Political Research Quarterly

This study reexamines the influence of party elite liberalism on voter participation across the American states. Incorporating Hill and Leighley's measure of liberal party control, we offer a framework that places party elites as an important component in the state electoral setting. However, this effort departs from previous work by suggesting that studies of voter mobilization should pay greater attention to participation as a multi-stage process, where citizens must first register. Our results con form to expectations driven by this conceptualization. States with more liberal Democratic elites and more Democratic legislatures witness higher levels of registration, controlling for other factors. We find that the influ ence of liberal party control on state turnout is indirect, operating through registration. Our results are consistent with a view of party elite ideology as a long-term, rather than campaign-specific, component of state electoral politics. More generally, the analyses provide new insight into influences on aggregate registration and turnout and into the electoral participation across the United States of different income classes.

Prior research on congressional recruitment establishes that “experi enced” or “quality” candidates compete more successfully for votes and money Little research, however, inquires into how type of prior experi ence affects strategic decisions on when to run or success once a race is undertaken. This research explores the impact of type of prior experi ence, focusing on state legislators who run for the U.S. House. We exam ine how experience affects decisions to run and money raised for all non incumbent general election House candidates between 1988 and 1994. We find that type of prior experience matters. In particular, state legisla tors, especially those serving in professionalized legislatures, are more risk averse in deciding when to run. They also raise more of their money from PACs, and even more as the density of their state's interest group structure and professionalism of their legislature increases.

For the fourth time since World War II, national policymakers, in 1992, engaged in a major debate over reforming and regulating the U.S. health care system. One of the most debated issues involved the problem of the uninsured. While Congress and the President garnered national attention debating the issue, several states were already dealing with the issue of health insurance and their own uninsurance problems. Today, in the absence of activity at the federal level, the states have become the de facto leaders in health care reform. Since 1990, forty-six states have adopted small group insurance market reforms. Such reforms are designed to improve the availability of insurance coverage for employees of small firms, who make up the largest segment of the uninsured in the states. This article examines the factors that account for the sudden pop ularity of small group insurance market reforms, and the factors or char acteristics of the states that explain the extent of policies adopted. To examine these questions, a pooled cross-sectional time series model is employed. The results indicate the factors contributing to the adoption of small group health insurance market reforms are a state's regulatory envi ronment, a state's regulatory philosophy, state fiscal health, problem severity, and the activities of neighboring states. Implications of the find ings are also discussed.

This article examines the effects of state policy on net interstate migration. Using Ordinary Least Squares regression on aggregate cross-sectional data, state policy factors are found to be significant determinants of the net interstate migration levels of the states. In addition, two previously untested variables, state ideology and an investment-consumption ratio, are found to be significant. The analysis indicates that states with low taxation levels, high investment-consumption ratios, and more liberal ideologies relative to other states, tend to experience more population growth via interstate migration. The results suggest that a consumer-voter model explains a significant portion of the variation in aggregate migration behavior.

Is it possible to force other states to be free by imposing democracy on them during military interventions? This article analyzes the histori cal relationship between U.S. military intervention and the democratiza tion of target states from 1898-1992 using the Polity III data set to meas ure democracy It argues that U.S. military intervention in and of itself does not have a positive impact on democracy Active support for “free and fair” elections during those military interventions, however, has often had a profound and positive impact on the democratization of target states. The relationship between American-sponsored elections and democracy remains positive and statistically significant when interven tion cases are compared with states that have not experienced U.S. mili tary intervention in multivariate models controlling for the prior demo cratic experience and war participation of target states and American opposition to the government of the target state.

Roll-call votes of African American representatives are explored to dis cern more explicitly the ideological cohesiveness of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and factors that affect vote choice. We use adjusted Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores. The adjustment corrects for changes in the ADA's scale from year to year. The analysis is carried out focusing on CBC coherence with respect to ideological voting and potential influences on Caucus unity We pool the CBC data from the period under investigation (1971-1996) to address the impact of vari ables identified as affecting roll call voting. The findings suggest that while there is considerably more diversity within the CBC than we some times imagine, African American representatives are more cohesive with the Black Caucus on roll call behavior than they are with either their regional or state party delegations. In addition, analyses suggest that sen iority, correspondence between the president's party and the CBC, presi dential policy preferences, percent black voters in the district, and elec toral margin of victory in the district may help explain variation in Caucus unity Finally, we conclude high vote cohesion is meaningful for the CBC and the representation of black interests in Congress.

Divided government affects individual choices over how to vote in midterm elections because it increases uncertainty in the minds of voters. Particularly, divided control of government makes blame attribution more difficult by obscuring causal connections and reducing the overall amount of usable information. As a result, we argue that under divided government, voters are less likely to vote for the House candidate not of the President's party. Using both NES and election-specific contextual data, we examine divided government's effect on the voters' political knowledge and candidate preferences in all midterm elections from 1978 to 1994, controlling for well identified factors that shape outcomes in House elections. We find, first, that divided government reduces the amount of political information held by voters. Second, divided govern ment helps the President's party by lowering the probability that an indi vidual votes for the out-party candidate.

The power of incumbency in congressional elections is widely accepted. Is there a partisan component to the incumbency advantage? The theories of divided government push in two directions. Jacobson's argument would lead one to believe that the Democrats should be advantaged. Fiorina's argument would lead one to believe that there should be no difference between the parties. Using the American National Election Studies of 1956 through 1996, one can see that there is little difference in the two parties' abilities to capitalize on the advantages incumbency confers. Both parties' incumbent members of the House seem to provide the particularized services that both Jacobson and Fiorina think are so important for retaining a seat in the House. Also, constituents view both parties' incumbents as being equally responsive on matters of public policy. Consequently, there is little reason to fear that the policymaking process is distorted by one party being more advantaged by incumbency than another. Last, the evidence, albeit indirect, lends support to the policy-balancing model of Fiorina.

The current method of hypothesis testing in the social sciences is under intense criticism, yet most political scientists are unaware of the important issues being raised. Criticisms focus on the construction and interpretation of a procedure that has dominated the reporting of empirical results for over fifty years. There is evidence that null hypothesis significance testing as practiced in political science is deeply flawed and widely misunderstood. This is important since most empirical work argues the value of findings through the use of the null hypothesis significance test. In this article I review the history of the null hypothesis significance testing paradigm in the social sciences and discuss major problems, some of which are logical inconsistencies while others are more interpretive in nature. I suggest alter native techniques to convey effectively the importance of data-analytic findings. These recommendations are illustrated with examples using empirical political science publications.