Preferable Minority Representatives: Brokerage and Betrayal (original) (raw)
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David R. Mayhew - Congress The Electoral Connection (2004)
Preface xvii ber may need to cater to a crosscountry finance con stituency in order to keep scoring with a home-district voter constituency. Southern Democrats running for the Senate, for example, seem to need to raise money in Holl yw ood. lt is a dual-constituency pattern. Also on the campaign finance front, an incumbent may stock up enough campaign money to scare off strong challengers. That is a perfect instance of acting so as to influence relevant political actors, even if home district voters know nothing about it. Fifth, let me admit that if I were writing The Ekctoral Connection today I would back off from claiming that "no theoretical treatment of the United States Con gress that posits parties as analytic units will go very far" (p. 27). From the perspective of 2004 it is easy to see that the congressional parties bottomed out in importance around 1970 and that they have grown considerably more important in various ways since that time. That much is clear. Still, I have not seen any evidence that today's congressional party leaders "whip" or "pressure" their members more frequently or effectively than did their predecessors thirty years ago. Instead, today's pattern of high roll-call loyalty seems to owe a debt to a post-1960s increase in each party's "natural" ideological homogeneity across its universe of home constituencies. Somehow, the cau sation lurks down there in the states and districts. 5 5. See Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher, "The Disappear ance of Moderate and Cross-Pressured Members of Congress: Conversion, Replacement and Electoral Change," paper pre-xviii Prefar.e Also, even in an era of stronger party leadership and high party loyalty, there are limits. A key finding of recent research is that members of a House majority party can profit individually in the next election through what might be called "centrist defecting"that is, by voting with the minority party on roll calls where their own party's stance is risky back home. Perhaps we ali knew this, but I had not seen the effect measured in sophisticated fashion until recently. The phenomenon has been observed on roll calls on showdown budgetary questions in general during the 1980s and 1990s, on three major White House or Democratic measures during 1993-94-Clinton's budget package of 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the party's omnibus crime measure of 1994-and on the Republicans' Contract with America in 1995. 6 sented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 2001. For a stat�f-the-art treatment of the relationship between constituencies and roll-call voting,
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