Browsing by Author "Hamm, Keith E"
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Item The Right to Party (Resources): Political Party Networks and Candidate Success(2014-12-04) Kettler, Jaclyn J; Hamm, Keith E; Stein, Robert M; Duenas-Osorio, LeonardoHow does the structure of political party organizations impact candidates in elections and the legislature? How does the position of candidates within the party affect their success? To address these questions in my dissertation, I use social network analysis to study candidates’ relationships and the context around those relationships. I measure party networks with campaign finance transactions in seven states for the 2010 and 2012 state legislative elections. After a case study of Texas parties that establishes the validity of my approach, I compare the structure of party networks across states. Although I discover that these networks are relatively sparse in general, my results also reveal that parties in states with competitive legislative chambers tend to be more connected. Finally, I explore how the party structure influences candidates. By drawing upon Ronald S. Burt’s (1992, 2005) structural holes theory, I identify influential actors and examine how their network position impacts their success in legislatures. I find that influential candidates in the electoral party network are more likely to become a legislative leader in the following session, demonstrating an important link between electoral and legislative politics.Item Win the Battleground to Win the Battle: Essays on Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and Interest Group Venue Shopping(2015-03-23) McNeese, Marvin R.; Stein, Robert M; Hamm, Keith E; Schuler, Douglas A; Alford, John R; Wilson, Rick KCampaign finance research examines how interest groups advocate for policy using money, while punctuated equilibrium theory focuses on their informational appeals. Yet all of this activity happens in the context of the multiple political venues of the U.S. government. This dissertation asks what independent affect do political venues have relative to one another on an interest group’s policy success, and whether interest groups strategically choose venues accordingly. The dissertation argues for a more precise definition of political venue as “single, autonomous a single, autonomous, political institution imbued with sufficient legal authority to direct the coercive power of government to distinguish between actors who are determine policy enactments from those who only influence them. It theorizes that the systematic variation in legal supremacy (i.e. authority), barriers to access, and information and bargaining costs (i.e. transaction costs) arrays U.S. political venues in an hierarchical order in terms of their utility to interest groups petitioning for their preferred policy alternatives. It uses a well-received dataset of interest group lobbying activity on a random set of issues at the Federal level from 1999-2002 to find support for its prediction that interest groups are most likely to petition the next higher venue when seeking to change the status quo policy. Tests on that same dataset reveal that the shift of policymaking to a higher political venue changes the outlook for policy success most and negatively for groups defending the status quo and otherwise makes it most likely that interest groups will win all or nothing of their preferred policies. The final analysis follows the debate on hydraulic fracturing through coverage in 20 national and regional newspapers from January 2007 through June 2013 to predict that a punctuated change in policy is not likely without the various stakeholders arriving at a grand compromise later codified by policymakers. This sets the stage for later analysis examining policymaking observed during the period can be explained by which political venues produced the enactment.