When Pivotal Politics Meets Partisan Politics

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed many efforts to understand legislative productivity and gridlock. However, despite theoretical and empirical contributions to how preferences and institutions shape political gridlock 's level (e.g., Krehbiel 1996's level (e.g., Krehbiel , 1998 and empirical evidence about how parties may affect political gridlock (e.g., Binder 1999;Coleman 1999), we lack a comprehensive perspective theoretically and empirically examining preferences, institutions, and parties. We overcome this deficiency by modeling conditions for gridlock as a function of preferences and institutions-incorporating bicameralism and presidential influence-and of parties. By generating equilibrium gridlock intervals for empirical testing using Poole's (1998) common space scores, and showing that gridlock intervals associated with models in which parties have no effect or an agenda-setting role do not explain policy gridlock but that those linked to models with party-unity effects and strong presidential leadership do, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for party and leadership roles in explaining legislative choices. ).Thanks to Keith Krehbiel, Adam Meirowitz, research seminar participants at Princeton University, anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and to Keith Poole for generously furnishing data and providing guidance.1 Some confirm that productivity is invariant to factors such as divided government (e.g., Jones 1997; Quirk and Nesmith 1995), and others develop different measures of significant legislation and find some empirical evidence that divided government matters (e.g., Kelly 1993;Binder 1999;Howell et al. 2000).Despite these developments, a theoretical and corresponding empirical analysis examining whether the "pivotal politics" or the partisan approach better explains the extent of gridlock is lacking. Preference-based theory does not seriously integrate parties, and partisan-oriented empirical work lacks the theoretical foundation that the preference-based approach provides and may, as a result, miss essential features of gridlock.Our analysis builds on previous works theoretically and empirically by linking preferences, institutions, and parties. Theoretically, we make Krehbiel's model more realistic by incorporating bicameralism, integrating different roles for political parties, including that of the president as its leader, and deriving appropriate equilibrium gridlock intervals (EGIs). Empirically, we test whether EGIs for different models matter for postwar legislative productivity, improving past research in several waysnotably by using Poole's (1998) common space scores to provide a common, preference-based, metric for House members, Senators, and presidents-and find that models with party discipline work much better than those with preferences alone.

Using Roll Call Estimates to Test Models of Politics

“…If so, correlating measures of legislative performance (e.g., enactments) with gridlock intervals over time appears to reveal which gridlock interval best predicts the variation in observed activity (e.g., Binder 1999, Chiou & Rothenberg 2003.…”

“…Many prominent law-making models in political science can be interpreted as a variant of this game (see, e.g., Krehbiel 1996, Chiou & Rothenberg 2003, Cox & McCubbins 2005. Let S denote the legislator with the power to make take-it-or-leave-it proposals, and let the median legislator be known as M. Assume every legislator has a preferred outcome in a unidimensional policy space, and let X S and X M represent the ideal policy of the agenda setter and the median legislator, respectively, with X S > X M .…”

“…Whether preferences are defined over policy outcomes or public positions is unclear, and the meaning likely varies by application. Work focused on the representation of interests and constituents (e.g., Bartels 1991, Ansolabehere et al 2001, Bafumi & Herron 2010) typically requires only that ideal points reflect legislators' public positions, but some assume that ideal points characterize true preferences over policy outcomes (e.g., Chiou & Rothenberg 2003, Bianco et al 2004, Bianco & Sened 2005.…”

“…Starting with Lowell (1902), political scientists have generally used roll call votes to investigate two types of questions: why do legislators behave as they do (e.g., Bartels 1991, Ansolabehere et al 2001, Bafumi & Herron 2010, and how do institutions affect the choices that are made (e.g., Krehbiel 1998, Binder 1999, Chiou & Rothenberg 2003, Cox & McCubbins 2005, Wiseman & Herron 2008, Wiseman & Wright 2008?…”

Cohabitation and Conflicting Politics in French Policymaking

“…Hence, there has indisputably been an evolution toward more and more sophistication in the quantitative treatment of this issue. Moreover, while most of these works have adopted more of an inductive approach, the American scholarship has also produced noticeable deductive works that use formal modelling to derive testable hypotheses about the effect of divided government on policy gridlock (Cameron, 2000;Chiou & Rothenberg, 2003;Krehbiel, 1998;.…”