Volume 13, Issue 2

This manuscript examines the political behavior of White union members, with a focus on the differences between private sector and public sector union members. In the last several decades, private sector union membership has drastically declined, but public sector union membership has greatly increased. This has transformed the White unionized workforce from a group composed primarily of non-professional men with no college education to one that is much more female, college educated, and professional. We test the proposition that White public sector union members have greater incentives to support the Democratic Party than their private sector counterparts. The method employed is an examination of the presidential vote among both unionized and non-unionized Whites during the 1950s and the 2000s, using data from the American National Election Studies. Support among unionized Whites for Democratic presidential candidates in the 2000s came primarily from college educated and professional White union members, which represents a reversal of the pattern found during the 1950s. These results provide evidence that the White union members currently voting for Democratic candidates belong mainly to public sector unions.

In the wake of the Bi-Partisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 and subsequent rulings by the Supreme Court, American political parties face greater regulation than interest groups in terms of their ability to finance federal elections. While parties continue to be constrained by contribution limits, nearly all interest groups can now raise and spend money in unlimited amounts to influence elections. Further, many new groups formed to take advantage of these legal changes. Few studies address the ramifications of these developments for political parties’ fundraising capabilities. To see whether these disadvantages hamper party fundraising, I examine parties’ direct fundraising costs overtime and I use structural equation analysis to investigate the giving habits of party donors overtime. I find the fundraising cost of each dollar raised has risen and habitual party donors provide significant support to Super PACs. Habitual party donors have also become less consistent givers in the Democratic Party. I discuss the relationship of these findings to changes in party fundraising tactics and their implications for future efforts by the parties to maintain their revenue streams.

Super PACs can raise and spend money in unlimited amounts, but what do they do with their money? What goals do super PACs pursue in allocating their money? We analyze how super PACS spent their money in the 2012 federal elections. What principles guided super PAC spending strategies? Do they follow strategies similar to traditional PACs? We argue that their spending patterns have changed the dynamics of federal campaign finance by directing more funds to individual candidate races than in the past, particularly through candidate-specific super PACs. We find that most super PACs spend their money differently than conventional PACs in that they are less interested in access to sitting lawmakers and more focused on an electoral strategy to affect the partisan composition of government. Thus many super PACs behave more like political parties than traditional PACs.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), applications flooded the IRS to establish political 501(c) nonprofits. This increased popularity in creating 501(c)s is fueled by the fact that 501(c) nonprofits are not required to release their donor information, as opposed to PACs and super PACs that operate transparently. Consequently, those who are interested in keeping their political activities secret, including, presumably, for-profit businesses, have mostly contributed to political 501(c)s. This study seeks to better explain the dark-money phenomenon by examining all outside expenditures in the 2010 and 2012 congressional elections. It finds that dark-money groups are mostly conservative organizations utilizing 501(c)s and occasionally 501(c)s and super PACs simultaneously. It also provides a discussion of efforts to increase transparency in both federal and state elections, and provides some support to the theory that dark-money groups will avoid activity in strongly regulated races.

This paper uses assumptions about position taking and credit claiming to help predict when Congress will challenge and override a presidential veto. Using assumptions about position taking and credit claiming to generate measurable hypotheses, I find that vetoes on spending bills are 13.0 percentage points more likely to be challenged and 13.1 percentage points more likely to be overridden. Furthermore, spending vetoes are more likely to be overridden when congressional elections are nearing. The results confirm that the electoral connection not only explains individual behavior, but can also help predict institutional outcomes.

Geographic sorting of the electorate along partisan lines has received increased attention by scholars following the publication of Bill Bishop’s and Robert Cushing’s The Big Sort (2008). The evidence presented in this paper stems from an original public opinion survey in two Wisconsin landslide counties. We find that the majority among migrants to these partisan strongholds have shared the partisanship of the respective political majority. Using logistic regression analysis, we show that partisanship as well as specific lifestyle preferences mattered in people’s decisions to migrate into these partisan strongholds. We also find that partisanship is a factor in potential out-migration: residential satisfaction is lower among the respective political minorities, and relevant shares of the political minority say they consider moving away for political reasons. Among the members of the minority who consider leaving the county about one third say they do so because they dislike the politics of the people there. Our findings on the two counties, each a prototypical Democratic and Republican stronghold, lend further support to the Big Sort hypothesis.