The Moderating Role of Electoral Pressure on Congressional Ideological Polarization: A Cross-Sectional Time-Series Analysis

Reelection and self-interest are recurring themes in the study of our congressional leaders. To date, many studies have already been done on the trends between elections, party affiliation, and voting behavior in Congress. However, because a plethora of data has been collected on both elections and congressional voting, the ability to draw a connection between the two provides a very reasonable prospect. This project analyzes whether voting shifts in congressional elections have an effect on congressional voting. Will a congressman become ideologically more polarized when his electoral margins increase? Essentially, this paper assumes that all congressmen are ideologically polarized, and it is elections which serve to reel congressmen back toward the ideological middle. The election and ideological data for this study, which spans from the 56th to the 107th Congress, finds statistically significant relationships between these two variables. In fact, congressman pay attention to election returns when voting in Congress. When broken down by party, Democrats are more exhibitive of this phenomenon, which suggest that Democrats may be more likely to intrinsically follow the popular model of representation. Meanwhile, it can be hypothesized that insignificant results for Republicans indicate that Republicans may follow a trustee model of representation.

Environmental Policy in Majoritarian Systems

This paper sheds new light on the determination of environmental policies in majoritarian federal electoral systems such as the U.S., and derives implications for the environmental federalism debate on whether the national or local government should have authority over environmental policies. In majoritarian systems, where the legislature consists of geographically distinct electoral districts, the majority party (at either the national or the state level) favors its own home districts; depending on the location of polluting industries and the associated pollution damages, the majority party may therefore impose sub-optimally high or low pollution taxes due to a majority bias. We show that majority bias can influence the social-welfare ranking of alternative government policies and, in some cases, may actually bring distortionary policies closer to the first-best solution.

For Sale: Trade Policy in Majoritarian Systems

We provide a theory of trade policy determination that incorporates the protectionist bias inherent in majoritarian systems, suggested by Grossman and Helpman (2005). The prediction that emerges is that in majoritarian systems, the majority party favors industries located disproportionately in majority districts. We test this prediction using U.S. tariff data from 1993, and House campaign contribution data from two electoral cycles. We find evidence of a protectionist bias due to majoritarian system politics that is comparable in magnitude to the payoff from being an organized industry.