Many observers decry an "imperial presidency" in war-making, equating unilateral force with an unconstrained executive. This research reframes the war powers debate by centering the powerful incentives lawmakers have to avoid blame for military action.
Do US congressmembers vote according to their constituents' policy preferences? Previous research suggests incongruent voting occurs on about one-third of roll calls. This article explores why, particularly for Republicans who vote against district majorities more often but aren't punished at the polls.
US House members increasingly rely on out-of-district donors, raising questions about the influence of these contributions. Does national donor preference impact policy decisions? How does electoral safety factor in?
This article explains the pretrain–finetune paradigm for transformer language models and shows how applied political scientists can use it to classify political text with relatively little labeled data and modest computation. The author frames mechanisms behind pretraining and finetuning, addresses common misconceptions about costs and complexity, and demonstrates the approach by identifying toxic language in conversation threads that follow U.S. Senators’ tweets. An online tutorial accompanies the article to help nontechnical scholars adopt the workflow.
New research reveals how union influence significantly lessens unequal representation in U.S. Congress.
Many observers argue that Congress has weakened capacity to govern, and understanding that decline requires attention to how member offices build—or fail to build—expertise.
This article asks how domestic factors affect US presidents’ decisions to lift sanctions and whether they choose different exit routes (for example, capitulation) depending on political pressure. Using a novel dataset of US sanctions from 1990–2018 combined with interviews and anecdotal practitioner evidence, the author links presidents’ political standing and congressional oversight to variation in the timing and manner of sanctions termination.
This paper reveals a counterintuitive finding: costly protests by low-resource groups can actually increase their visibility and legislative representation despite resource constraints. The core argument emerges from formal theory, suggesting that legislators are more responsive to protesters than previously thought.
A new, long-run measure of legislative effectiveness captures a member’s ability to propose and advance bills on important topics and spans both chambers from 1873 to 2010. The dataset incorporates all 1.1 million introduced bills, creating opportunities to study legislative institutions and behavior across multiple congressional eras.
This paper examines congressional approval ratings through the lens of responsible party government and citizens' assessments based on partisanship/ideology.
Theoretical work predicts symbolic benefits when institutions are gender-inclusive, yet empirical findings are inconsistent. This article argues that a key reason for mixed results is that many Americans misperceive how well women are represented. By focusing on variation in citizens' beliefs about women's inclusion, the analysis links those perceptions to feelings about legislative institutions.
Does partisanship influence environmental outcomes? Addressing this question requires more than just examining policy passage or spending.
Conjoint experiments are popular in political science surveys, but researchers lacked guidance on how many attributes could be included before survey satisficing became problematic. This paper addresses that gap by conducting two pre-registered studies examining choices among hypothetical US Senate candidates or hotel rooms.
Introduces a method for scaling two datasets from different sources by estimating a latent factor common to both and idiosyncratic factors unique to each source. The approach also lets the scaled locations depend on covariates and enables efficient inference via resampling.
A new methodology—the bipartite link community model (biLCM)—infers political actors' latent memberships in communities of collective activity that shape observable interactions. Unlike existing approaches, biLCM is designed for two distinct actor sets and captures overlapping and multi-faceted interaction structure.
Our new spatial voting model explains why congressional candidates adopt more extreme ideological positions than their constituents' preferences. Unlike standard models, we find that voters in the candidate's own party tolerate extremism without imposing electoral penalties.
Political elites are known to constrain democracies’ use of overt military force, but the literature has largely ignored whether those same elite dynamics curb the initiation of covert operations. Secrecy is often assumed to let leaders sidestep congressional oversight. The central question is whether elite opposition—especially from Congress—limits presidents’ ability to act secretly or whether it affects only overt force.
Current measures of foreign policy positions in US Congress often rely on all votes, including domestic ones, thereby conflating a member's stance across different domains. This paper introduces an alternative approach using Bayesian item response theory applied exclusively to foreign policy votes.
This paper introduces a comprehensive dataset of nearly 9,000 local appropriations decisions made by the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 1882.
Electoral outcomes significantly influence voter representation, yet this impact often lasts far longer than anticipated. Using dynamic regression discontinuity designs with combined electoral and legislative roll-call data across the US House, Senate, and state legislatures, we demonstrate that even 'coin-flip' election results maintain their effects for a decade or more—and sometimes as long as three decades—in all settings. Incumbent advantages contribute to this durability.
Does responsiveness influence approval ratings for members of Congress (MCs), their parties, or the institution itself?
This article examines elite conflict on civil rights roll calls in the U.S. House from 1877 to 2011.
A growing set of measures aims to place incumbent and nonincumbent congressional candidates on a single ideological scale, offering the promise of new tests of accountability and representation. This paper evaluates how well six recent candidate-orientation measures actually capture the same underlying concept.
This research note analyzes the results of Brazil's 2014 elections with a focus on the National Congress and on claims and predictions about the country's political future. Attention centers on how electoral agreements and alliances translate into the post-election configuration of Congress and on what that means for governability under Brazilian presidentialism.
Existing methods for creating comparable ideal-point estimates across time and chambers impose restrictive assumptions: some legislators are fixed in place or their movement is artificially constrained. Those constraints conflict with theories that expect congressional responsiveness to election dynamics and changes in constituency.
This paper introduces a novel method using campaign finance data to measure political ideology.
New approach traces policy idea flow in US Congress using text reuse analysis.
Roll-call voting data is a cornerstone of legislative analysis but often overlooks non-response. This study explores how missing votes, previously dismissed as ignorable noise, actually contain crucial information about party divisions and strategic behavior. By implementing novel methods to handle incomplete voting records systematically, rather than simply discarding them or treating them as random errors, we demonstrate that failing to account for this pattern distorts our understanding of legislative politics significantly.