This chapter examines the party-centered theory of spatial voting. Party identification is essentially an emotional attachment to a political party. Typically, this affective attachment is acquired early in life, most commonly from one's parents but not infrequently from one's peers. Characteristically, party supporters' identification with their party increases over the course of their lives. However, the bond between partisan and party does not strengthen out of policy conviction. Identifying with a party is only minimally, and then often coincidentally, related to identifying with policies that the party stands for. Indeed, there are two reasons why a programmatic partisan may judge a candidate of his party to represent his policy preferences. One is because the candidate's position is closer to his. The other is because the outlook of the candidate's party is closer to his.

Eighty percent of Americans believe that government is run for “a few big interests” rather than the public interest. Rooted in notions of social welfare, cost-benefit analysis might be seen as an analytical procedure to flush out and discourage at least the most egregious abuses in lawmaking authority, thereby encouraging citizens to view their government as essentially pursuing some plausible notion of the public interest. Yet the extent to which cost-benefit analysis might fill this trust-building role is an unaddressed issue. Here, I conduct an experiment based on a (de)regulatory action in the environmental context to examine whether cost-benefit analysis might yield trust dividends. I find that cost-benefit analysis produces large increases in public sector trust, but only when paired with reasonableness review, and only among “elites.” This pattern of findings suggests that, without more, an agency declaration of cost justification is not credible, but that it may be made so through a form of reasonableness review. I discuss the contours of such review, and highlight perils if review is overly aggressive.

The purpose of this study is two-fold. A central divide in the race-in-politics literature concerns whether people openly profess racially prejudiced statements or confine themselves to subtle racism. Our first objective is to examine this debate using new data from the 2008 election. Our second – and central – objective is to bring out the opposing forces in the politics of race. To this point, all the emphasis has been on the force of prejudice. We show that an opposing force of good will also exists, and that many Americans hold blacks in esteem. Using data collected after the 2008 election, we find that esteem dramatically increases the likelihood of supporting Obama for partisans who disagree with their party on ideological terms (e.g., conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans), but not for partisans who agree with their party ideologically (e.g., liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans).

This article develops two new tests of partisan and nonpartisan theories of lawmaking based on cutpoint estimates and measures of uncertainty about ideal point estimates. Theories of congressional organization make explicit predictions about the absence of cutpoints in certain intervals of the policy space. We test these theories with new cutpoint estimates and exploit the fact that the ideal points of members located far from the density of cutpoints are necessarily estimated with less precision. We validate our empirical approach through simulations, and we test three models of congressional organization using House roll call data from the 86th through the 110th Congresses (1959–2008). We find strong evidence of partisan agenda control. Our findings exhibit modest differences from the results predicted by Cox and McCubbins's party cartel theory: negative agenda control increases over time and is negatively correlated with the size of the blockout region.

This book presents a new theory of party identification, the central concept in the study of voting. Challenging the traditional idea that voters identify with a political party out of blind emotional attachment, this pioneering book explains why party identification in contemporary American politics enables voters to make coherent policy choices. Standard approaches to the study of policy-based voting hold that voters choose based on the policy positions of the two candidates competing for their support. This study demonstrates that candidates can get a premium in support from the policy reputations of their parties. In particular, the book presents a theory of how partisans take account of the parties' policy reputations as a function of the competing candidates' policy positions. A central implication of this theory of reputation-centered choices is that party identification gives candidates tremendous latitude in their policy positioning. Paradoxically, it is the party supporters who understand and are in synch with the ideological logic of the American party system who open the door to a polarized politics precisely by making the best-informed choices on offer.