The strength of party brands means that fighting for marginal districts is now much more expensive for candidates

Concern about party polarization in Congress is by no means new, but using new research, Henry A. Kim and Brad L. LeVeck argue that it can also lead to more expensive campaigns for incumbents in marginal districts. They maintain that while strong party branding makes it much easier for candidates to communicate their ideology in districts that like the party, in competitive races, incumbent candidates must work hard, and spend more, to present more information to show that they are closer to their district’s preferences than those of their party

Coordination and cognition in parties

The three papers that comprise this dissertation all start with the premise that parties and other social groups have an incentive to coordinate their activities. Each paper then explores how this strategic incentive shapes beliefs of individuals within these parties and other organizations (Paper 1 and 2); or, how coordination within legislatures shapes the way voters come view parties and their candidates, and how this may in turn affect the cost that parties pay over time to coordinate their activities in Congress (Paper 3

The Democratic Peace and the Wisdom of Crowds

This article proposes a new theory for the democratic peace that highlights a previously unexplored advantage enjoyed by democracies in crises. We argue that because democracies typically include a larger number of decision-makers in the foreign policy process, they will produce fewer decision-making errors in situations of crisis bargaining. Thus, bargaining among larger groups of diverse decision-makers will fail less often. In order to test our hypothesis, we use data from experiments in which subjects engage in ultimatum bargaining games. We compare the performance of individuals, small groups and foreign policy experts against the performance of larger groups of decision-makers. We find strong support for the idea that collective decision-making among larger groups of decision-makers decreases the likelihood of bargaining failure

Evidence for a scale invariant relationship between the incumbency advantage and the nationalization of US House elections 1866–2014

In a recent article, Jacobson examines the rise and fall of the incumbency advantage from 1952 to 2014. He shows that the incumbency advantage over this period rose as elections became more localized, and has fallen in recent decades as elections have become more nationalized. In this research note, we examine whether a similar relationship holds when we extend the time-series back to the end of the Civil War. Consistent with earlier work, we find that the scale of the incumbency advantage was much smaller in the period prior to 1952— approximately ranging between 0 and 4 points. However, despite this difference in scale, there remains a very similar negative correlation between the nationalization of elections and the incumbency advantage. We therefore speculate that the nationalization of elections diminishes the relative size of the incumbency advantage, but the overall size of that advantage may also be shaped by other factors, such as technology, institutional reforms, or changes in the media landscape

Evidence for a Scale Invariant Relationship Between the Incumbency Advantage and the Nationalization of U.S. House Elections 1866–2014

This documentation and data contains all of the code necessary to replicate all of the analyses reported in the main manuscript, as well as a number of robustness checks. The Supplementary Information Appendix was written using Rmarkdown (http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/), which means that compiling the Rmd file in R simultaneously creates a PDF document explaining each step and reproduces all of the analyses in R

The role of self-interest in elite bargaining

One of the best-known and most replicated laboratory results in behavioral economics is that bargainers frequently reject low offers, even when it harms their material self-interest. This finding could have important implications for international negotiations on many problems facing humanity today, because models of international bargaining assume exactly the opposite: that policy makers are rational and self-interested. However, it is unknown whether elites who engage in diplomatic bargaining will similarly reject low offers because past research has been based almost exclusively on convenience samples of undergraduates, members of the general public, or small-scale societies rather than highly experienced elites who design and bargain over policy. Using a unique sample of 102 policy and business elites who have an average of 21 y of practical experience conducting international diplomacy or policy strategy, we show that, compared with undergraduates and the general public, elites are actually more likely to reject low offers when playing a standard "ultimatum game" that assesses how players bargain over a fixed resource. Elites with more experience tend to make even higher demands, suggesting that this tendency only increases as policy makers advance to leadership positions. This result contradicts assumptions of rational self-interested behavior that are standard in models of international bargaining, and it suggests that the adoption of global agreements on international trade, climate change, and other important problems will not depend solely on the interests of individual countries, but also on whether these accords are seen as equitable to all member states

Replication data for: The Role of Self Interest in Elite Bargaining

Data for the article "The Role of Self Interest in Elite Bargaining