Theories of parties and lawmaking typically require measures of legislators' preferences for empirical analysis. However, existing methods for generating estimates of these preferences presume that legislators care only about their own policy preferences and not about their constituency or party...

Scholars have long tried to understand the conditions under which actors choose to use violent versus non-violent means to settle disputes, and many argue that violence is more likely in weakly-institutionalized settings. Yet, there is little evidence showing that increases in state capacity...

In this paper, we show that the migrations of millions of Okies from the central plains to California has a demonstrable effect on political outcomes to this day, even after accounting for other relevant geographic and demographic factors. After demonstrating this pattern at the electoral level,...

The author analyzes the voting behavior of legislators in the Congresses of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. He shows that the occupation of Confederate Congressional districts by Federal troops led legislators to abandon their previous voting behavior and instead...

Scholars of Congress and other legislative institutions have posited that majority agenda-setting is one of the primary mechanisms by which a majority party demonstrates its power over legislation. However, this line of work has difficulty explaining why the floor median would delegate such...

Many standard models of political institutions frame outcomes as a function of the preferences of key decisionmakers. However, these models, and the empirical analyses they inspire, typically assume that decisionmakers can infer the identities and ideological locations of decisionmakers without...

Previous studies of presidential appointments have consistently found that presidents place their most competent appointees into agencies responsible for policy issues high on their agendas. Using a survey with an embedded experimental manipulation, we examine whether members of the public, when...

We analyze presidential appointee positions subject to Senate-confirmation (PAS) without a confirmed appointee in office. These “vacant” positions are byproducts of American constitutional design, shaped by the interplay of institutional politics. Using a novel data-set, we analyze PAS...

While the importance of political appointments is a matter of consensus, theorists and empiricists generally focus on different considerations, such as ideology and confirmation duration respectively. More recently, there have been efforts to integrate empirical and theoretical scholarship but,...

Scholars have seemingly established that constituents hold “out of step” legislators electorally accountable. Empirically, however, such claims have not been based on measures placing districts and perceptions of legislators’ preferences in the same space. We remedy this using the 2006 and...