well known in political science and beyond, including States and Social Revolutions, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, and The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (the latter coauthored with Vanessa Williamson). Skocpol has served as President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association. Among her honors, she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences, and she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. She was interviewed by Eric Schickler, the Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at...
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... We have also benefited from the work of many able research assistants over the years, among them Jon Cowden, Joel Fetzer, Matt Green, Eric McGhee, Barry McMillion, Melissa Michelson, David Nickerson, Kathryn Pearson, John Sides, Jenny... more
... We have also benefited from the work of many able research assistants over the years, among them Jon Cowden, Joel Fetzer, Matt Green, Eric McGhee, Barry McMillion, Melissa Michelson, David Nickerson, Kathryn Pearson, John Sides, Jenny Smith, Dara Strolovitch, Janelle ...
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Poole and Rosenthal's NOMINATE scores have been a boon to the study of Congress, but they are not without limitations. We focus on two limitations that are especially important in historical applications. First, the dimensions... more
Poole and Rosenthal's NOMINATE scores have been a boon to the study of Congress, but they are not without limitations. We focus on two limitations that are especially important in historical applications. First, the dimensions uncovered by NOMINATE do not necessarily have a consistent ideological meaning over time. Our case study of the 1920s highlights the challenge of interpreting NOMINATE scores in periods when party lines do not map well onto the main contours of ideological debate in political life. Second, the commonly used DW-NOMINATE variant of these scores makes assumptions that are not well suited to dealing with rapid or non-monotonic ideological change. A case study of Southern Democrats in the New Deal era suggests that a more flexible dynamic item-response model provides a better fit for this important period. These applications illustrate the feasibility and value of tailoring one's model and data to one's research goals rather than relying on off-the-shel...
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Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is... more
Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites—such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater—set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. This book instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. The book shows that the two parties&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39; transformation on civil rights took place gradually over decades. The book reveals that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and support for civil rights had crystallized in public opinion, state parties, and Congress by the mid-1940s. This trend was propelled forward by the incorporation of African Americans and the pro-civil-rights Congress of Industrial Organizations into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, Republican partisanship became aligned with economic and racial conservatism. Scrambling to maintain existing power bases, national party elites refused to acknowledge these changes for as long as they could, but the civil rights movement finally forced them to choose where their respective parties would stand. Presenting original ideas about political change, the book sheds new light on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics.