Presidential VS Parliamentary Presidential VS Parliamentary ElectionsElections

Accountability, Divided Government and Presidential Coattails.

QuestionsQuestions What are the consequences of divided

government , are they significant, should we be concerned? Is there evidence that divided party control of the Congress and White House hinders budgeting, lawmaking and congressional investigations are weak.

How do we measure the consequences of divided government that are causing large deficits, late budgets, contentious investigations, and a deadlock in law making?

Is it right that unaccountable state representatives can veto 55% of bills?

QuestionsQuestions Is the inefficiency and non-accountability that

critics have associated with divided party control of the presidency and the Congress so severe that America is undergoing a crisis of governance?

How does not acting under the party label effect accountability?

How does the issue of fixed terms/ incumbency effect accountability?

In the parliamentary system (e.g UK and Germany) is it right the executive can be held accountable for events which perhaps are not their fault?

Presidential CoattailsPresidential Coattails

• The coattail effect is the tendency for a popular political party leader to attract votes for other candidates of the same party in an election.

• For example congressmen are voted into office “on the coattails” of the president

Two methods to measure presidential coattails in the House elections

• Direct model: House votes are determined directly by presidential votes plus unrelated effects.

• The simultaneous determination model - votes for both offices are simultaneous results of national issues

Coattails- what this means for government

• Presidents can exploit the fact that most congressmen wish for re election or advancement to higher office

• This is dependent on the anticipated behaviour of the electorate

• Extensive coattail voting thus enables the president to assemble relatively durable legislative coalitions

Legislative cooperation

• A president with long coattails is likely to have a large legislative contingent to work with.

• The incentive effect: If a member of Congress is convinced that the president is popular in their district and that his constituent’s congressional votes are likely to be tied to their presidential votes, then that member will want to be known as a supporter of the president

• Entering power on the back of presidents means Entering power on the back of presidents means that coattails lead to cooperationthat coattails lead to cooperation

• Presidential leadership is the key to executive/ legislative cooperation

• Lyndon Johnson: (landslide victory in many congressional districts = signal BUTBUT When the president’s program no longer commanded was no longer popular or lacked attention and support, legislative cooperation evaporated)

• Overall the extent of coattail voting has declined steadily and drastically over the past decades.

Divided GovernmentDivided Government• Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial

branches• Checks and balances - protects democracy VS

slow government• Lincon ‘ I have been told that I am on the road

to hell, but I had no idea that it was just a mile down the road with a Dome on it’.

• The lack of partisan consensus between the president and the Congress stems from several electoral factors

Why government is divided PARTIES• Party organizations have lost power from

1946 to present -how candidates run under their label.

• The public may hold ideological views, but these views are not consistent with what parties they support (Flanigan and Zingale 1991).

• Pivotal voter theorem

Why government is divided • INCUMBANTS• PERSONALITY• Carter had unified government, yet experienced

serious opposition in Congress • Divided government during the Nixon and Ford

presidencies produced some of the most important domestic legislation since World War II

• A synthesis of these varying explanations is necessary in order to understand the reasons why we have divided government.

Do Voters Purposefully Act To Attract Divided Government?

• Divided government is more likely when voters are sophisticated and conditionally sincerer rather than naive or unconditionally sincere

Midterm Compared To Full Term Elections: how these effects divide government

• Midterm losses can be explained by strategic voting on the part of voters fuelled by uncertainty about the outcome of presidential elections

• Electoral balancing

Germany• Federal policy outcomes are a compromise

between the policy preferences of the parties controlling the Bundestag (the lower chamber) and the parties controlling the Bundesrat (the upper chamber)

• In Germany, one therefore never observes the kind of divided government so common in the USA, with the executive controlled by one party and the House controlled by the other.

Germany• In contrast to the American Senate, the

Bundesrat is not elected by the people. It is composed of the representatives of state governments

• The Bundestag and Bundesrat was described by Scharpf as: the ‘joint-decision trap’.

• Middle-of-the-road voters will have an incentive to use state elections to balance against the federal government

Germany

• The central observable implication of this argument is that under unified Government, we expect strong midterm losses for the party coalition controlling the Bundestag. Under divided government, in contrast, voters will have little incentive to engage in electoral balancing

•The graph clearly shows the impact of unified and divided government on midterm losses. •Under divided government, we do not witness any systematic midterm loss. •Under conditions of divided government, parties that are members of the federal coalition government on average neither win nor lose votes in state elections compared with the previous state election, regardless of when the state election takes place in the federal election cycle. • Only under conditions of unified government do we observe a systematic midterm loss•The conditional distribution of the changes in party vote shares shifts to the left of zero over the whole course of the federal election cycle, indicating (substantial) losses for the parties that are members of the federal coalition government. The graph suggests that such parties face a median midterm loss of about three to four percentage points

QuestionsQuestions What are the consequences of divided

government , are they significant, should we be concerned? Is there evidence that divided party control of the Congress and White House hinders budgeting, lawmaking and congressional investigations are weak.

How do we measure the consequences of divided government that is causing large deficits, late budgets, contentious investigations, and a deadlock in law making?

Is it right that unaccountable state representatives can veto 55% of bills?

QuestionsQuestions Is the inefficiency and non-accountability that

critics have associated with divided party control of the presidency and the Congress so severe that America is undergoing a crisis of governance?

How does not acting under the party label effect accountability?

How does the issue of fixed terms/ incumbency effect accountability?

In the parliamentary system (e.g UK and Germany) is it right the executive can be held accountable for events which perhaps are not their fault?