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。 由于这种结构是制度的内生性，如果立法者不能满足他们的需要，他们可以也会改变规则。 本研究探讨了美国众议院议员在旧制度不理想的情况下改变选举领导人的过程的一个例子。为了关注机构内议员的战略行为，立法机构的正式模型经常“黑箱”选民的战略行为。 立法者被认为是在谋求公职，所以他们想取悦选民，但在立法机构的正式模型中，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开发了两种正式的领导力选择理论。 在简单模型中，纯粹的资历决定了谁获得权力，谁不获得权力。 在更复杂的模型中，每个政党都使用多数决原则来决定哪些成员将担任领导职务。 该模型包含几个假设。 立法者首先是寻求连任。 他们还从在立法机构中拥有权力地位中获得效用。 因此，他们寻求权力，只要这样做不会导致他们失去连任。 像霍特林-唐斯模型一样，选民从选举意识形态上接近他们的立法者中获得效用。 他们还从选举一个强大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。 作为政党成员，立法者也从选举与他们关系密切、能够很好地履行领导任务的领导人中获得效用。 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款。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的立法机构：加州，佛罗里达，伊利诺伊州和新罕布什尔州。 选择这些州是因为它们在许多与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，利益集团的作用，利益集团的行为以及领导层选择过程的类型。初步数据分析包括20世纪50年代相关变量之间的比较，可以说是资历规则的鼎盛时期，在20世纪90年代，政党偏好在领导人的选择中发挥了更大的作用。 这一数据分析显示了立法机构之间的行为差异。 最值得注意的是，政党团结得分从20世纪50年代开始增加，这与模型的预测相一致，即在政党选择过程中，立法者将在意识形态上向他们的政党靠拢，以争取权力。

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.