The Majority-Party Disadvantage: Revising Theories of Legislative Organization

Abstract

Dominant theories of legislative organization in the U.S. rest on the notion that the majority party arranges legislative matters to enhance its electoral fortunes. Yet, as we demonstrate in this paper, there is little or no short-term electoral advantage for the majority party in U.S. state legislatures, and there is a pronounced downstream majority-party disadvantage. To establish these findings, we propose a technique for aggregating the results of close elections to obtain "as-if" random variation in majority-party status. We argue that the results from this approach are consistent with a phenomenon of inter-temporal balancing, which we link to other forms of partisan balancing in U.S. elections. The paper thus necessitates revisions to our theories of legislative organization, offers new arguments for balancing theories, and lays out an empirical technique for studying the effects of majority-party status in legislative contexts.

Agenda Control and Electoral Success in the US House

“…In this letter we conducted an explicit test of the electoral implications of Cartel Theory and presented what we believe is strong evidence that the effectiveness of the majority party’s agenda control in the House has no direct effect on its electoral fortunes in the period of 1972–2008. Our findings comport with recent efforts to identify majority-party advantage in American state legislatures (Feigenbaum et al 2017), but contradict the theoretical predictions of Cartel Theory. Though this does not suggest that the theory as a whole is without value – quite the contrary, the theory’s implications for legislative behavior have been empirically supported in several chambers, in several countries, dozens of times – our finding does present a challenge to one of the theory’s central premises 10 .…”

Measuring the Competitiveness of Elections

“…1 A small number of recent studies have attempted to create general measures of competitiveness that can be applied across SMD and MMD systems. Some focus on the aggregate level, assessing the governing party's probability of losing office (Kayser and Lindstädt, 2015;Abou-Chadi and Orlowski, 2016) or how far a party is from winning a majority in a legislative chamber (Feigenbaum, Fouirnaies and Hall, 2017). 2 A second approach focuses on the closeness of individual candidates to being elected (e.g., Kotakorpi, Poutvaara and Terviö, 2017), with the empirical aim of investigating candidate-level outcomes.…”

Party Effects in State Legislative Committees

“…Chamber seat shares are aggregations of individual elections that may or may not themselves be closely contested. Some suggest using a multidimensional RD design that uses the geometric distance from an aggregated threshold comprised of multiple running variables (Feigenbaum, Fouirnaies, and Hall forthcoming). In fact, Feigenbaum, Fouirnaies, and Hall (forthcoming) assert that seat share, as we use, is “not a valid running variable” for their purposes, due to weak balance test results.…”

“…Some suggest using a multidimensional RD design that uses the geometric distance from an aggregated threshold comprised of multiple running variables (Feigenbaum, Fouirnaies, and Hall forthcoming). In fact, Feigenbaum, Fouirnaies, and Hall (forthcoming) assert that seat share, as we use, is “not a valid running variable” for their purposes, due to weak balance test results. For our sample, though, we demonstrate that lagged (at both t −1 and t −2) chamber Democratic seat shares are strongly balanced around the treatment assignment threshold, indicating that future majority status is not generally manipulable by close majorities.…”