J. Carson | The University of Georgia (original) (raw)

Papers by J. Carson

Page 1. Linking Congressional Districts Across Time: Redistricting and Party Polarization in Cong... more Page 1. Linking Congressional Districts Across Time: Redistricting and Party Polarization in Congress Jamie L. Carson University of Georgia carson@uga.edu Michael H. Crespin Michigan State University crespinm@msu.edu ...

Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2005

We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predic... more We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predictions from the party cartel theory (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994, 2002). We gain leverage on the question of party influence in Congress by focusing on three types of House members: reelection seekers, higher-office seekers, and retiring members. We argue that retiring House members are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect source (when compared to higher-office seekers and reelection seekers) to determine the existence of party influence. Results from a pooled, cross-sectional analysis of the 94th through 105th Congresses (1975-98) suggest that party influence is indeed present in Congress, especially where the party cartel theory predicts: on procedural, rather than final-passage, votes. Moreover, we find that procedural party influence is almost exclusively the domain of the majority party. This latter finding is especially important in that most prior studies have been limited solely to investigating interparty influence. I. Introduction Research investigating party influence in Congress has exploded over the last decade. This has been due, in part, to concerns raised about what constitutes evidence of party influence. Traditionally, congressional scholars have viewed roll-call based measures of partisanship, like measures of "party strength" or "party cohesion," as sufficient to make the case for strong party influence (or discipline) in Congress. Recently, however, Krehbiel (1993, 1999a, 2000) has taken these scholars to task. Developing a preference-based model of congressional behavior, he contends that the typical measures of party influence "increasingly … seem to be artifacts of preferences rather than evidence of party discipline, party cohesion, party strength, or party government" (Krehbiel 2000: 225). While Krehbiel's contentions have resonated with congressional scholars, they have not squelched efforts to uncover evidence of party influence in Congress. Moreover, the use of rollcall votes as the means of uncovering that evidence has not been viewed as problematic, as new and innovative roll-call based approaches have been developed in an effort to separate the effects of preferences and partisanship: examples include a "non-partisan" interest group score 1 (Binder, Lawrence, and Maltzman 1999), a "party pressure" measure 2 (Snyder and Groseclose 2000), partisan "roll rates" 3 (Cox 2001; Cox and McCubbins 2002), partisan "cut points" 4 (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001), and a "net" Rice index of party difference (Cox and Poole 2002). This paper fits in the aforementioned tradition, by searching for party influence in Congress using a different approach to the study of roll-call voting. Rather than developing and applying new methods to "tease out" party influence, however, we apply an existing research design in a different way to a new set of data.

Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2011

Research on candidate competition has focused on how much context matters in emergence decisions ... more Research on candidate competition has focused on how much context matters in emergence decisions and election outcomes. If a candidate has previously held elected office, one additional consideration that may influence entry decisions is the relative degree of overlap between the candidate's current constituency and the "new" set of voters she is seeking to represent. Using GIS software, we derive a measure of the challenger's personal vote by focusing on constituency congruency between state legislative and congressional districts. Results suggest state legislators are more likely to run for a seat in the U.S. House if constituency congruency is relatively high.

American Politics Research, 2002

Although some studies of Congress have employed aggregate-level ideological measures to character... more Although some studies of Congress have employed aggregate-level ideological measures to characterize the outlier tendencies of congressional committees, such measures cannot reveal intracommittee variation in the propensity for disagreement between committees and the floor. In this analysis, we examine differences in voting behavior between members of the committee to which bills were initially referred and the House in the 96th and 104th Congresses. We demonstrate that significant variation occurs both within and among committees, and divergence is at times quite high among some committees not traditionally considered outliers. In the multivariate analysis, we discover that many vote-level factors significantly influence the degree of committee-floor divergence, and a considerable range of variation is evident in the level of divergence across committees. We also find that the number of committees exhibiting divergent behavior, the degree of this divergence, and the breakdown between the parties differs dramatically between the two periods.

American Politics Research, 2007

The elevated levels of party polarization observed in the contemporary Congress have been attribu... more The elevated levels of party polarization observed in the contemporary Congress have been attributed to a variety of factors. One of the more commonly recurring themes among observers of congressional politics is that changes in district boundaries resulting from the redistricting process are a root cause. Using a new data set linking congressional districts from 1962 to 2002, we offer a direct test of this claim. Our results show that although there is an overall trend of increasing polarization, districts that have undergone significant changes as a result of redistricting have become even more polarized. Although the effect is relatively modest, it suggests that redistricting is one among other factors that produce party polarization in the House and may help to explain the elevated levels of polarization in the House relative to the Senate.

Previous studies of polarization in Congress have attributed patterns of divergence among legisla... more Previous studies of polarization in Congress have attributed patterns of divergence among legislators to factors ranging from changes in the nature of the legislative agenda to replacement of members by more extreme ideologues. In this paper, we seek to more directly link patterns of polarization in the U.S. House to underlying changes in representatives' constituencies resulting from redistricting. As districts

Page 1. Linking Congressional Districts Across Time: Redistricting and Party Polarization in Cong... more Page 1. Linking Congressional Districts Across Time: Redistricting and Party Polarization in Congress Jamie L. Carson University of Georgia carson@uga.edu Michael H. Crespin Michigan State University crespinm@msu.edu ...

Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2005

We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predic... more We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predictions from the party cartel theory (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994, 2002). We gain leverage on the question of party influence in Congress by focusing on three types of House members: reelection seekers, higher-office seekers, and retiring members. We argue that retiring House members are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect source (when compared to higher-office seekers and reelection seekers) to determine the existence of party influence. Results from a pooled, cross-sectional analysis of the 94th through 105th Congresses (1975-98) suggest that party influence is indeed present in Congress, especially where the party cartel theory predicts: on procedural, rather than final-passage, votes. Moreover, we find that procedural party influence is almost exclusively the domain of the majority party. This latter finding is especially important in that most prior studies have been limited solely to investigating interparty influence. I. Introduction Research investigating party influence in Congress has exploded over the last decade. This has been due, in part, to concerns raised about what constitutes evidence of party influence. Traditionally, congressional scholars have viewed roll-call based measures of partisanship, like measures of "party strength" or "party cohesion," as sufficient to make the case for strong party influence (or discipline) in Congress. Recently, however, Krehbiel (1993, 1999a, 2000) has taken these scholars to task. Developing a preference-based model of congressional behavior, he contends that the typical measures of party influence "increasingly … seem to be artifacts of preferences rather than evidence of party discipline, party cohesion, party strength, or party government" (Krehbiel 2000: 225). While Krehbiel's contentions have resonated with congressional scholars, they have not squelched efforts to uncover evidence of party influence in Congress. Moreover, the use of rollcall votes as the means of uncovering that evidence has not been viewed as problematic, as new and innovative roll-call based approaches have been developed in an effort to separate the effects of preferences and partisanship: examples include a "non-partisan" interest group score 1 (Binder, Lawrence, and Maltzman 1999), a "party pressure" measure 2 (Snyder and Groseclose 2000), partisan "roll rates" 3 (Cox 2001; Cox and McCubbins 2002), partisan "cut points" 4 (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001), and a "net" Rice index of party difference (Cox and Poole 2002). This paper fits in the aforementioned tradition, by searching for party influence in Congress using a different approach to the study of roll-call voting. Rather than developing and applying new methods to "tease out" party influence, however, we apply an existing research design in a different way to a new set of data.

Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2011

Research on candidate competition has focused on how much context matters in emergence decisions ... more Research on candidate competition has focused on how much context matters in emergence decisions and election outcomes. If a candidate has previously held elected office, one additional consideration that may influence entry decisions is the relative degree of overlap between the candidate's current constituency and the "new" set of voters she is seeking to represent. Using GIS software, we derive a measure of the challenger's personal vote by focusing on constituency congruency between state legislative and congressional districts. Results suggest state legislators are more likely to run for a seat in the U.S. House if constituency congruency is relatively high.

American Politics Research, 2002

Although some studies of Congress have employed aggregate-level ideological measures to character... more Although some studies of Congress have employed aggregate-level ideological measures to characterize the outlier tendencies of congressional committees, such measures cannot reveal intracommittee variation in the propensity for disagreement between committees and the floor. In this analysis, we examine differences in voting behavior between members of the committee to which bills were initially referred and the House in the 96th and 104th Congresses. We demonstrate that significant variation occurs both within and among committees, and divergence is at times quite high among some committees not traditionally considered outliers. In the multivariate analysis, we discover that many vote-level factors significantly influence the degree of committee-floor divergence, and a considerable range of variation is evident in the level of divergence across committees. We also find that the number of committees exhibiting divergent behavior, the degree of this divergence, and the breakdown between the parties differs dramatically between the two periods.

American Politics Research, 2007

The elevated levels of party polarization observed in the contemporary Congress have been attribu... more The elevated levels of party polarization observed in the contemporary Congress have been attributed to a variety of factors. One of the more commonly recurring themes among observers of congressional politics is that changes in district boundaries resulting from the redistricting process are a root cause. Using a new data set linking congressional districts from 1962 to 2002, we offer a direct test of this claim. Our results show that although there is an overall trend of increasing polarization, districts that have undergone significant changes as a result of redistricting have become even more polarized. Although the effect is relatively modest, it suggests that redistricting is one among other factors that produce party polarization in the House and may help to explain the elevated levels of polarization in the House relative to the Senate.

Previous studies of polarization in Congress have attributed patterns of divergence among legisla... more Previous studies of polarization in Congress have attributed patterns of divergence among legislators to factors ranging from changes in the nature of the legislative agenda to replacement of members by more extreme ideologues. In this paper, we seek to more directly link patterns of polarization in the U.S. House to underlying changes in representatives' constituencies resulting from redistricting. As districts