No abstract

Recent years have witnessed many efforts to understand legislative productivity and gridlock. However, despite theoretical and empirical contributions to how preferences and institutions shape political gridlock 's level (e.g., Krehbiel 1996's level (e.g., Krehbiel , 1998 and empirical evidence about how parties may affect political gridlock (e.g., Binder 1999;Coleman 1999), we lack a comprehensive perspective theoretically and empirically examining preferences, institutions, and parties. We overcome this deficiency by modeling conditions for gridlock as a function of preferences and institutions-incorporating bicameralism and presidential influence-and of parties. By generating equilibrium gridlock intervals for empirical testing using Poole's (1998) common space scores, and showing that gridlock intervals associated with models in which parties have no effect or an agenda-setting role do not explain policy gridlock but that those linked to models with party-unity effects and strong presidential leadership do, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for party and leadership roles in explaining legislative choices.

Unilateral presidential actions, such as executive orders, are widely cited as a key strategic tool for presidential power. However, is unilateral action evidence of unilateralism or might it represent executive acquiescence? We answer this by (1) specifying three competing models, each with a different presidential discretion assumption and generating alternative hypotheses; (2) extending the canonical item-response model to best measure executive-order significance; and (3) comparing competing theoretical models to data for . Theoretically, we show that legislative preferences may impact unilateral actions differently than previously thought and indicate how parties may be influential. Empirically, a model where the president is responsive to the chamber's majority-party median fits the data better than models assuming responsiveness to the chamber median or no presidential acquiescence. Unilateral action appears not tantamount to presidential power, as evidence implies that legislative parties, or the judicial actors enforcing their will, are key conditioning factors.

No abstract

Scholars have long assigned a key role to party identification as an explanation of voting behaviour. In doing so, they have assumed that individuals' partisan affiliations remain unchanged for long periods of time. But is partisanship sufficiently stable to justify this assumption? At the very least, to be considered a long-term force party identification cannot change during an election. Yet the intra-election stability of party affiliations has been accepted on faith, rather than examined empirically.Our analysis tests this assumption by looking at the evolution of partisanship over the course of the 1980 election. We find that many citizens do alter their partisanship over a single electoral period. These changes in party identification follow a systematic - and not a random - pattern. Both cognitive and affective factors account for this intra-election partisan lability. These findings suggest that much of the previous research on voting behaviour has been seriously misspecified.