Doctoral Dissertation Research in Politcal Science: Seeking Power and Re-election in American Legislatures

有人断言，每个立法者的主要目标都是连任。国会的结构、规则和规范有助于立法者实现他们的目标。由于这种结构对该机构来说是内生的，如果立法者未能满足他们的需求，他们可以而且会改变规则。这项研究探索了一个这样的案例：当旧的制度变得不太理想时，美国众议院的立法者改变了选择领导人的程序。为了将注意力集中在一个机构内立法者的战略行为上，立法机构的正式模式通常是选民的战略行为的黑箱。议员们被认为是在寻求职位，所以他们想取悦选民，但在立法机构的正式模式中，选民很少被描绘成进行复杂的理性选择计算。这导致了文献中不必要的分歧，一边是新制度主义，另一边是投票的空间模型。这个博士论文研究项目发展了两个关于领导层选择的正式理论。在简单的模型中，纯粹的资历决定了谁获得了权力，谁没有。在更复杂的模型中，每个政党都使用多数规则来决定哪些成员将担任领导职务。该模型包含了几个假设。立法者首先寻求连任。他们还从在立法机构中担任权力职位中获得效用。因此，他们寻求权力，前提是这样做不会导致他们失去连任。与霍特林-唐斯模式一样，选民通过选举在意识形态上与他们接近的议员来获得效用。他们还从选举一位有权势的立法者中获得效用，但这种效用是立法者与选民之间意识形态距离的函数。作为其政党的成员，立法者从选举与他们关系密切并能够很好地履行领导任务的领导人中获得好处。该模型可以很容易地被操纵，以包括任期限制和利益集团捐赠。该项目包括对该模型的几个实证测试，使用的数据来自美国众议院和四个州立法机构：加利福尼亚州、佛罗里达州、伊利诺伊州和新罕布夏州。之所以选择这些州，是因为它们在许多与这项研究相关的变量上存在分歧，包括政党在选民和立法机构中的权力、利益集团的角色、利益集团的行为以及领导人选择过程的类型。初步数据分析包括对20世纪50年代和90年代相关变量的比较，20世纪50年代是资历规则的全盛时期，90年代是政党偏好在领导人选择中发挥更大作用的时期。这一数据分析表明，不同立法机构的行为存在差异。最值得注意的是，自20世纪50年代以来，政党团结分数有所上升，这与该模型的预测相符，即在政党选举过程中，立法者将在意识形态上倾向于他们所在的政党，以努力获得权力。

It has been asserted that every legislator's principal goal is to be reelected. The structure, rules, and norms of Congress help legislators to achieve their goals. And since that structure is endogenous to the institution, legislators can and would change the rules if they failed to meet their needs. This research explores one such case in which legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives changed the process for selecting their leaders when the old system became suboptimal.In an effort to focus attention on strategic behavior of legislators within an institution, formal models of legislatures often "black box" the strategic behavior of voters. Legislators are assumed to be office-seeking, so they want to please voters, but voters are rarely depicted in formal models of legislatures as making complex rational choice calculations. This leads to an unnecessary divide in the literature, with neo-institutionalism on one side, and spatial models of voting on the other. This Doctoral Dissertation Research project develops two formal theories of leadership selection. In the simple model, pure seniority determines who gets power and who does not. In the more complex model, each party uses majority rule to determine which of its members will rise to leadership positions. The model incorporates several assumptions. Legislators are first and foremost reelection seeking. They also derive utility from holding a position of power within the legislature. Therefore, they seek power, provided that doing so does not cause them to lose reelection. Like the Hotelling-Downs models, voters derive utility from electing legislators who are ideologically proximate to them. They also derive utility from electing a powerful legislator, but that utility is a function of the ideological distance from the legislator to the constituent. As members of their political parties, as well, legislators derive utility from electing leaders who are proximate to them and are able to perform leadership tasks well. The model can easily be manipulated to include term limits and interest group donations.The project includes several empirical tests of the model, using data from the United States House of Representatives and four state legislatures: California, Florida, Illinois, and New Hampshire. These states were selected because they diverge on many of the variables relevant to the study, including the power of political parties in the electorate and in the legislature, the role of interest groups, the behavior of interest groups, and the types of leadership selection processes.Preliminary data analysis consists of a comparison between relevant variables in the 1950s, arguably the heyday of the seniority rule, and in the 1990s, when party preferences play more of a role in leadership selection. This data analysis shows differences in behavior among legislatures. Most notably, party unity scores have increased from the 1950s, in correspondence with the model's prediction that legislators under a party selection process would move ideologically toward their parties in an effort to gain power.