Political scientists have long considered ideology, partisanship, and constituency in determining how members of the United States Congress make decisions. Meanwhile, psychologists have held that personality traits play central roles in decision-making. Here, we bridge these literatures by...

Individuals who are more sensitive to negative outcomes from error are more likely to provide nonresponses in surveys. We argue Neurotics’ sensitivity to negative outcomes leads them to avoid gathering costly information and forming/reporting opinions about stimuli. Using data from the 2014...

Political scientists have long considered the primacy of ideology, party affiliation, and constituency preferences in determining how members of the U.S. Congress make decisions. At the same time, psychologists have held that individuals' immutable personality traits play a central role in...

Although research during the Vietnam era suggested that the political attitudes of American veterans were not significantly different from those of the public at large, more recent studies argue that this may not be the case for veterans of the all-volunteer military. Thus far, however, the...

The presidential primary constituency is a relatively understudied subject in the public and rhetorical presidency literature, and little is known about the strategies presidents use to maintain this group. In recent years presidents have increasingly communicated with core supporters through...

The Bush and Obama administrations have complemented their capacity to make public appeals by creating grassroots lobbying organizations with the explicit purpose of mobilizing supporters to pressure Congress to pass presidential policy priorities. This paper advances the study of organizations...

Abstract: The Bush and Obama administrations have added to their capacity to make public appeals by creating grassroots lobbying organizations with the expressed purpose of mobilizing supporters to pressure Congress to pass presidential policy priorities. This paper advances the study of...

Perennial gridlock in Washington has led to many political and media elites calling for an end to the filibuster. But would it matter? In this paper, I derive a series of legislative bargaining models and show that eliminating the filibuster would likely affect gridlock in a narrow set of...

Theories of parties in Congress contend that one tool that party leaders possess to induce loyalty among rank-and-file members is control over committee assignments, but conventional tests of this linkage have failed to distinguish loyalty from simply voting one's preferences in accordance with...

Measuring party loyalty (and party effects, more broadly) in roll call voting has long been a contentious matter in the study of legislative behavior. While techniques for measurement in this arena are numerous, most of them suffer from a fatal flaw: they improperly (or insufficiently) separate...