Coordination, Moderation, and Institutional Balancing in American Presidential and House Elections

Abstract

Voters have been coordinating their choices for president and House of Representatives in recent presidential election years, with each voter using a strategy that features policy moderation. Coordination is defined as a noncooperative rational expectations equilibrium among voters, in which each voter has both common knowledge and private information about the election outcome. Stochastic choice models estimated using individual-level NES data from 1976–96 support coordination versus a model in which voters act nonstrategically to moderate policy. The empirical coordinating model satisfies the fixed-point condition that defines the common knowledge expectation voters have about the outcome in the theoretical equilibrium. The proportion of voters who split their ticket in order to balance the House with the president has been small but large enough to affect election outcomes. Moderation has usually been based on voters' expectations that the president will be at least an equal of the House in determining postelection policy.

Does Separation of Powers Promote Stability and Moderation?

“…8 Enacting the statute entails an additional cost to Party L of K E ≥ 0, which can be thought of as a reduced 7 The assumption of statistical independence in these examples is unrealistic, but the modeling framework here can accommodate correlations (both positive and negative) in the probabilities that any one faction controls different lawmaking bodies. If the fortunes of a party's candidates for different offices tend to rise or fall together, then π would tend to be lower, all else equal; if voters seem to prefer to "split their tickets" (Mebane 2000) then π would tend to be higher. 8 The assumption that Party L may propose the statute even if Party R has unified control may be unrealistic in some systems, because the dominant party might not allow the opposition to introduce any proposals (even those that would pass).…”

“…A plausible intuitive hypothesis is that more extreme redistributive policies should reduce the incumbents' probability of reelection, given the evidence that most voters (at least in the United States) are centrist and prefer more moderate policies (Alesina and Rosenthal 1995;Mebane 2000;Mebane and Sekhon 2002). However, under some circumstances the electoral benefits of "turning out the base"-by enacting "extreme" policies that energize a party's core constituents-may outweigh the electoral costs of reducing the party's appeal to centrist voters, despite the fact that the latter are more numerous (Fiorina 1999;Glaeser, Ponzetto and Shapiro 2005;McGinnis and Rappaport 2006).…”

An Estimate of Risk Aversion in the U.S. Electorate

“…Similarly, Alvarez (1997) and Bartels (1986), who both consider the effect of uncertainty under the assumption of quadratic preferences, present models which can be seen as special cases of the our model where α = 2. Mebane's (2000) model of vote choice pairs for President and US House also uses the utility function described above and incorporates uncertainty. However, whereas Mebane assumes that voters know with certainty what each candidate would do if elected, but are uncertain about which candidates will be elected, our model follows Bartels (1986) and Alvarez (1997) in assuming voters are uncertain about each candidate's positions.…”

“…Answering these questions involves two considerations: (i) the shape of the utility function that maps the policy positions of candidates into vote choice and (ii) the degree to which voters incorporate uncertainty about the policies that will be implemented as the result of an election into their utility calculus. In previous work, these two considerations are largely treated in isolation (Mebane (2000) being one notable exception). Authors such as Jackson (1991) and Westholm (1997) consider the shape of voters' utility functions over policy without accounting for uncertainty.…”

Do Voters Vote Sincerely?

“…17 In some elections a single candidate runs uncontested. Occasionally, a third, independent candidate also runs.…”