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In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly, we find as much change after the 1910s as before, which contributes to the existing literature that focuses on changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We also investigate words and phrases that had negative or positive partisan connotations in particular periods. Finally, we examine whether some of the common hypotheses offered in the literature can account for the changes. The initial findings suggest that these explanations can only account for part of the decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When did candidate-centered campaign advertising take off in the United States, and what accounts for this growth? In this article, we analyze a novel data set of political advertisements in newspapers between 1880 and 1930. We show that there was a sharp increase in candidates' newspaper advertising beginning around 1910. We exploit the panel structure of these data to investigate the impact of political reforms on advertising. The results suggest that the introduction of the direct primary substantially increased the number of campaign advertisements for candidates in general election races. They also suggest that the switch to nonpartisan elections increased newspaper advertisements by candidates for judicial offices. We do not find similar effects for the Australian ballot. Finally, we find little evidence that reforms affected advertising in US presidential races or by political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malapportionment of state legislatures before the mid-1960s gave urban and suburban voters much less representation than they deserved. This Essay documents that suburban and urban voters had markedly different policy [...]

We develop a theory of legislative competition in which voters care about local candidate valence and national party positions that are determined by the parties' median legislators. As long as election outcomes are sufficiently predictable, the only stable equilibria exhibit policy divergence between the parties. If the degree of uncertainty about election outcomes decreases, and if voters place less weight on local candidates' valence, polarization between the parties increases. Furthermore, a systematic electoral shock makes the party favored by the shock more moderate, while the disadvantaged party becomes more extreme. Finally, we examine data on state elections and the ideological positions of state legislatures and find patterns that are consistent with key predictions of our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how government officials' behavior varies with their ethnicity, gender, and political orientation. Specifically, we analyze criminal sentencing decisions in Texas state district courts using data on approximately half a million criminal cases from 2004 to 2013.We exploit randomized case assignments within counties and obtain precisely estimated effects of judges' ethnicity, gender, and political orientation that are near zero, conditional on geographic factors. However, we find substantial cross-judge heterogeneity in sentencing. Exploiting a unique overlapping structure of Texas state district courts, we find no evidence that this heterogeneity is driven by judges pandering to voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that the literature underestimates the value of primaries because it focuses on overall average effects. We argue that primary elections are most needed in safe constituencies, where the advantaged party's candidate can usually win the general election -- even if she is low quality. If the main role of elections is to select good candidates, then advantaged party primaries in open seat races are particularly consequential. We provide evidence that these primaries are especially effective at selecting high quality types. This appears to be driven both by differences in the proportion of high quality candidates competing in the primaries and also by voter behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We employ a regression discontinuity design (RDD) based on close elections to estimate the rents from a seat in the U.S. Congress between 1850 and 1880. Using census data, we compare wealth accumulation among those who won or lost their first race by a small margin. We find evidence of significant returns for the first half of the 1860s, during the Civil War, but not for other periods. Those who won their first election by a narrow margin and served during the period 1861-1866 accumulated, on average, almost 40% more wealth between 1860 and 1870 (roughly $800,000 in present-day values) relative to those who ran but did not serve. We also find that wealth accumulation was particularly large for congressmen who represented states most involved in military contracting and those who served during the Civil War in committees that were responsible for most military appropriations. We hypothesize that increased opportunities from the sudden spike in government spending during the war and the decrease in control by the media might have made it easier for incumbent congressmen to collect rents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without question, the 1974 House elections that brought an influx of 'Watergate babies' caused the House to become more liberal. Despite this, however, both the median and mean rating of [...]

One key role of elections is to allow voters to remove politicians who perform poorly in office. We analyze the extent to which incumbents who are involved in relatively serious political scandals lose elections. More importantly, we assess the relative importance of primary and general elections in removing such incumbents. How often do incumbents involved in relatively serious scandals lose in the primary election? How often do they lose in the general election? How often is it the case that the primary election was probably necessary in order to remove the incumbent -- i.e., would the incumbents in "safe districts" have been re-elected in the general election if they did not lose in the primary? We find that that incumbents in scandals are more likely to face a serious primary challenger compared to other incumbents. This relationship is even stronger when the incumbent represents a "safe district" -- i.e., a district where she would probably have won the general election. Our estimates suggest that primary elections have an important role in removing incumbents in otherwise "safe districts." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a first-ever comprehensive empirical assessment of a key Progressive reform, the direct primary, and its impact on competition in American elections. We begin with a review of the problems Progressives diagnosed in the American electoral system and reasons to expect the direct primary to be a pro-competitive, democratizing reform. We then consider prior research into the direct primary and electoral contestation and describe the database of primary and general election outcomes that we have constructed to trace competition in primaries for federal and statewide offices. Finally, we examine the historical trajectory of competition in primary elections, starting with the first decades after the introduction of the reform and then the succeeding decades. Consistent with the hopes of reformers, we find primary elections indeed provided a forum for contestation for federal and statewide elections. Although primaries were never broadly competitive, even at the outset, they accounted for about a third of the serious electoral tests faced by statewide officeholders and about a fifth faced by U.S. representatives. The role of primaries as a venue for robust contestation, however, was short-lived, as the competitiveness of federal and statewide primaries decreased sharply starting in the 1940s. The last section of this article explores whether two recent developments in American elections—the extension of two-party competition and the rise in the value of incumbency—conspired to temper the contribution of direct primaries to electoral competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What would happen if the current U.S. campaign finance system, mostly based on private donations, were replaced by a public funding scheme of the same magnitude? Some argue that public funding would deprive voters of useful information, but this can only be true if private donations are somehow targeted to "better" candidates. In this paper, we ask what voters can learn about the "effectiveness" of a legislator from the amount and pattern of contributions received during the campaign. We find that the total amount that a candidate receives is a positive, but weak, predictor of that candidate's effectiveness. Small contributions provide a strong and positive signal of effectiveness, while large contributions are a negative signal of effectiveness. Contributions from organizations also provide a positive signal, while contributions from individuals, parties, and candidates themselves do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many observers and scholars argue that primary elections contribute to ideological polarization in U.S. politics. We test this claim using congressional elections and roll call voting behavior. Many of our findings are null. We find little evidence that the introduction of primary elections, the level of primary election turnout, or the threat of primary competition are associated with partisan polarization in congressional roll call voting. We also find little evidence that extreme roll call voting records are positively associated with primary election outcomes. A positive finding is that general election competition exerts pressure toward convergence as extreme roll call voting is negatively correlated with general election outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate the impact of press coverage on citizen knowledge, politicians' actions, and policy. We find that voters living in areas where, for exogenous reasons, the press covers their U.S. House representative less are less likely to recall their representative's name and less able to describe and rate him or her. Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies: they are less likely to stand witness before congressional hearings, to serve on constituency-oriented committees (perhaps), and to vote against the party line. Finally, federal spending is lower in areas with exogenously lower press coverage of congressmen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates' and voters' strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multiplicity. We prove that, even after restricting attention to subgame perfect Nash equilibria in weakly undominated strategies, the set of electoral equilibria is very large. We provide several characterizations of candidates' equilibrium platforms, including a set of conditions under which equilibrium platforms are located in the minmax set. We also examine welfare implications of the results as well as connections between the noncooperative equilibria and the uncovered set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a model of electoral competition in which two parties compete for votes amongst three groups of voters. Each party first internally selects one of two candidates to run in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideological platform and can promise a distribution of a unit of public spending across groups. Without primary elections, the selection process is random. With primary elections, an ideologically friendly subset of the voters strategically chooses the candidate. In the basic model, primary elections cause politicians to cater to extreme groups rather than a moderate group with many ''swing voters.'' The amount promised to extreme groups is decreasing in the ideological polarization of those groups, while each party's probability of victory is increasing in the size and extremity of its favored group. We also find that an incumbency advantage reduces the amount promised to extremists, and therefore benefits moderates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A venerable supposition of American survey research is that the vast majority of voters have incoherent and unstable preferences about political issues, which in turn have little impact on vote choice. We demonstrate that these findings are manifestations of measurement error associated with individual survey items. First, we show that averaging a large number of survey items on the same broadly defined issue area—for example, government involvement in the economy, or moral issues—eliminates a large amount of measurement error and reveals issue preferences that are well structured and stable. This stability increases steadily as the number of survey items increases and can approach that of party identification. Second, we show that once measurement error has been reduced through the use of multiple measures, issue preferences have much greater explanatory power in models of presidential vote choice, again approaching that of party identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributive politics models often predict that legislators will demand inefficiently large projects, with inefficiency increasing in the number of districts, and that this will translate into larger projects and higher spending. The relationship between efficiency and legislature size is often referred to as the "law of 1/n"(Weingast, Shepsle, and Johnsen 1981). We demonstrate that the "law of 1/n" result with respect to project sizes and total spending is dependent on several factors, including the type of good being provided, the costs of raising revenue, and whether the local government has to share in the project's cost with the central government. In general, the "law of 1/n" need not hold for total government spending, and in fact a "reverse law of 1/n" often holds. In light of our theoretical findings, we reassess the empirical literature on this topic. The results have implications for a wide variety of applications in American and comparative politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied the effects of districting on intergovernmental aid by state governments to local governments in the United States. We found that metropolitan areas receive relatively more aid when represented in the state legislature by an at-large delegation than when divided into single-member districts. This suggests that the free-riding that may occur with at-large representation is more than counterbalanced by other factors. The estimated effects are robust to the effects of other confounding factors as well as the choice of estimators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents and investigates a prominent but little discussed pattern in U.S. politics, which is the decline of third-party electoral support over the past century. We find evidence consistent with the claim that electoral support for third parties—mainly left-wing third parties—declined because the Democratic Party co-opted the left-wing policy position beginning with the passage of the New Deal agenda. We note first that most of the third-party voting in the pre-New-Deal era was for left-wing third parties and that this declined sharply during the 1930s and 1940s. We then show that after the New Deal the Democratic Party's electoral support was higher in areas that had traditionally supported left-wing third parties. Contrary to some claims in the literature, we find little support for the hypothesis that the decline of third-party voting was immediately due to electoral reforms such as the introduction of direct primaries and the Australian ballot, except possibly in the south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of party control of state governments on the distribution of intergovernmental transfers across counties from 1957 to 1997. We find that the governing parties skew the distribution of funds in favor of areas that provide them with the strongest electoral support. This is borne out in two ways. (i) Counties that traditionally give the highest vote share to the governing party receive larger shares of state transfers to local governments. (ii) When control of the state government changes, the distribution of funds shifts in the direction of the new governing party. We find only weak evidence that parties reward electorally pivotal counties or counties in electorally pivotal legislative districts. Finally, we find that increased spending in a county increases voter turnout in subsequent elections. This suggests that parties have an electoral incentive to skew the distribution of funds to influence future election results, and the mechanism through which this works is "mobilization" rather than "conversion" of voters in a fixed electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]