The Electoral Origins of Divided Government: Competition in U.s. House Elections, 1946-1988 by Gary C. Jacobson

Author:Gary C. Jacobson [Jacobson, Gary C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American Government, National, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780813309071
Google: -eiGAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 1679110
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1990-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

National Tides in House Elections

The peculiar structure of the American political system has never made it easy for voters to hold elected leaders collectively responsible for the government's performance. Where votes are cast to choose a governing party, and only incidentally particular legislators, as in most parliamentary systems, enforcement of collective responsibility is relatively uncomplicated, and so incentives for members of governing parties to pursue successful national policies are unambiguous. Where executives and legislatures are elected separately, however, legislators can contemplate independent electoral careers. Insofar as personal ties to constituents protect them from punishment by association for bad times or failed programs, incentives for producing collectively beneficial policies are weakened. Elections that revolve around local candidates and issues, slighting national parties and leaders, reward individual responsiveness at the expense of collective responsibility (Fiorina 1980; Jacobson 1987b).

Despite the formal separation of congressional from presidential elections, the historic pattern of House seat swings suggests that, by using party labels to assign credit or blame for national conditions, voters have been able to enforce a considerable degree of collective responsibility. Historically, unpopular presidents or presidential candidates, unpopular or failed national policies, and poor economic performance have all cost the administration's party seats in Congress. Successful presidents and policies have, in the short term as well as in the long run, added to the party's congressional strength.

Whether this is still true is a valid question. Have electoral results become less responsive to national conditions over the postwar period? Some of the evidence discussed in previous chapters would lead us to believe that responsiveness has diminished. Electoral disaggregation, especially the increasing dissociation of presidential from other election results, implies a diminished electoral role for national forces. But it is important to avoid confusing electoral articulation at the district level with electoral articulation at higher levels of aggregation. The relationship between U.S. House elections and state legislative elections provides a good illustration of this point. Recall from Table 2.2 in Chapter 2 that the impact of the partisan distribution of state legislative seats on the probability of a party's winning a given House seat in the state has fallen sharply over the postwar period. The connection has diminished to the point where the distribution of state legislative seats in the average House Democrat's state is only slightly more Democratic than the distribution of state legislative seats in the average House Republican's state.1

On a district-by-district, state-by-state basis, the link between the outcomes of state legislative and House elections has become remarkably weak. In aggregate, however, these sets of elections continue to move together with considerable precision, as Figure 5.1 demonstrates. The entries are the percentage of House seats won by Democrats and the mean percentage of Democrats elected to the lower house of the state legislature. At the highest level of aggregation, House and state legislative elections continue to track one another quite closely. And they have done so just as closely in the second half of this period as they did in the first, as the regression equations in Table 5.

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