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Partisan brand name building and deficit politics: examining the role of power sharing on party issue consistency*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2013

Michael S. Lynch  and
Anthony J. Madonna
Michael S. Lynch
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Georgia, USA E-mail: mlynch@uga.edu
Anthony J. Madonna
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Georgia, USA E-mail: ajmadonn@uga.edu
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Abstract

Scholars of political parties frequently note that a party's candidates are aided by the presence of a consistent and favourable party brand name. We argue that partisan success in maintaining a consistent position on important policy issues hinges on how their role in the government motivates their strategies about public policy formation. Specifically, when parties share control of government institutions, parties need to balance their electoral interest in promoting a consistent brand name with the need to generate public policy that leads to effective governance. When control is held by one party, the costs and benefits of effective governance are born entirely by the majority, absolving both parties of the need to compromise on the substance of policy. By employing item response theory methods to assess patterns of party voting on deficit issues, we find strong support for these hypotheses.

Keywords

budgetary politicscongressional politicsparty politicsquantitative methods
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Public Policy , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , December 2013 , pp. 319 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The authors thank Ryan Bakker, Jamie Carson, Mike Crespin, Chuck Finocchiaro, Sean Gailmard, participants of the University of California, Merced's conference on “The Politics of Federal Spending”, anonymous reviewers, and the editor for helpful comments on this paper. The authors also wish to thank Keith Poole and Jeff Lewis for generously supplying open access to the congressional roll call data used in this paper. All errors remain the authors.

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