Does public campaign financing improve representation by reducing politicians' reliance on wealthy donors as advocates claim, or does it worsen representation by expanding the candidate marketplace to give extreme and nonrepresentative candidates an electoral boost? We conduct a novel analysis of public financing programs in Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine to causally identify the effect of a legislator's funding status on how closely she represents constituent preferences. Using multiple identification strategies, we show that candidates who exclusively use public campaign financing are more extreme and less representative of their districts than nonpublicly financed candidates. Our findings add new evidence to the electoral reform debate by demonstrating how replacing private campaign donations with public financing can actually damage substantive representation. We also advance the scholarship on how institutions affect substantive representation and candidate positioning as they respond to new campaign financing structures.

Few issues are more salient for voters or more important in political decision making than economic conditions, and no American public official is more closely associated with the economy than the president. Existing scholarship disagrees, however, about how partisan loyalties affect economic evaluations. We study how partisan control of the presidency affects economic perceptions using eight waves of panel data collected around the 2016 presidential election from a national probability sample. We find that although individual‐level perceptions are largely stable across time, the change in partisan control of the White House was associated with more positive evaluations among Republicans and more negative evaluations among Democrats. These effects are statistically significant yet substantively modest in magnitude. Our results indicate that partisanship is less strongly associated with economic assessments than some previous scholarship has claimed and suggest more sanguine conclusions about the prospects for presidential accountability even in a partisan era.

Steady political polarization since the late 1970s ranks among the most consequential transformations of American politics—one with far-reaching consequences for governance, congressional performance, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and citizen perceptions of the stakes of party conflict and elections. Our understanding of this polarization critically depends on measuring it. Its measurement in turn began with the invention of the NOMINATE algorithm and the widespread adoption of its estimates of the ideal points of members of Congress. Although the NOMINATE project has not been immune from technical and conceptual critique, its impact on how we think about contemporary politics and its discontents has been extraordinary and has helped to stimulate the creation of several similar scores. In order to deepen appreciation of this broadly important intellectual phenomenon, we offer an intuitively accessible treatment of the mathematics and conceptual assumptions of NOMINATE. We also stress that NOMINATE scores are a major resource for understanding other eras in American political development (APD) besides the current great polarization. To illustrate this point, we introduce readers to Voteview, which provides two-dimensional snapshots of congressional roll calls, among other data that it generates. We conclude by sketching how APD scholarship might contribute to the contemporary polarization discussion. Placing polarization and depolarization in historical perspective may powerfully illuminate whether, how, and why our current polarization might recede.

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