Electoral mandates in American politics

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 37, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 711-730

  Grossback, Lawrence J ^a   Peterson, David A M ^a   Stimson, James A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34548789002     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123407000385     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. David A. M. Peterson, Lawrence J. Grossback, James A. Stimson and Amy Gangl, 'Congressional Response to Mandate Elections', American Journal of Political Science, 47 (2003), 411-26. In order to avoid a long series of awkward self-references we note here that all subsequent references to our work should be assumed to refer to this article.
2. James A. Stimson, Michael B. MacKuen and Robert S. Erikson, 'Dynamic Representation', American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 543-65.
3. James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991);
4. James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings, 2nd edn (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999).
5. As noted above, change is an essential element of any definition of a mandate. If an election outcome is held to be ideological, but it does not contain any message for change, it will not be called a mandate. Moreover, all of the rhetorical mandate claims made by politicians are always claims that the voters support some specific change. Newly elected officials do not want to spend the capital they have 'earned' in the election by staying the course. They want to adopt new policies and create some change in the status quo.
6. As we will show shortly, it is the consistency of election outcomes across institutions (the presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives and governors) rather than the size of the presidential win that drives the interpretations of the election. While commentators and pundits often have a strong expectation of presidential outcomes (though 1980 was a surprise in its magnitude), other races are usually difficult to predict. Thus, we see the importance of down ballot races in determining the interpretation of the election as evidence for the importance of the need for a surprise to create a mandate.
7. The correlation between the two is 0.89.
8. This requires that we decide which party 'won' each election so that it might have claimed the hypothetical mandate. That is pretty obvious in most cases. Our decision rule is that the winner is the presidential winner in presidential years or the House winner in midterms.
9. Only roll calls that fall on the standard liberal-conservative divide are used.
10. The statistically inclined reader may wonder why these percentages are not fixed by the choice of some critical value. The answer is that member votes are judged against personal norms, not the distribution for the body, and thus there is no hypothetical limit on the number who can pass this criterion.
11. The elections of 1966, 1974, 1982 and 1986 are the biggest contributors to this pattern. Two of these, 1966 and 1982, notably, are mandate cancelling, reversing the party gains of an earlier mandate election.
12. And our two presidential year mandates, 1964 and 1980, were also big congressional wins for the president's party.
13. Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).
14. The perspective changes, however, under Krehbiel's 'Pivotal Politics' theory; Kieth Krehbiel, Pivotal Politics: A Theory of U.S. Lawmaking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Krehbiel notes that simple majorities do not normally prevail, that policy success under the institutions of American government require supermajorities to overcome blocking pivots beyond the simple majority. Thus our counterfactual analysis, which distinguishes cases which switch from one side of a simple majority to the other, would understate the mandate influence, which would be seen in overcoming the other blocking pivots as well.
15. David A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).
16. Charles O. Jones, Separate but Equal Branches, 2nd edn (New York: Chatham House, 1999).
17. Note that the CQ key votes are the key roll-call votes of the congressional session, not the key votes for each piece of legislation.
18. Sarah A. Binder, 'The Dynamics of Legislative Gridlock, 1947-96', American Political Science Review, 93 (1999), 519-34.
19. Robert S. Erikson, Michael B. MacKuen and James A. Stimson, The Macro Polity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
20. David R. Mayhew, Divided We Govern (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991).