The Conditional Effect of Term Limits on Electoral Activities

In this article, I examine how term limits affect the amount of time that legislators focus on constituency service and fundraising. I use data from the 2002 U.S. State Legislative Survey conducted by Carey, Niemi, Powell, and Moncrief to provide support for my hypotheses. The results from the data analysis suggest that in the presence of term limits, legislators with long-term career goals in politics spend less time on constituency service activities and more time on fundraising with their caucus. For legislators with short-term career goals in politics, there is very little evidence to suggest that term limits have an effect on how much time they spend on constituency service activities and fundraising activities

The Effect of Partisan Representation at Different Levels of Government on Satisfaction with Democracy in the United States

In this paper, we analyze how variations in partisan representation across different levels of government influence Americans’ satisfaction with the democracy in the United States. We conduct two survey experiments and analyze data from the 2016 American National Election Study postelection survey. We find that Americans are the most satisfied with democracy when their most preferred party controls both the federal and their respective state governments. However, we also find that even if an individual’s least preferred party only controls one level of government, they are still more satisfied with democracy than if their most preferred party controls no levels of government. These findings suggest that competition in elections across both the national and state government, where winning and losing alternates between the two parties, may have positive outcomes for attitudes toward democracy

Regions of Hierarchy and Security: US Troop Deployments, Spatial Relations, and Defense Burdens

Recent work has begun exploring the effects of foreign military deployments on hoststate foreign policies. However, research mostly focuses on dyadic relationships between major powers and host-states, ignoring the broader regional security environment of host-states. We develop a theory of spatial hierarchies to understand how security relationships throughout the region surrounding the host-state affect hoststate foreign policy. Using data on US military deployments from 1950–2005, we show that regional security considerations condition how host-states respond to the deployment of military forces to their territory. Consequently, regional analyses are fundamental in understanding monadic and dyadic decisions about security, alliance behavior, and conflict

Institutional origins of COVID-19 public health protective policy response (PPI) data set v. 1.2 (countries)

This is an original dataset of stringency of public health policy measures that were adopted in response to COVID-19 worldwide by governments at different levels January 24 and April 30 2020. The national file includes daily national level aggregates for 64 countries. The regional file includes daily sub-national level aggregates for Canada and the USA. To measure COVID-19 mitigation policy responses, we gathered data on policies that national and subnational policymakers adopted within fifteen public health categories: state of emergency, self-isolation and quarantine, border closures, limits on social gatherings, school closings, closure of entertainment venues, closure of restaurants, closure of non-essential businesses, closure of government offices, work from home requirements, lockdowns and curfews, public transportation closures, and mandatory wearing of PPE. We identify and code national and subnational public health policies for each subnational unit in 64 countries (subnational aggregates are presently published of USA and Canada only), including countries in North America, Central America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. We rely primarily on government resources, press releases, and news sources, dating policies based on first announcement. Note that between and within the policy categories, there is variation on stringency, with some policy adoptions being more stringent than others (i.e. self-isolation versus lockdowns, partial school closings versus full school closings). To this end, we weighed more stringent policies in each category in the index more heavily. Based on coded public health policy responses to COVID-19, we calculate the Public Health Protective Policy Indices (PPI): Regional PPI for each subnational unit on each day; National PPI for a country on each day, based on national level policies; and Total PPI for each subnational unit on each day. The Total PPI reflects the strictest between the national and subnational policies adopted within each category for that unit for that day. The indices are scaled to range between 0 and 1. The Average Total PPI for each country-day is computed by weighing the different units’ Total PPI values by the units’ population shares. The indices apply solely to the measurable subnational and national public-health COVID-19 mitigation policy responses

CONSTITUTIONAL AND INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURAL DETERMINANTS OF POLICY RESPONSIVENESS TO PROTECT CITIZENS FROM EXISTENTIAL THREATS: COVID-19 AND BEYOND

A multitude of government forms and institutional variations have the same aims of serving their countries and citizens but vary in outcomes. What it means to best serve the citizens is, however, a matter of broad interpretation and so the disagreements persist. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic creates new metrics for comparing government performance – the metrics of human deaths, or, alternatively and as we pursue it here, the metrics of the speed of government response in preventing human deaths through policy adoption. We argue in this essay that institutional and government systems with more authority redundancies are more likely to rapidly generate policy in response to crisis and find better policy solutions compared to centralized systems with minimal authority redundancies. This is due to a multiplicity of access points to policy making, which increase the chances of a policymaker crafting the “correct” response to crisis, which can be replicated elsewhere. Furthermore, citizens in centralized and unitary governments must rely on national policymakers to get the correct response as subnational policymakers are highly constrained compared to their counterparts in decentralized systems. As policy authority is institutionally defined, these policy authority redundancies correspond to specific institutional and constitutional forms. In this paper, we provide a mathematical/formal model where we specifically analyze the contrast in the speed of policy response between more centralized and autocratic states versus democratic federations

Federal Institutions and Strategic Policy Responses to COVID-19 Pandemic

This essay examines the policy response of the federal and regional governments in federations to the COVID-19 crisis. We theorize that the COVID-19 policy response in federations is an outcome of strategic interaction among the federal and regional incumbents in the shadow of their varying accountability for health and the repercussions from the disruptive consequences of public health measures. Using the data from the COVID-19 Public Health Protective Policy Index Project, we study how the variables suggested by our theory correlate with the overall stringency of public health measures in federations as well as the contribution of the federal government to the making of these policies. Our results suggest that the public health measures taken in federations are at least as stringent as those in non-federations, and there is a cluster of federations on which a bulk of crisis policy making is carried by subnational governments. We find that the contribution of the federal government is, on average, higher in parliamentary systems; it appears to decline with the proximity of the next election in presidential republics, and to increase with the fragmentation of the legislative party system in parliamentary systems. Our analysis also suggests that when the federal government carries a significant share of responsibility for healthcare provision, it also tends to play a higher role in taking non-medical steps in response to the pandemic

Winners, Losers, and Protest Behavior in Parliamentary Systems

In this paper, I examine the impact of winning and losing in parliamentary systems on protest behavior. I argue that losers in parliamentary systems with single party, majority governments are more likely to protest than losers in systems with coalition governments. In the empirical analysis, I provide support for my argument using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) survey from 2001 to 2006. The results suggest that losers in single party, majority systems were more likely to protest than their counterparts in coalition systems. In addition, while it is unclear whether winning and losing had an effect on protest behavior in coalition systems, losers in single party, majority systems were more likely to protest than winners

COVID-19 Policy Response and the Rise of the Sub-National Governments

We examine the roles of sub-national and national governments in Canada and the United States vis-à-vis the protective public health response in the onset phase of the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This period was characterized in both countries by incomplete information as well as by uncertainty regarding which level of government should be responsible for which policies. The crisis represents an opportunity to study how national and sub-national governments respond to such policy challenges. In this article, we present a unique dataset that catalogues the policy responses of US states and Canadian provinces as well as those of the respective federal governments: the Protective Policy Index (PPI). We then compare the United States and Canada along several dimensions, including the absolute values of sub-national levels of the index relative to the total protections enjoyed by citizens, the relationship between early threat (as measured by the mortality rate near the start of the public health crisis) and the evolution of the PPI, and finally the institutional and legislative origins of the protective health policies. We find that the sub-national contribution to policy is more important for both the United States and Canada than are their national-level policies, and it is unrelated in scope to our early threat measure. We also show that the institutional origin of the policies as evidenced by the COVID-19 response differs greatly between the two countries and has implications for the evolution of federalism in each