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Dynamic Elite Partisanship: Party Loyalty and Agenda Setting in the US House

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2013

René Lindstädt  and
Ryan J. Vander Wielen
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Abstract

Legislators and legislative parties must strike a balance between collective and member-level goals. While there are legislative and reputational returns to co-ordinated behavior, partisan loyalty has a detrimental effect on members’ electoral success. This article argues that members and parties navigate these competing forces by pursuing partisan legislation when the threat of electoral repercussions is relatively low – when elections are distant. This study tests our theory by examining US House members’ likelihood of voting with their party on both partisan and non-divisive votes during the course of the election cycle in order to assess whether members strategically alter their levels of party loyalty as elections approach. It also explores whether majority parties strategically structure the agenda according to variation in members’ electoral constraints. This approach allows elite partisanship to follow a dynamic process, which is referred to here as dynamic elite partisanship. The results demonstrate that as elections approach, members are less likely to cast party votes, and parties are less inclined to schedule votes that divide the parties. At the same time, the study finds no evidence of strategic variation in members’ voting behavior on broadly consensual votes with election proximity.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 741 - 772
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

René Lindstädt is Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex (email: rlind@essex.ac.uk); Ryan J. Vander Wielen is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Temple University (email: vanderwielen@temple.edu). The authors wish to thank Jamie Carson, Gregory Koger, Matthew Lebo and Everett Young for sharing the data used for some control variables in the member-level models, as well as John Aldrich, Kevin Arceneaux, David Rohde, the BJPolS editor, three anonymous reviewers and participants of the 2012 Philadelphia-Area American Politics Workshop, Philadelphia, PA, USA. An online appendix with supplementary materials is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123413000173. The data used in this article, which is part of a larger, ongoing project on dynamic elite partisanship, will be made available at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JPS within two years of the date of publication.

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