Political Competition in Legislative Elections

Krasa, Stefan; Polborn, Mattias

doi:10.1017/s0003055418000503

Cited by 28 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…They assume that each party leader can redistrict her party's territory (the districts with her party's seats) independently, maximizing the probability of winning the majority of seats. 17 They show that the optimal policy is again a version of "pack-and-crack." However, these papers do not compare the optimal partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering policies.…”

Section: Related Empirical and Theoretical Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…He uses this quasi-natural experiment to test the hypotheses. Interestingly, the 1960s and 2000s redistrictings were bipartisan, whereas those in the 1980s were partisan and led by the Democrats.13Krasa and Polborn (2015) argue that their answer may be incomplete if the political positions of district candidates are mutually interdependent.14 As early evidence,Ferejohn (1977) finds little support for gerrymandering being the cause of the decline in competitiveness of congressional districts in the 1960s.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering

Konishi

Pan

2020

J Public Economic Theory

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This paper analyzes the optimal partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering policies in a model with electoral competitions in policy positions and transfer promises. Party leaders have both office‐ and policy‐motivations. With complete freedom in redistricting, partisan gerrymandering policy generates the most one‐sidedly biased district profile, while bipartisan gerrymandering generates the most polarized district profile. In contrast, with limited freedom in gerrymandering, both partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering tend to prescribe the same policy.

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Section: Related Empirical and Theoretical Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering

Konishi

Pan

2020

J Public Economic Theory

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“…Eguia (2011) shows how durable voting coalitions endogenously form in a legislative assembly. Krasa and Polborn (2018) consider candidate selection in multidistrict legislative elections, in a one-dimensional model.…”

Section: Primariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crashing the Party? Elites, Outsiders, and Elections

Buisseret

Weelden

2019

American J Political Sci

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We consider an election between two parties that nominate candidates for office. The parties are polarized along a traditional cleavage, but they are also internally divided along a second issue dimension. We introduce a threat of entry from Outsider candidates, who have the prominence and resources to bypass party elites. We consider when voters will turn to Outsiders, and identify the conditions under which Outsiders will enter the election through an established party's nomination process, as opposed to circumventing established parties via a third‐party challenge. We further explore when the elites will fail to respond to the threat of Outsider candidates. Our framework highlights how established parties will be especially vulnerable to Outsider primary entry in periods of intense ideological polarization between the parties, and that this vulnerability is especially heightened for the majority party.

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“…We consider this possibility now. While elections across multiple districts can interact in subtle and interesting ways, analyzed elsewhere (e.g., Krasa and Polborn 2015;Mattozzi and Snowberg 2015), we abstract from these interactions to keep the analysis as simple as possible.…”

Section: Extension: Posturing and Polarizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Elections and Divisiveness: Theory and Evidence

Ash¹,

Morelli²,

Weelden³

2017

The Journal of Politics

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This article provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of how politicians allocate their time across issues. When voters are uncertain about an incumbent's preferences, there is a pervasive incentive to "posture" by spending too much time on divisive issues (which are more informative about a politician's preferences) at the expense of time spent on common-values issues (which provide greater benefit to voters). Higher transparency over the politicians' choices can exacerbate the distortions. These theoretical results motivate an empirical study of how Members of the US Congress allocate time across issues in their floor speeches. We find that US senators spend more time on divisive issues when they are up for election, consistent with electorally induced posturing. In addition, we find that US house members spend more time on divisive issues in response to higher news transparency.Most citizens want a secure country, a healthy economy, safe neighborhoods, good schools, affordable health care, and good roads, parks, and other infrastructure. These issues do get discussed, of course, but a disproportionate amount of attention goes to issues like abortion, gun control, the Pledge of Allegiance, medical marijuana, and other narrow issues that simply do not motivate the great majority of Americans.-Fiorina, Adams, and Pope (2006, 202) Can't we wait on the things that we're going to yell at each other about and start on the things that we agree on? -Austan Goolsbee, Meet the Press, August 7, 2011 A s the above quotes illustrate, there is a widespread perception that the political process involves excessive amounts of time devoted to narrow and divisive issues. This raises the questions of why politicians spend so much time on these issues and if, as sometimes argued (e.g., Hillygus and Shields 2014), the focus on divisive issues is a response to electoral pressures. We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of electoral pressures in driving divisive politics.The first contribution of this article is theoretical. We provide a positive theory of incumbent politicians' allocation of time and resources across two policy issues. While commonvalues issues are more important to the voters, voters are unsure of the politician's preferences on divisive issues. The politician has an incentive to overprovide effort on divisive issues, at the expense of common-values issues, to signal that she holds preferences that make her more attractive to the majority of voters. Moreover, this incentive to "posture" is stronger with higher transparency-that is, when voters have more information on the politician's effort choices.The second contribution is empirical. We construct a measure of divisive effort for members of the US Congress using the text of their floor speeches. We then report two new empirical findings. First, we exploit variation in the time to re-election for US senators to demonstrate that senators spend more time on divisive issues when elections are more imminent. Second, we exploit variation in...

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Political Competition in Legislative Elections

Cited by 28 publications

References 49 publications

Partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering

Partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering

Crashing the Party? Elites, Outsiders, and Elections

Elections and Divisiveness: Theory and Evidence

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