Steve Rogers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Steve Rogers
Political Science Research and Methods, 2018
Using new data on roll-call voting of US state legislators and public opinion in their districts,... more Using new data on roll-call voting of US state legislators and public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. In so-called “moderate” districts that switch hands between parties, legislative behavior is shaped by the fact that voters are often quite heterogeneous: the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans within these districts is often greater than the distance between liberal cities and conservative rural areas. We root this intuition in a formal model that associates intradistrict ideological heterogeneity with uncertainty about the ideological location of the median voter. We then demonstrate that among districts with similar median voter ideologies, the difference in legislative behavior between Democratic and Republican state legislators is greater in more ideologically heterogeneous districts. Our findings suggest that accounting for the subtleties of political geogra...
American Journal of Political Science, 2013
Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a pola... more Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a polarizing influence. Likewise, many reformers advocate opening party nominations to nonmembers as a way of increasing the number of moderate elected officials. Data and measurement constraints, however, have limited the range of empirical tests of this argument. We marry a unique new data set of state legislator ideal points to a detailed accounting of primary systems in the United States to gauge the effect of primary systems on polarization. We find that the openness of a primary election has little, if any, effect on the extremism of the politicians it produces. "We have a system today where, with. .. a closed right primary and a closed left primary, which is Republican and Democrat, we have folks that come up there-and, frankly, they're concerned about the next election, their next position. They're concerned about party bosses. They don't worry about what's really important, and that's the state of California. We get this partisanship."-Abel Maldonado, California Lieutenant Governor, 2010-11 (Vocke 2010) F ew dispute that Congress is polarized at historic levels and continues to grow more so each year. Recent research (Shor and McCarty 2011) has shown that this is true of state legislatures as well. To many, this situation is a cause for concern: elected officials pander to partisan interests at the expense of the common good. The quotation above (Vocke 2010
Political Science Research and Methods, 2018
Using new data on roll-call voting of US state legislators and public opinion in their districts,... more Using new data on roll-call voting of US state legislators and public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. In so-called “moderate” districts that switch hands between parties, legislative behavior is shaped by the fact that voters are often quite heterogeneous: the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans within these districts is often greater than the distance between liberal cities and conservative rural areas. We root this intuition in a formal model that associates intradistrict ideological heterogeneity with uncertainty about the ideological location of the median voter. We then demonstrate that among districts with similar median voter ideologies, the difference in legislative behavior between Democratic and Republican state legislators is greater in more ideologically heterogeneous districts. Our findings suggest that accounting for the subtleties of political geogra...
American Journal of Political Science, 2013
Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a pola... more Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a polarizing influence. Likewise, many reformers advocate opening party nominations to nonmembers as a way of increasing the number of moderate elected officials. Data and measurement constraints, however, have limited the range of empirical tests of this argument. We marry a unique new data set of state legislator ideal points to a detailed accounting of primary systems in the United States to gauge the effect of primary systems on polarization. We find that the openness of a primary election has little, if any, effect on the extremism of the politicians it produces. "We have a system today where, with. .. a closed right primary and a closed left primary, which is Republican and Democrat, we have folks that come up there-and, frankly, they're concerned about the next election, their next position. They're concerned about party bosses. They don't worry about what's really important, and that's the state of California. We get this partisanship."-Abel Maldonado, California Lieutenant Governor, 2010-11 (Vocke 2010) F ew dispute that Congress is polarized at historic levels and continues to grow more so each year. Recent research (Shor and McCarty 2011) has shown that this is true of state legislatures as well. To many, this situation is a cause for concern: elected officials pander to partisan interests at the expense of the common good. The quotation above (Vocke 2010