Conditional Party Government in the Electorate

• In Event: Electoral Democracy, Capitalism and Epistography

Abstract

Existing accounts of conditional party government situate the concept clearly within legislative institutions and this is especially true for empirical analyses (e.g. see, Rohde 1991, Aldrich 1995, Aldrich and Rohde 1997 & 2001). This explanation of elite party behavior argues that legislators empower their leaders to force party discipline in order to pass policies when differences exist between the parties, but relative unity exists within a party. Focusing on the post-1974 U.S. House of Representatives, Rohde (2001) writes about how the influx of new progressive Democratic members prompted leadership to enact a series of reforms that made it easier to pass policies preferred by liberals. For example, breaking the strict seniority rule no longer guaranteed that committee chairs would hold their posts nor exert their powers, especially gatekeeping, in such imperious ways. Indeed, after a forced audition in front of the new Democratic first year members, the party replaced three existing chairs who they viewed as an obstacle to achieving policy goals.(1)

In this paper, we seek to extend this theory of legislative party politics to the broader electorate and to better explain citizens’ decisions on to turnout to congressional elections. Typically, scholars represent the calculus of voting based upon a voter’s benefits multiplied by the probability that their vote will be pivotal in that election, minus the costs of voting. Sometimes, scholars also include an additional term representing civic duty (see Riker and Ordeshook 1968, né Downs 1957). Like members of Congress, we argue that voters have policy goals which they seek to enact by supporting politicians who they hope will act on desired policy outcomes when in office. While we assume the value of voting for one’s local candidate comes from using that vote to help that specific candidate win, this is rarely the case in national elections. Instead, in addition to citizens voting to try to make their candidate win the district election, they also use that vote to express their support for their national party and its policy goals. In other words, even voters from uncompetitive districts are still drawn to cast ballots in order to show that they support their party’s agenda when the national parties are sufficiently different from one another and internally coherent.

We test our theory using data from the American National Election Study (ANES) and Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) since the 1970s. By combining these two studies, we are able to get a time series that goes from an era of low polarization to the current period of historically high polarization. As differences between the parties grow larger and they become more internally cohesive, we expect to find increased evidence of conditional party government in the electorate. A voter in 2018 is more likely to support a party for its coherent set of policy preferences than would have been the case in the 1970s when there were still a substantial number of southern Democratic conservatives and center to center-left northeastern Republicans.
This paper relates to the 2020 APSA theme of “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization” because of the central role of voting in citizens’ response to threats to their position within American democracy. By casting votes for candidates in Congress who they believe will support policies to protect them from threats, citizens can take steps to secure their position in society. Many Republican voters who turned out in droves in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections did so due to perceived threats to their place in society from the Obama administration; similarly, heightened Democratic turnout in 2018 was in response to fears borne out of the first two years of the Trump administration. Further, actions taken in the first two years of the Trump administration prompted worries of rising authoritarianism, so beyond ideological considerations, Democratic voters may have cast ballots to show that they oppose these actions. Through this research, we can better understand the factors driving voters to the polls in an era of democratic instability in the U.S. and across the globe.

(1) One of the chairs who Democrats replaced, Wright Patman of Texas, was relatively liberal. Democrats replaced Patman because members viewed him as having poor committee leadership skills, something that also imperiled party goals (Rohde 1991, 195).

Authors

• John H. Aldrich, Duke University

• Jacob Forrest Harrison Smith, Duke University