scholarly journals Legislative Capacity & Administrative Power Under Divided Polarization

Daedalus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 150 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Sean Farhang
Keyword(s):  
Regulatory Policy ◽  
Divided Government ◽  
Democratic Accountability ◽  
Bureaucratic Discretion ◽  
Party Polarization ◽  
Administrative Power ◽  
Legislative Agenda ◽  
Legislative Productivity ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Constitutional Legitimacy

Abstract Conventional wisdom holds that party polarization leads to legislative gridlock, which in turn disables congressional oversight of agencies and thus erodes their constitutional legitimacy and democratic accountability. At the root of this argument is an empirical claim that higher levels of polarization materially reduce legislative productivity as measured by the number of laws passed or the number of issues on the legislative agenda addressed by those laws, both of which are negatively associated with party polarization. By focusing on the content of statutes passed rather than their number, this essay shows that in the era of party polarization and divided government, Congress has actually 1) enacted an ever growing volume of significant regulatory policy (packaged into fewer laws); 2) increasingly employed implementation designs intended to limit bureaucratic and presidential power; and 3) legislated regulatory policy substance in greater detail (reducing bureaucratic discretion) when relying on litigation and courts as a supplement or alternative to bureaucracy. This essay thereby complicates, both empirically and normatively, the relationship between Congress and administrative power in the era of party polarization and divided government.

State Budgetary Delays in an Era of Party Polarization

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 259-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel A. Birkhead
Keyword(s):  
Divided Government ◽  
Budgetary Process ◽  
Party Polarization ◽  
American States ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship between state budgetary delays and party polarization. Although others have evaluated the influence of divided government on a state’s likelihood of passing a budget on time, the influence of party polarization has not been explored. Given the growing rate of party polarization in the American states, it is important to understand the implications that this trend has for the budgetary process. The first analysis in this article predicts if a budgetary delay will occur, and the second evaluates the factors that explain how long the stalemate continues when a delay occurs.

Competing Explanations of Split-ticket Voting in American National Elections

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANCO MATTEI ◽  
JOHN S. HOWES
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
National Elections ◽  
Congressional Voting ◽  
Party Polarization ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Candidate Evaluations ◽  
Electoral Expectations ◽  
The Relationship

In this article, the authors propose an extension to Fiorina's balancing model based on voters' electoral expectations and test this extension and several implications of the theory. The authors examine the observed pattern of ticket-splitting and find it less consistent with a balancing perspective than with an alternative approach stressing separation between presidential and congressional voting. They also address the relationship between party polarization and ticket-splitting; their results indicate that the occurrence of split ballots does not increase with polarization. A further test identifies respondents with both the sophistication and the motive to engage in balancing behavior. According to this analysis, balancing considerations influence, at most, the very small group of voters whose sophistication and electoral expectations give them the tools and the incentive to pursue balance with a split ballot. Ticket-splitting appears to result far more from incumbency and cross-pressured voters holding candidate evaluations at odds with their partisan learnings.

Contemporary Change: Liberalization and Epistemic Modernization

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Hess
Keyword(s):  
Case History ◽  
Regulatory Policy ◽  
Scientific Field ◽  
Industrial Change ◽  
Research Needs ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
Reflexive Modernization ◽  
Double Movement ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Opening Up

The chapter discusses the problem of developing a historical sociological perspective on science, technology, and social movements during the period of the 1980s through 2015. It argues in favor of a historical dynamic based on liberalization and reflexive modernization that is similar to Polanyi’s double movement. The dynamic is formulated specifically for technological and industrial change based on the relationship between the liberalization of regulatory policy and the epistemic modernization of policy and knowledge production. Epistemic modernization involves the opening up of the research agendas of the scientific field to the concerns of undone science and the research needs of industrial transition movements and counterpublics. The theoretical framework is applied to a case history on the movement that supports greater access to and more research on cancer treatment based on complementary and alternative medicine. Both liberalization and epistemic modernization processes are documented for the movement.

1. The historical origins of the trust

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
JE Penner
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
The Core ◽  
Administrative Power ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Historical Origins

Titles in the Core Text series take the reader straight to the heart of the subject, providing focused, concise, and reliable guides for students at all levels. This chapter traces the historical roots of the trust. The law of trusts is the offspring of a certain English legal creature known as ‘equity’. Equity arose out of the administrative power of the medieval Chancellor, who was at the time the King’s most powerful minister. The nature of equity’s jurisdiction and its ability to provide remedies unavailable at common law, the relationship between equity and the common law and the ‘fusion’ of law and equity, and equity’s creation of the use, and then the trust, are discussed.

Equilibrium, Demoi-cracy, and Delegation in the Crisis of European Integration

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter L. Lindseth
Keyword(s):  
European Integration ◽  
Public Law ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
The Public ◽  
Work Breaks ◽  
Administrative Governance ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Constitutional Legitimacy ◽  
Micro Foundations

As my work has argued previously, European integration enjoys an “administrative, not constitutional” legitimacy. This view is in obvious tension with the deeply-rooted conceptual framework—what we might call the “constitutional, not international” perspective—that has dominated the public-law scholarship of European integration over many decades. Although the alternative presented in my work breaks from that traditional perspective, we should not view it as an all-or-nothing rejection of everything that has come before it. The administrative alternative can be seen, rather, as providing legal-historical micro-foundations for certain theories that also emerged out of the traditional perspective even as they too are in tension with it. I am referring in particular to Joseph Weiler's classic notion of European “equilibrium”—now updated as “constitutional tolerance”—as well as Kalypso Nicolaïdis's more recently developed theory of European “demoi-cracy” on which this article focuses in particular. The central idea behind the “administrative, not constitutional” interpretation—the historical-constructivist principal-agent framework rooted in delegation, as well as the balance demanded between supranational regulatory power and national democratic and constitutional legitimacy— directly complements both theories. The administrative alternative suggests how the relationship between national principals and supranational agents is one of “mediated legitimacy” rather than direct control. It has its origins in the evolution of administrative governance in relation to representative government over the course of the twentieth century (indeed before). By drawing on the normative lessons of that history—notably the need for some form of national oversight as well as enforcement of outer constraints on supranational delegation in order to preserve national democratic and constitutional legitimacy in a recognizable sense—this article serves an additional purpose. It suggests how theories of European equilibrium and demoi-cracy might be translated into concrete legal proposals for a more sustainable form of integration over time—a pressing challenge in the context of the continuing crisis of European integration.

scholarly journals Building a Conservative State: Partisan Polarization and the Redeployment of Administrative Power

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (02) ◽  
pp. 453-469
Author(s):  
Nicholas F. Jacobs ◽  
Desmond King ◽  
Sidney M. Milkis
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
State Spending ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Partisan Polarization ◽  
Administrative Power ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Roll Back

It is commonplace to equate the arrival of a new conservative administration in Washington, DC, with the “rolling back” of the federal activities. We disagree with this conventional perspective, and seek to demonstrate that the equation of conservative Republicanism and retrenchment elides a critical change in the relationship between party politics and State power—a relationship that Donald Trump seems determined to nurture. Drawing on primary research, we argue that partisanship in the United States is no longer a struggle over the size of the State; rather it is a contest to control national administrative power. Since the late 1960s, conservative administrations have sought to redeploy rather than dismantle or roll back state power. Through “redeployment,” conservative presidents have sustained previous levels of State spending or State activity, but in a way reflecting a new administration’s ideology.

Gridlock in the Government of the United States: Influence of Divided Government and Veto Players

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manabu Saeki
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Veto Players ◽  
Divided Government ◽  
Substantial Impact ◽  
Government Effectiveness ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
Party Control ◽  
The Government ◽  
Legislative Productivity

David Mayhew’s Divided We Govern significantly challenged the conventional wisdom of the adversarial effect of divided government on government effectiveness in the United States. While the post-Mayhewian literature has been centred on legislative productivity as a measure of gridlock, gridlock is here defined as an ‘inability to change policy’. In this study, the preferences of the legislators, such as the filibuster, override and House median veto players are plotted in Euclidean space. The analysis focuses on the influence of the area of the winset, which is an intersection overlapped by the veto players’ indifference curves. There is a substantial impact of the area of the winset on the change in policy output point, which is measured by the ADA scores and by Poole’s Mean Winning Coordinate. Yet divided government has marginal or no effect on policy swing. The conclusion is that the preferences of veto players, but not party control of the government, have a substantial impact on gridlock in the United States.

scholarly journals Perceptions of elites and (asymmetric) sorting

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205316801877709 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas T. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Feedback Loop ◽  
Panel Study ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Party Polarization ◽  
The Relationship

Conventional wisdom suggests that citizens who recognize party polarization exhibit well-sorted preferences. Curiously, however, this extant research has not grappled sufficiently with how pervasive perceptual biases might moderate the relationship between perceptions of elites and sorting. In this manuscript, I show that perceived out-group dissimilarity affects sorting, albeit in an asymmetric manner: perceived out-group dissimilarity corresponds to greater sorting for persons with right-leaning identities compared to those with left-leaning ones. I then analyze the 1992–1996 ANES Panel Study and find that these patterns mostly hold, with one caveat: sorting also shapes perceptions of out-group dissimilarity. These findings offer preliminary evidence of the existence of a feedback loop between perceptions of elites and sorting.

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