Does partisanship affect the local budget process? This study examines the effects of partisanship on the local budget process in two cities in Florida, Cocoa and Rockledge. According to the literature, the effects of partisanship are present at the national level, while at the state level, these effects diminish due to legal requirements for balanced budgets and/or factors related to the state of the economy. This study reveals that evidently, partisanship effects diminish even further at the local level. Based on surveys administered to council members and staff, this study attempts to examine the conduct of the local budget process, the relationship between partisanship and budgetary priorities, and the influence on the budget process by citizens and interest groups. Further, budget documents from 1988 to 2010 are analyzed to examine the effects of partisanship using population, unemployment, and crime as controls. Survey findings suggest that budget priorities are very similar for Republicans and Democrats at the local level; in addition, after reviewing three budget items, community development, police, fire, and also millage rates, partisan effects are found to be minimal. Overall, however, it appears that the municipal budget process in Cocoa and Rockledge is not impacted by partisanship.

Why have group-party alliances become more common since the mid-twentieth century? This dissertation employs both qualitative and statistical tools to address the puzzle of contemporary special interest partisanship. After tracing partisanship across several measures, I develop a continuum of group-party relationships, running from fluid, unstructured interactions (akin to political pluralism) to highly institutionalized alliances (as we might see in a firm). Drawing on pluralist scholarship and theories of firm formation and evolution, I explore the costs and benefits of different arrangements, and explain why we might expect to see movement along the continuum over time. On the one hand, pluralism offers flexibility to parties and groups, and alliances have little value when parties are too weak to discipline their members in Congress. On the other, institutionalized alliances offer significant efficiency gains, which are especially valuable during periods of growth. I argue that changes in group-party relations stem from the growth of national party organizations over the second half of the twentieth century, which increased the value of group resources and intensified parties' need for efficiency. Until this period, parties were weak on the national level and strong on the state and local levels, and patronage was the primary currency of politics, leaving little room for issues in political competition. The New Deal's historic expansion of federal power disrupted this balance, temporarily strengthening local parties by offering new sources of patronage, while also sparking gradual, interconnected processes that would ultimately undermine machine power--most notably, the growth of groups and the rise of issue politics as a site of electoral competition. Realizing the economies of scale necessary to build strong national parties required movement away from pluralism into more structured, long-term relationships. Moreover, in order for the new site of competition to help Republicans build a coalition to compete with the long-dominant New Deal Democrats, distinct issue positions were necessary. The result of this party-building process is a pattern of group-party alliances quite unlike the bipartisan relations V.O. Key, David Truman, and others observed in the mid-twentieth century.

A key expectation of elections is that voters hold elected officials to account for their performance in office. A contradiction exists in the literature between those who believe voters are incapable of exercising accountability and those who believe voters are successfully able to do so. This thesis addresses this contradiction and presents four empirical case studies in which I test the conditions under which voters exercise accountability. In order to explore these conditions I focus on situations in which partisan voters in the US receive a performance signal that directly contradicts their partisan loyalty. I refer to these voters as cross-pressured partisans. In the thesis I examine who these voters are and how they behave at election time. I find that partisans are responsive to signals about the quality of economic management of the incumbent government and that candidate competence matters at the local level. I find that the electoral response to corruption is more mixed. Although some partisans punish their party in light of a corruption scandal, corruption also depresses turnout and a lab experiment shows that voters do not punish candidates who embezzle funds if the candidate shares their group identity. The thesis finds that three factors moderate the extent to which partisan voters hold their own party to account: (1) individual voter characteristics; (2) the electoral context and; (3) the type of government performance. First, partisan voters with strong levels of affiliation to a party are less likely to exercise accountability whereas those with moderate levels are most likely to do so. Second, if the partisan stakes of an election are high, democratic accountability is low. Third, although partisan voters exercise accountability in the domain of economic management and candidate competence, the electoral response to corruption is more mixed. The thesis shows that there are many partisans who are conflicted between their loyalty to their party and their evaluations of incumbent performance. Under certain conditions this conflict incites behavioural change at election time. Partisans are therefore not incapable of holding their preferred candidate or party to account for their performance in office, but neither should they always be expected to do so.

No description available.

<p>I develop and justify a measure of polarization based on pairwise differences between and within groups, which improves on previous approaches in its ability to account for multiple dimensions and an arbitrary number of partitions. I apply this measure to a roll-call based ideological mapping of U.S. legislators to show that while the contemporary Congress is polarized relative to mid-century levels, the current state is not historically unprecedented.</p><p>I then estimate the ideology of public opinion using survey respondent thermometer evaluations of political elites and population subgroups. I find that party affiliation is polarizing in this space, but that alternate partitions of the electorate, along racial, educational, and other socio-demographic lines, are de-polarized.</p><p>Finally, I estimate a two-dimensional latent space based on social identity trait co-occurrence. I show that positions in this space are predictive of survey respondent ideology, partisanship, and voting behavior. Further, I show that when conceived in this way, we do observe a polarization of the social space over the last half-century of American politics.</p> / Dissertation

abstract: A large amount of research examines the effect of partisan polarization on the institution of Congress, yet we know remarkably little about this political phenomenon’s precise effect on the political behavior of the American electorate. Some scholars argue that polarization is healthy for democracy because it allows political elites to send clear cues to the mass public, but other scholars postulate that polarization is bad for democracy. Decades of research on voter turnout resulted in a vast accumulation of knowledge on the subject. However, scholars must pay greater attention to data collection and measurement strategies because the prevalent technique to quantify voter turnout artificially deflates participation rates. I take two paths to uncover the effects of partisanship on the decision to vote. From the micro perspective, I utilize a variety of partisanship measures based on survey data. From the aggregate perspective, I argue that calculating voter turnout based on the voting eligible population (VEP) is a superior measurement strategy to other techniques. I adoopt a VEP measure of voter turnout for state-wide races (1994-2010). The results suggest that polarization is an important factor that increases voter turnout at both the individual and aggregate levels. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Political Science 2016

This dissertation analyzes the trading effects and the politics of antidumping. The first essay empirically examines the influence of partisanship on antidumping. I show that an increase in the leftist orientation of the government makes labor intensive industries less likely to file an antidumping petition. I also demonstrate that the increase in the leftist orientation of the government is associated with an increase in the likelihood of an affirmative antidumping outcome for the petitions of labor intensive industries. The second essay investigates the effect of past exporting relationships of the firms, whose products are targeted by antidumping duties, on their export flows to alternative markets. My estimations show that facing an antidumping duty on a product leads to a 18% increase in the exports of the firm for that product to the alternative countries where the firms previously exported the same product and a 8% increase to the countries where the firms exported another product. On the contrary, I fail to find a significant effect of antidumping duties on the exports of the particular product to third countries to which the firm did not export before. Further, I show that a firm’s probability to start exporting the duty imposed product in a different destination increases by 8-10% if the firm already exported another product to that destination. However, I find no such evidence for the countries to which the firm did not export before. The third essay empirically analyzes the effect of potential antidumping claims, resulting from an antidumping investigation in the domestic market, on the quality of exported products to the target countries. My findings suggest that retaliation threats increase the quality of firms’ shipments for the named industries’ products to the target countries by 11%. This effect is also significantly increasing in the share of the exports of the named industries’ products shipped to the target country in the firms’ total exports. Further, I show that this effect is 4 % higher for the exporters serving the developed countries and 3% higher for ones serving the heavy antidumping users.

No description available.

This thesis seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the extent and use of public inquiries appointed by the Commonwealth government since federation. Given the increased incidence in public inquiries since the 1970s, particular attention is given to assessing inquiries during this period. The thesis develops a clear definition of public inquiries to better identify the number established and to distinguish them from other advisory institutions and to allow more accurate comparison of their use by different governments over extended timeframes. The thesis addresses a number of key issues concerning public inquiries such as the reasons for their appointment, their roles and functions in the political system, their powers of investigation, processes of operation, their different organisational forms and their impact on policy development. In addition, the thesis seeks to explain both the long term use of public inquiries in Australia, and in particular their increased incidence since the 1970s. Supported by new data, and a more rigorous definition of public inquiries, the thesis identifies trends in the number and type of public inquiries appointed, their use by different governments, the range of issues investigated, the processes employed and the changing composition of their memberships. The thesis proposes that an important means of explaining the continuing appointment of inquiries is their intrinsic 'publicness' - their public appointment, external membership, temporary nature, open processes, and public reporting arrangements. This 'publicness' has given public inquiries a particular standing and legitimacy in the political system that for a variety of reasons, other institutions are increasingly unable to provide. Other issues concerning public inquiry appointment such as the effect of government partisanship, the impact of the electoral cycle, and the political motivations of governments are also assessed. A number of theories such as public choice are examined in relation to explaining inquiry appointment and found to have limited application in providing an overall explanation of inquiry use and their functions. These different issues are analysed by examination of many individual inquiries and supplemented by in depth assessment of three clusters of case studies. The case studies cover seven inquiries of different types and powers appointed over a twenty year period by both Labor and Coalition governments into a range of different fields including public sector reform, allegations of corruption and maladministration and financial deregulation. Each set of case studies examines why the inquiries were appointed, their classification and type, the processes employed, the form and content of their reports, and their policy impact. The thesis concludes that in examining why public inquiries are appointed and their roles in the political system, they need to be assessed not just by the effectiveness of their processes or the quality of their advice. These are important, but alone are not sufficient in explaining the persistent use of inquiries by all governments and their proliferation since the 1970s. The thesis contends that it is the 'publicness' of inquiries which distinguishes them from other advisory bodies and gives inquiries particular standing in the Australian political system to be perceived to be able to legitimately investigate and advise on a wide of issues. Despite the growth of other advisory bodies in recent times, public inquiries have continued to be appointed in increasing numbers since the early 1970s regardless of the government in power and therefore need to be seen less as an aberration of the Australian political system and more as an important, if often understudied, component. Future research areas recommended include the need for greater comparative analysis of their use with other Westminster democracies such as the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand.

The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 made the production of an annual comprehensive budgetary framework the central focus of the federal budget process. Before 1974, the budget process had allowed legislation from each of the revenue committees and each of the appropriations subcommittees to come to the floor separately. Congress judged the merits of individual programs without considering the overall budget. The 1974 budget act changed the organizational ethos of the budget process from incremental change to comprehensive review and from fragmented, ad hoc decision making to coordinated decision making. It helped sort members into ideologically homogenous groups by transforming many battles over separate policy priorities into one grand battle over the biggest question in American politics: What is the role of government? The 1974 shift to comprehensive budgeting, along with subsequent additional controls on budget practices, has magnified and accelerated the effects of the many polarizing forces that have characterized the last 40 years of American politics. With this conclusion come unanswered questions regarding the merits of a distinct two-party system, as well as the potential need for comprehensive budgeting despite its political challenges.