Volume 12, Issue 2

Analysts in the media and political world are suddenly paying attention to a debate rooted in decades of political science research. In this article, we introduce this debate and its roots in three scholarly camps, each of which is focused on explaining election outcomes – those who stress persuasion, those who stress mobilization, and those who stress fundamentals. The article argues that while each of these camps has something valuable to say about why campaigns are won and lost, none of them in and of themselves explains the ultimate outcomes of competitive national elections. For this, fundamentals matter greatly but cannot offer the final percentage points in ultimate outcomes, where marginal variance can be crucial, while turnout and persuasion together, on top of these economic and partisan fundamentals, yield small but more than occasionally decisive determinants of election outcomes.

A newly created dataset makes it possible to go looking for the mass ideologies most common in American politics across the postwar years. For this purpose, it is necessary to distinguish five great ideological groups: Liberals, Conservatives, Populists, Libertarians, and Moderates. These prove to have distinct voting behaviors, not just in the ballot for President but also in the propensity and manner by which they split their tickets. They have distinct perceptions of the main organizational referents in politics, both political parties and organized interests, while the distinction between objectively measured versus self-identified ideologies proves to be consequential as well. Finally, these ideological groups do not just evolve differently across the postwar years; they alter the substantive content of major-party coalitions at both the rank-and-file and the activist levels while doing so.

The Democratic Party has long used a system of caucuses and councils to reach out to marginalized groups among convention delegates. This article tests two hypotheses about how this system works within the party. First, the Parties in Service to Candidates Hypothesis holds that caucuses and councils mobilize elites from marginalized groups to increase support for the party nominee. Second, the Group Solidarity Hypothesis holds that caucuses and councils mobilize elites from marginalized groups to enhance group solidarity. Regression analysis of data drawn from an original survey of delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention provides no support to the Service Hypothesis , while the evidence supports the Solidarity Hypothesis in the case of the Women’s Caucus, which became a rallying point for women who were disappointed that Hillary Clinton was not the Democratic Party nominee. A similar survey of delegates to the 2008 Republican National Convention did not uncover a parallel system of representing marginalized groups within the Republican Party.

Modern “reconstructive” presidents face an institutional environment that affords strong veto possibilities to defenders of the status quo, making today’s politics resistant to the “order shattering” and “order creating” style of change most frequently associated with the leadership type. This project responds to the possibility that the rise of these conditions suggests the end of such reconstructive politics. It applies fresh insights gleaned from historical-institutionalist scholarship to investigate the full range of options that are available to presidents inheriting the opportunity to reorder politics. Mathematical simulation, via Polya’s urn model, is used to demonstrate how institutional displacement, layering, conversion, and drift can be used – independently and together – to recalibrate the equilibrium of a “path-dependent” system and thus alter developmental pathways. This not only suggests that modern presidents can still reorder and rejuvenate politics in a constrained environment; it updates expectations and warns of potential dangers.

This article examines independent spending in state elections before and after the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC . We find that the decision did not have much of a direct effect on business spending, despite public expectations. Increases were higher in the aggregate in states that prohibited corporate spending before the decision. However, the major growth was not in the business or labor sectors, but in the network organizations of political parties – and most particularly the national organizations of state elected and party officials. Contrary to some contemporary views, these developments cannot be understood as a displacement of within-state money from parties to interest groups. Instead, national party organizations were operating across state lines, deciding whether to contribute to formal party committees or their party allies as local circumstances might dictate. This complex movement of money belies any theorizing that would treat a decline in the proportional role of formal party spending as equivalent to a zero-sum increase in the non-party power of interest groups. Rather, we see the pattern of independent spending as part of a larger story of change in American political parties. These changes now include vertically networked parties operating across levels of jurisdiction, alongside the horizontal networks receiving attention in recent scholarship.

Despite being known as the “Evangelical Vatican,” politics in Colorado Springs is more pluralistic, and interesting, than its reputation suggests. The city is overwhelmingly conservative, but all major factions of modern conservatism – social, economic, and defense-related – have a significant presence in the city, leading to unusual controversies among them and with the city’s erstwhile liberals. Three paradoxes reveal the more complicated nature of this politics: 1) even though Colorado Springs is a bastion of evangelicalism, it is a largely secular city; 2) it loathes but is simultaneously dependent on the federal government; and 3) its social conservatives exercise more power nationally than locally.

In a recent issue of The Forum , Fortier and Malbin call for more research into the effects of disclosure requirements for campaign finance. In this paper, we report the results of a field experiment designed to assess whether such rules dissuade potential contributors due to privacy concerns. The paper is unique in that we explain why the field experiment never happened, and what we can learn from its “failure.” Specifically, we show that 2012 Congressional candidates were fearful about letting potential contributors know that their donations would be made available on the Internet, along with their address, employer, and other personal information. In trying to learn directly about whether contributors would be spooked by this knowledge, we ended up learning indirectly, through the actions of candidates, that privacy concerns may in fact limit participation in the political process, including among small donors.