The majority-party disadvantage: revising theories of legislative organization

Dominant theories of legislative organization in the U.S. rest on the notion that the majority party arranges legislative matters to enhance its electoral fortunes. Yet, we find little evidence for a short-term electoral advantage for the majority party in U.S. state legislatures. Furthermore, there appears to be a pronounced downstream majority-party disadvantage. To establish these findings, we propose a technique for aggregating the results of close elections to obtain as-if random variation in majority-party status. We argue that the results from this approach are consistent with a phenomenon of inter-temporal balancing, which we link to other forms of partisan balancing in U.S. elections. The article thus necessitates revisions to our theories of legislative organization, offers new arguments for balancing theories, and lays out an empirical technique for studying the effects of majority-party status in legislative contexts

Essays on campaign finance and political power

This thesis is concerned with the influence of campaign finance on the interplay between political power and electoral competition in the United States and the United Kingdom. The thesis considers both the donation and expenditure sides of campaign finance: In the context of U.S. state and federal legislative elections (1980-2014), I study how political power affects the allocation of campaign contributions, and in the context of U.K. House of Commons elections (1885-2010), I examine how campaign spending restrictions affect political power via electoral behavior. The three papers which make up the construct of the thesis answer the following questions: (i) What is the financial value of incumbency status, and who generates it? (ii) Who values legislative agenda setters, and why do they do so? (iii) What are the electoral consequences of statutory limits on campaign expenditure? I argue that campaign donors make their contributions to powerful politicians in exchange for access to the policy-making process, and that the power of these politicians is sustained, at least in part, due to these contributions. In the first paper, I document that U.S. incumbent legislators enjoy sizeable financial advantages compared to challengers, and I demonstrate that this advantage is the result of donations from access-seeking industries. In the second paper, I show that U.S. legislators who are institutionally endowed with agenda-setting powers are given special treatment by campaign donors. I document that donors with vested economic interests in regulatory policy place great value on agenda-setting legislators – in particular when institutions provide these legislators with the authority to block new legislation. In the final paper, I study the consequences of campaign spending limits in the context of U.K. House of Commons elections. I show that unrestrained spending reduces electoral competition, promotes professionalized campaigns, and benefits incumbents and centerright parties

English Bacon: Co-partisan Bias in Intergovernmental Grant Allocation in England

Replication data and do file for the paper: "English Bacon: Co-partisan Bias in Intergovernmental Grant Allocation in England". The data contains information on central government grants and partisan composition of English local authorities 1992-2012

Replication Data for: When Are Agenda Setters Valuable?

Why do industries donate money to legislative campaigns when roll-call votes suggest that donors gain nothing in return? I argue that corporate donors may shape policy outcomes by influencing powerful agenda setters in the early stages of lawmaking. On the basis of a new dataset of more than 45,000 individual state-legislator sessions (1988- 2012), I document how agenda control is deemed valuable to legislators and groups seeking influence on policy. Employing a difference-in-differences design, I assess the revealed price, as measured by campaign contributions, that firms are willing to pay for access to committee and party leaders and document how this price varies across industries and institutions. The results indicate that industries systematically funnel money to the legislative agenda setters by whom they are regulated, and to those endowed with important procedural powers. I document that the value of agenda- setter positions has increased dramatically in recent years. Finally, exploiting changes in state laws, I show that relaxing contribution limits significantly benefits committee chairs and party leaders more so than it does other legislators, suggesting that agenda setters have strong incentives to obstruct restrictive campaign finance reforms

Replication Data for: How Do Interest Groups Seek Access to Committees?

Concerns that interest groups use their financial resources to distort the democratic process are longstanding. Surprisingly, though, firms spend little money on political campaigns, and roughly 95% of publicly traded firms in the U.S. have never contributed to a political campaign. Do interest groups seek political access through their modest contributions, or are these contributions only a minor and forgettable part of the political process? In this paper, we present comprehensive evidence that interest groups are extremely sophisticated in the way they make campaign contributions. We collect a new dataset on U.S. state legislative committee assignments and legislator procedural powers from 1988–2014, merged with campaign finance data, in order to analyze over 440,000 candidate-committee observations across 99 legislatures. Using a series of difference-in-differences designs based on changes in individual legislators’ positions in the legislature, we not only show that interest groups seek out committee members, but we also show that they value what we call indirect access. When a legislator gains procedural powers, interest groups reallocate considerable amounts of money to her. The results reveal how interest groups in a wide range of democratic settings seek to influence the policy process not only by seeking direct access to policymakers but by seeking indirect access to legislative procedure as well

The financial incumbency advantage: causes and consequences

In this article, we use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of incumbency on campaign contributions in the U.S. House and state legislatures. In both settings, incumbency causes approximately a 20-25 percentage-point increase in the share of donations flowing to the incumbent's party. The effect size does not vary with legislator experience and does not appear to depend on incumbent office-holder benefits. Instead, as we show, the effect is primarily the result of donations from access-oriented interest groups, especially donors from industries under heavy regulation and those with less ideological ties. Given the role of money in elections, the findings suggest that access-oriented interest groups are an important driver of the electoral security of incumbents

Representation and district magnitude in plurality systems

Despite the widely accepted theoretical prediction that high district magnitudes should yield less proportional results in plurality systems, empirical evidence is surprisingly mixed. We argue that these mixed results are ultimately due to a lack of clarity about the counterfactual being considered. We use a simple model to show that an increase in district magnitude reduces expected proportionality in a plurality system only if it is accompanied by a reduction in the number of districts. This conditional prediction helps to explain the diversity of existing findings and is consistent with our own analysis of both U.S. congressional delegations and local councils in Britain