This paper estimates the effects of initial committee seniority on the career outcomes of Democratic members of the House of Representatives from 1949 to 2006. When more than one freshman representative is assigned to a committee, positions in the seniority queue are established by lottery. This ensures that queue positions are uncorrelated in expectation with other legislator characteristics within these groups. This natural experiment allows us to estimate the causal effect of seniority on a variety of outcomes. Lower ranked committee members are less likely to serve as subcommittee chairs on their initial committee, are more likely to transfer to other committees, and have fewer sponsored bills passed in the jurisdiction of their initial committee. On the other hand, there is little evidence that the seniority randomization has a net effect on reelection, terms of service in the House, or the total number of sponsored bills passed.
Abstract: This paper develops a new method for estimating the ideological preferences of members of the British House of Commons. Existing methods produce implausible results due to high levels of party cohesion and strategic voting on the part of opposition parties. To circumvent these problems, this paper estimates MP preferences using Early Day Motions (EDMs) as an alternative to roll call votes. The Bayesian ideal point model for the decision to sign an EDM takes into account both policy preferences and signing costs. The estimates obtained have greater face validity than previous attempts to measure preferences in the House of Commons, recovering the expected order of parties and of members within parties. The estimates successfully predict voting behavior in the House of Commons. As with other Bayesian ideal point methods, this approach produces natural uncertainty estimates and allows for easy calculation of quantities of interest such as member ranks.
It is a well-established empirical regularity that parties in federal office suffer setbacks in state-level elections. Many authors attribute this to a desire on the part of voters to balance the policy preferences of the federal incumbent. In this paper, I consider an alternative explanation with a long tradition in the literature: voters punish the party of the federal incumbent in state elections in order to send a signal to the federal government. I construct a simple signaling model to formalize this intuition, which predicts that under most circumstances signaling can occur at only one level of government. I estimate a statistical model allowing for electoral punishment using data from German elections and find support punishment at the state level, rather than the punishment at both levels implied by balancing theories.
Abstract: In this paper, I demonstrate that higher levels of union membership and NDP provincial governments are associated with lower post-tax-and-transfer inequality in Canadian provinces. These results are consistent with the power resources theory of inequality and the welfare state first advanced by Korpi (1983) and Stephens (1979), which claims that differences in organizational resources such as unions and left political parties are responsible for differences in distributional outcomes. While many studies have found this association using cross-national data from rich democracies, the repeated use of data from the same set of countries raises the possibility that the relationship is due to unobserved country-specific characteristics. Using a pooled cross-sectional time series dataset from 1980 to 2002 and focusing on within-province variation in Canada, I find evidence that supports the power resources model.