Browsing by Author "Carroll, Royce"
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Item Organizing Legislative Parties: How Elections and Policy Positions Shape Intraparty Politics(2016-04-28) Kubo, Hiroki; Carroll, RoyceIn this dissertation project, I examine how elections produce the diverse preferences within political parties and how these differences are managed by party organizations in legislatures. Existing research on legislative parties suggests that electoral incentives shape legislative behavior and individual politicians delegate their power to parties in order to reconcile the pursuit of individual interests with collective needs. However, especially outside the US Congress, little is known about 1) sources of ideological heterogeneity within parties and 2) the sanction and reward mechanisms used for parties to overcome heterogeneity and achieve collective goals. In order to address these questions, this study investigates how patterns of candidate competition at the electoral district level affect the ideological cohesion of legislative parties and how party leadership allocates posts and resources to legislators. By focusing on contemporary party politics in Japan and the US, I clarify the logic of legislative parties under different circumstances, especially the difference between parliamentary lower houses and other chambers. These two countries have important common features: a two-party system operating entirely or mostly under plurality electoral systems. While an SMD-based electoral system in the lower chamber promotes a two-party system and usually single-party majorities, these parties face the challenge of how they maintain party discipline. These institutional characteristics enable us to engage in within-country comparisons with key features varying. In terms of methodology, I make use of scaling methods on survey data analysis in order to clarify how electoral competition shapes the pattern of intra-party politics and party leadership strategy on post and resource allocation within parties. This study also illuminates the possibilities for survey data analysis approach and cross-national analysis on the causes and the consequences of party ideological cohesion.Item Recovering a Basic Space from Issue Scales in R(Foundation for Open Access Statistics, 2016) Poole, Keith T.; Lewis, Jeffrey B.; Rosenthal, Howard; Lo, James; Carroll, Roycebasicspace is an R package that conducts Aldrich-McKelvey and Blackbox scaling to recover estimates of the underlying latent dimensions of issue scale data. We illustrate several applications of the package to survey data commonly used in the social sciences. Monte Carlo tests demonstrate that the procedure can recover latent dimensions and reproduce the matrix of responses at moderate levels of error and missing data.Item The Role of Party: The Legislative Consequences of Partisan Electoral Competition(John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013) Carroll, Royce; Eichorst, JasonWe examine the proposition that incentives for legislative organization can be explained by the nature of electoral competition. We argue that legislators in environments where parties are competitive for majority status are most likely to have delegated power to their leadership to constrain individualistic behavior within their party, which will in turn increase the spatial predictability of individual voting patterns. Using roll call votes and district-level electoral data from the U.S. state legislatures, we show empirically that increased statewide interparty competition corresponds to much more predictable voting behavior overall, while legislators from competitive districts have less predictable behavior.Item Shadowing Ministers: Monitoring Partners in Coalition Governments(Sage, 2012) Carroll, Royce; Cox, Gary W.In this article the authors study delegation problems within multiparty coalition governments. They argue that coalition parties can use the committee system to “shadow” the ministers of their partners; that is, they can appoint committee chairs from other governing parties, who will then be well placed to monitor and/or check the actions of the corresponding ministers. The authors analyze which ministers should be shadowed if governing parties seek to minimize the aggregate policy losses they suffer as the result of ministers pursuing their own parties’ interests rather than the coalition’s. Based on data from 19 mostly European parliamentary democracies, the authors find that the greater the policy disagreement between a minister’s party and its partners, the more likely the minister is to be shadowed.Item The Structure of Utility in Spatial Models of Voting(John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013) Carroll, Royce; Lewis, Jeffrey B.; Lo, James; Poole, Keith T.; Rosenthal, HowardEmpirical models of spatial voting allow legislators' locations in a policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll-call votes. These are typically random utility models where the features of the utility functions other than the ideal points are assumed rather than estimated. In this article, we first consider a model in which legislators' utility functions are allowed to be a mixture of the two most commonly assumed utility functions: the quadratic function and the Gaussian function assumed by NOMINATE. Across many roll-call data sets, we find that legislatorsメ utility functions are estimated to be very nearly Gaussian. We then relax the usual assumption that each legislator is equally sensitive to policy change and find that extreme legislators are generally more sensitive to policy change than their more centrally located counterparts. This result suggests that extremists are more ideologically rigid while moderates are more likely to consider influences that arise outside liberal-conservative conflict.Item The Electoral Cost of Coalition Governance and Elites' Behavior in Parliamentary Democracies(2015-12-02) Lin, Cheng-Nan; Martin, Lanny W.; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Carroll, Royce; Lewis, Steven W.This dissertation examines the interaction between voters and party elites in parliamentary democracies, particularly those with multiparty governments. In the first half of the dissertation I focus on individual party supporters and explore their reactions to coalition policymaking. I develop a heuristic model that explains voters' preferences for coalition governance and the consequent impact of their preferences on voting behavior. I contend that party voters' preferences for coalition governance are associated with two simple heuristics: cabinet membership and their own ideological locations relative to parties in a coalition on the left-right policy spectrum. I find that party supporters who perceive themselves to be located between coalition partners are less likely to cast a punishing vote. This is because voters expect that policy compromise essentially brings cabinet parties closer to their own ideal points. In the second half of my dissertation, I derive a behavioral implication from the theory regarding the collaborative behavior of party elites. I argue that rational politicians should be able to predict the potential cost of coalition participation by gauging the size of ideological interior voters (i.e., party supporters located in between a pair of parties) they share with other parties, and that they can respond to this information by acting strategically. Specifically, political parties are more likely to cooperate with one another when they share more interior supporters than when they do not. This is because parties in such a situation face a lower cost of collaboration if they chose to partner with each other. I then examine this implication empirically by using data on parliamentary speeches and coalition partnerships. The empirical investigations show results that are consistent with my argument. I find party elites to be less likely to engage in lengthy floor debates on government policies and to be more likely to govern together when they share more interior voters. Taking all these findings together, this dissertation enhances our understanding of citizens' preferences for collective policymaking and of the connection between voters and political elites in parliamentary democracies.