Congressional Party Defection in American History

Nokken, Timothy P.; Poole, Keith T.

doi:10.3162/036298004x201294

Cited by 155 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…question: When we observe legislators choosing between organizations with different characteristics, we can identify directly the features of parties that are important for political goals and careers. For this reason, there is a rich tradition of work on party switching within political science, with scholars leveraging party switching to understand politics in the United States (Grose 2004;Nokken 2000;Nokken and Poole 2004), Latin America (Desposato 2006;Mejia Acosta 2004;Schmitt 1999), Europe (Heller and Mershon 2005;McElroy 2003;Shabad and Slomczynski 2004;Thames 2007;Turan 1985), and Asia (Cox and Rosenbluth 1995;Kato 1998;Reed and Scheiner 2003). Party switching can be of several types, including to new or old parties (Shabad and Slomczynski 2004), and fluidity of membership can be an ongoing phenomenon or just an infrequent realignment occurrence.…”

Section: Our Approach: Using Party Switching To Study Party Affiliationmentioning

confidence: 98%

Governmental Centralization and Party Affiliation: Legislator Strategies in Brazil and Japan

Desposato

Scheiner

2008

Am Polit Sci Rev

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W hat shapes politicians' strategies in political systems where pork, rather than programmatic platforms, wins elections? We argue that resource control provides much of the answer, as politics in pork-centric systems will in large part be organized around actors who control access to pork. We use new national and subnational data from Brazil and Japan to show how the degree of centralization of resources can affect party affiliation patterns. We find that in decentralized Brazil, both national and subnational politicians join parties that control their subnational government. In contrast, in our analysis of centralized Japan, politicians at both national and subnational levels base their party affiliation decisions on national-level partisan considerations. P ork-barrel politics is a defining feature of electoral competition in many established democracies and, even more frequently, new democracies. However, because most theories of political parties focus on spatial competition, political science has not yet fully developed a framework for understanding political strategies in systems that are dominated by pork.By definition, in pork-oriented systems it is important for politicians to deliver private and local public goods to their constituents. As a result, those who control access to these goods have substantial influence over political actors. In this way, the institutions that assign control over state resources are likely to shape power relations and the incentives that drive political behavior throughout the system, and different patterns of resource control ought to lead politicians to pursue different career strategies. Comparative Politics Workshop, and the editors and four reviewers at the APSR. We thank Caitlin Milazzo for her research assistance. We thank Jun Saito, Rob Weiner, Ryota Natori, and Yusaku Horiuchi for their (leading) role in creating the JERRY data set on prefectural assembly members in Japan, and Rob Weiner for sharing his data on prefectural governors in Japan, upon which the bulk of the Japan subnational data analysis was based. The information on party switching at the prefectural level in Japan was drawn from the kaiha/party listings for each prefectural legislator in Yomiuri Shinbun (various years). The information on district overlap between national and subnational politicians in Japan was drawn from Yomiuri Shinbun (various years) and Miyakawa (1994). may be widely evident in political systems, affecting career paths, roll-call votes, coalition formation, and, the focus of this paper, party affiliation.We provide suggestive evidence about the relationship between resource decentralization and party system organization, examining national and subnational legislatures in Brazil and Japan. These two cases share many similar features, including a strong pork-barrel orientation, but in Brazil, control over pork allocation is significantly decentralized, whereas in Japan it is highly centralized. The implication is that national and subnational legislators in Brazil should be orient...

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Section: Our Approach: Using Party Switching To Study Party Affiliationmentioning

confidence: 98%

Governmental Centralization and Party Affiliation: Legislator Strategies in Brazil and Japan

Desposato

Scheiner

2008

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…Using various approaches to estimating preferences, Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers (2004), Nokken and Poole (2004), and Poole and Rosenthal's NOMINATE data all indicate that Jeffords's voting became distinctly more liberal after he switched. Nonetheless, there are multiple reasons to believe that a significant change in Jeffords's preference does not explain our results.…”

Section: Could a Change In Jeffords's Preferences Explain Our Results?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Jeffords switch and legislator rolls in the U.S. Senate

Hartog

Monroe

2015

Public Choice

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“…These roll call experiments have been used extensively in the literature to test for effects on first dimension W-NOMINATE scores from events such as party switching, redistricting, and last-period effects (Nokken and Poole 2004;Goodman 2004). The wnominate package simplifies this procedure into two important ways.…”

Section: Natural Experiments With W-nominatementioning

confidence: 99%

Scaling Roll Call Votes withwnominateinR

Poole¹,

Lewis²,

Lo³

et al. 2011

J. Stat. Soft.

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This paper presents a software package designed to estimate Poole and Rosenthal W-NOMINATE scores in R. The package uses a logistic regression model to analyze political choice data, usually (though not exclusively) from a legislative setting. In contrast to other scaling methods, W-NOMINATE explicitly assumes probabilistic voting based on a spatial utility function, where the parameters of the utility function and the spatial coordinates of the legislators and the votes can all be estimated on the basis of observed voting behavior. Building on software written by Poole in Fortran, the new wnominate package in R facilitates easier data input and manipulation, generates bootstrapped standard errors, and includes a new suite of graphics functions to display the results. We demonstrate the functionality of this package by conducting a natural experiment using roll callsan experiment which is greatly simplified by the data manipulation capabilities of the wnominate package in R.

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Congressional Party Defection in American History

Cited by 155 publications

References 19 publications

Governmental Centralization and Party Affiliation: Legislator Strategies in Brazil and Japan

Governmental Centralization and Party Affiliation: Legislator Strategies in Brazil and Japan

The Jeffords switch and legislator rolls in the U.S. Senate

Scaling Roll Call Votes withwnominateinR

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