Doctoral Dissertation Research: Electoral Uncertainty and Policy Change

对多数控制的选举竞争如何影响立法机关起草和通过有意义的立法的能力？今天，即使是最不经意的政治观察家也明白立法僵局是现代立法政治的一个关键特征。至少从20世纪90年代开始，学者、媒体专家，甚至政客们都呼吁人们关注这些机构缺乏生产力的问题，大多数人将这种现象归因于两大政党之间日益严重的意识形态两极分化。但是，尽管政党之间日益扩大的鸿沟——以及它可能对政策变化和立法僵局产生的影响——是不可否认的，但本项目研究了一个大多数关于立法僵局的报道都被忽视的关键因素：争夺多数控制权的竞争加剧。该项目开发了一种新的政策变化理论，阐明并测试了这种选举竞争鼓励或阻碍政策变化的条件，超出了两极分化可能预测的范围。最终，该项目将解释为什么即使是受欢迎的立法也往往无法获得牵引力，以及为什么两极分化本身并不总是预测立法机关的生产力水平。以这种方式将立法生产力与选举竞争联系起来，还会对诸如选举频率和党派议程设置的适当性等主题产生潜在的规范、宪法和政策影响。对多数控制权的竞争如何改变立法机构中党派议程制定者的战略考量？它对总体政策变化可能产生什么影响？从梅休（1973）开创性的工作开始，选举动态一直是几乎所有现代立法政治分析的核心。然而，尽管存在这种中心地位，尽管选举竞争力在多数人控制的美国政治史上存在巨大差异（Lee 2016），但很少有理论或实证研究描述选举动态如何影响政策变化过程。本项目将政治科学中选举和政策变化文献的关键见解联系在一起，创建了一个新的、选举调整的政策变化模型，并为该理论提供了一系列新颖的实证检验。首先，本项目使用测量宏观层面竞争力的同时代信念的新数据，与现有模型（例如，Krehbiel 1998, Cox and McCubbins 2005）相比，检验了我的选举调整政策变化模型预测1940年以来立法生产力的效果。其次，该项目利用重新授权流程和新的基于利益集团的法案位置估计来检查宏观层面的竞争是否以及如何影响与政策变化有关的法案层面决策。最后，利用广泛覆盖的法案位置估计（包括未接受点名投票的法案位置），本项目研究宏观层面的竞争如何影响多数党领导人做出的议程设置决策。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

How does electoral competition over majority control influence a legislature's ability to draft and pass meaningful legislation? Today, even the most casual observers of politics understand legislative gridlock to be a key feature of the modern legislative politics. Since at least the 1990s, scholars, media pundits, and even politicians have called attention to these institutions' lack of productivity, most often attributing the phenomenon to growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties. But while the widening gulf between the political parties --and the influence it likely has on policy change and legislative gridlock-- is undeniable, this project examines a crucial factor that most accounts of legislative gridlock have ignored: the rise in competition over majority control. This project develops a new theory of policy change that articulates and tests the conditions under which this sort of electoral competition encourages or stymies policy change, beyond what polarization alone might predict. Ultimately, the project would provide an explanation for why even popular legislation often fails to gain traction, and why polarization does not itself always predict a legislature's levels of productivity. Tying legislative productivity to electoral competition in this way would also carry with it potential normative, constitutional, and policy implications regarding topics such as the frequency of elections and the appropriateness of partisan agenda-setting.How does competition over majority control alter the strategic calculus of partisan agenda-setters in a legislature and what influence may it have on aggregate policy change? Beginning with Mayhew's (1973) seminal work, electoral dynamics have remained at the heart of nearly all modern analysis of legislative politics. Yet in spite of this centrality, and in spite of the sharp differences in electoral competitiveness over majority control American political history (Lee 2016), little theorizing or empirical research has delineated how electoral dynamics influence the policy change process. This project ties together key insights from both the electoral and policy change literatures in political science to create a new, elections-adjusted model of policy change and provide a series of novel empirical tests of this theory. First, using new data measuring contemporaneous beliefs regarding macro-level competitiveness, this project examines how well my elections-adjusted policy change model predicts legislative productivity since 1940, compared to current models (e.g., Krehbiel 1998, Cox and McCubbins 2005). Second, the project leverages the reauthorizations process and new, interest-group-based estimates of bill locations to examine whether and how macro-level competition influences bill-level decisionmaking regarding policy change. Finally, capitalizing on the broad coverage of bill location estimates (including locations of bills that failed to receive a roll call vote), this project examines how macro-level competition influences the agenda-setting decisions made by majority leaders.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.