2007 Conference Program - Midwest Political Science Association

39-5 THE POLITICS OF CONGRESS AND THE COURTS
(Co-sponsored with Judicial Politics, see 41-26)
Room Montrose 1, 7 th Floor, Fri at 9:50 am
Chair John P. Forren, Miami University
Paper Explaining the Bork Effect: Senate Confirmation Votes and
Electoral Politics
James A. Rydberg, University of Iowa
Robert McGrath, University of Iowa
Overview: This paper explains the increasingly ideological nature
of Supreme Court confirmation votes in terms of changing state
electoral competitiveness. Our theoretical approach allows us to
specify the underlying mechanism for the purported “Bork
Effect.”
Paper Ideology's Conditional Influence on Supreme Court
Confirmation Votes
Jonathan P. Day, University of Iowa
Overview: Ideology’s influence on Supreme Court confirmation
votes is conditioned upon the context in which the vote takes place
and the previous justice’s ideology in relation to the nominee’s
ideology is an important contextual variable influencing votes.
Paper Civility in Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings, 1955-2006
Harry C. Strine, IV, Bloomsburg University
Overview: Did Martha Alito shed crocodile tears at her husband’s
hearing or has the Judiciary Committee become more hostile to
Supreme Court Nominees? Using Bales’ Interaction Process
Analysis I perform a content analysis of these hearings from 1955-
2006.
Paper The Sources and Evidence of Temporal Variance in the Lower
Court Appointment Process: Establishing Periodic Regimes of
Appointment Events
Marcus E. Hendershot, University of Florida
Overview: This analysis looks at the potential source of temporal
variance in the lower court appointment process and looks to
competing internal and external hypotheses of this variance. It
then utilizes an extensive source of appointment events to evaluate
the potential source.
Disc. Matthew M. Schneider, Washington University, St. Louis
John P. Forren, Miami University
39-18 PARTY LEADERS: HILL STYLE AND HOME
STYLE
Room Suite 9-142, 9 th Floor, Fri at 9:50 am
Chair Linda L. Fowler, Dartmouth College
Paper An Historical Footnote: Remembering Richard Bolling
Richard F. Fenno, University of Rochester
Overview: An in-depth analysis of the career of Richard Bolling,
who was a leading member and student of the U.S. House in the
1960s and 1970s.
Paper Middleman or Middlewoman: Gender Dynamics of
Congressional Leadership Elections
Cindy Simon Rosenthal, University of Oklahoma
Overview: This paper explores how gender factors into
congressional elections since 1975 and analyzes the success of
282 leadership candidates through a gendered lens.
Paper Partisan Vote Gathering in the U.S. House: The Role of the
Minority
C. Lawrence Evans, College of William and Mary
Overview: This paper employs a unique new data set (records of
the private whip counts conducted by House Republican leaders
during 1975-80 and 1989-94) to address four key questions about
the evolving legislative role of the minority party.
Paper Strategic Party Leadership
Gregory Koger, University of Montana
Matthew Lebo, Stony Brook University
Overview: What makes a good leader? This paper posits that
legislators choose party leaders to advance their shared electoral
interests. We test the hypothesis that leader turnover is linked to
disappointing election results.
Disc. David W. Rohde, Duke University
39-19 CAREERS INSIDE CONGRESS AND BEYOND
Room Burnham 1, 7 th Floor, Fri at 9:50 am
Chair Matthew N. Green, Catholic University of America
Paper Congressional Caucuses and Party Leadership in the U.S.
House
Kate Carney, University of Oklahoma
Overview: Caucuses offer an alternative to the traditional avenues
to party leadership. This paper examines careers of freshman
members in the 98th - 106th Congresses to determine if caucus
leadership influences a member's career path to party leadership.
Paper Voluntary Retirement from the United States Congress: A
Bicameral Analysis
Karen Ramsey, George Washington University
Maeve Carey, George Washington University
Overview: Using an event history model, we examine retirement
patterns from the U.S. House and Senate, determining what factors
explain retirement trends and how they differ between the
chambers.
Disc. Larry Butler, Rowan University
40-3 EXAMINING LEGISLATIVE ELECTIONS AND
POLITICAL OUTCOMES
Room LaSalle 3, 7 th Floor, Fri at 9:50 am
Chair Craig Goodman, Texas Tech University
Paper Distributive Consequences of Unequal Participation
Jun Saito, Wesleyan University
Yusaku Horiuchi, Australian National University
Overview: Studies that tap the effect of turnout on pork suffer
from measurement errors because of an unobservable proportion
of voters who are not beneficiaries of pork. By using rainfall as an
instrument, we show the OLS estimates have a large downward
bias.
Paper Ideological Polarization and the Vanishing of Electoral
Margins
Jeffrey W. Ladewig, University of Connecticut
Stephen Napier, University of Connecticut
Overview: We theorize and test a model that hypothesizes that
legislators view their roll-call vote choices through a retrospective
lens of their past vote margins. We find that wider margins allow
legislators to show their true ideological colors.
Paper Congressional Campaign Rhetoric and Legislative Agendas
Tracy Sulkin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Overview: I develop and test a new agenda-based model of
campaign promise-keeping, defining it as the extent to which
candidates' issue appeals in campaigns serve as reliable signals
about their subsequent policy priorities in office.
Paper Estimating Legislators' Efficiency: Do Expensive and
Productive Go Together
Milena I. Neshkova, Indiana University
Alexander V. Borisov, Indiana University
Overview: To examine if the most "expensive" legislators are also
the most "productive" ones, we apply stochastic frontier analysis
to assess legislators' efficiency in their use of campaign money
and employ this measure to estimate their legislative output.
Paper Read My Lips: Senatorial Promises and Performance
Kristin L. Campbell, SUNY, Buffalo
James B. Cottrill, Santa Clara University
Overview: This paper proposes to examine the promises made by
27 successful Senate candidates across three elections (1998,
2000, and 2002) in an effort to further understand why politicians
attempt to fulfill some campaign promises and not others.
Disc. Craig Goodman, Texas Tech University
John Wilkerson, University of Washington
Page | 153