This paper examines whether control of patronage jobs significantly increased a political party's probability of winning elections in U.S. states. We employ a differences-in-differencs design, exploiting the fact that there is considerable variation in the dates different states adopted civil service reforms. We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that political parties in U.S. states were able to use patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of their state legislatures and statewide executive offices. We also find evidence that an "entrenched" party in power for a longer time period can use patronage more effectively than a non-entrenched party. We consider several alternative hypotheses that might plausibly account for the patterns in the data, but find no evidence to support them.

Many observers and scholars argue that primary elections contribute to ideological polarization in U.S. politics. We test this claim using congressional elections and roll call voting behavior. Many of our findings are null. We find little evidence that the introduction of primary elections, the level of primary election turnout, or the threat of primary competition are associated with partisan polarization in congressional roll call voting. We also find little evidence that extreme roll call voting records are positively associated with primary election outcomes. A positive finding is that general election competition exerts pressure toward convergence as extreme roll call voting is negatively correlated with general election outcomes. *

Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to "politicize" the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to voters in a way that will increase her electoral prospects, or she can "insulate" the bureaucracy, which prevents all future winners from using the bureaucracy for electoral advantage. Our main result is that politicization persists when incumbents expect to win, and insulation takes place when they expect to lose. We test this hypothesis using data from the adoption of civil service reforms across the U.S. states. The predictions of the model are consistent with the empirical patterns leading up to the implementation of the general civil service reforms. Using both state and city level data, we observe an increase in partisan competition prior to the reforms.

This article presents evidence that electoral institutions affect the geographic distribution of both candidate electoral support and government resources. The author exploits two electoral reforms in Japan to identify the effect of institutional incentives: (1) the 1994 electoral reform from a multimember single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system to a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system with a single-member district (SMD) component and a proportional representation component; and (2) the 1925 electoral reform from a predominantly SMD system to a multimember SNTV system. Using several new data sets, the two main findings of this article are that (1) Japanese representatives competing in multimember SNTV districts had more geographically concentrated electoral support than those competing in SMDs and that (2) intergovernmental transfers appear to be more concentrated around Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) incumbents' home offices under the multimember SNTV system than under the MMM system. The findings in this article highlight the connection between institutions and geographic patterns of representation.

1 We thank seminar participants at MIT and Columbia for helpful comments. AbstractThis paper highlights a prominent but little discussed pattern in U.S. politics, which is the decline of third party electoral support during the second half of the twentieth century.Contrary to claims in the literature, we provide evidence that the introduction of the direct primaries and the Australian ballot are not correlated with an immediate decline of third party electoral support outside the South. Instead, we find evidence consistent with the claim that electoral support for third parties declined because the Democratic Party co-opted the left-wing policy position beginning with the passage of the New Deal agenda. After the New Deal the Democratic Party's electoral support was higher in areas that had traditionally supported left-wing third parties.