Brian Gaines

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Traditionally, legislative committees have been regarded as quite unimportant in the UK. Some scholars contend that recent reforms have substantially increased the powers of select committees, rendering them genuinely important to policy and the scrutiny of government; others see little sign of change. We examine House of Commons select committees...

While theories of committees in the U.S. Congress can continue to play a central role in the still-growing comparative study of committees, they require careful, frequent modification. Moreover, more fruitful study of committees may require a wider framework, recognising more fully that committees are institutions embedded in wider social structure...

Proving that legislative committees really matter is not simple. The assembled papers aim to demonstrate fruitful paths to analysing when committees influence policy, what they can and should do, and how to detect their importance to the political process.

Advocates of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) promise that it can deliver plurality electoral rule (“first past the post”) for presidential elections, at the national level, without amending the Constitution or abolishing the Electoral College. They also contend that the plan has seen bipartisan support and will pass on the stre...

Gaines and Taagepera [(2013) How to operationalize two-partyness. Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties, 23(4), pp. 387–404] propose two indices of two-party competition for district-level data, both of which are alleged to be flawed. The case against them rests mainly on whether or not elections with one dominant party should be regarded...

Because of the prominence of Duverger's law, a great deal of work has focused on assessing whether or not given election outcomes can be regarded as exhibiting two-party competition. The most common metric for assessment is whether the effective number of parties is close to two. We introduce two statistics that better measure conformity to two-par...

In Illinois and Texas, senate elections return members to serve terms of different length. Because term length schedules are randomized, these states provide a natural experiment. Cross-sectional comparison of chambers requires statistical controls for myriad factors that distinguish cases (chambers or periods). These two chambers, by contrast, pro...

Social scientists widely regard the random-assignment experiment as the gold standard for making causal inferences about the world. We argue that it can be improved. For situations in which self-selection and heterogeneity of treatment effects exist, an alternative experimental design that retains random assignment to treatment or control and suppl...

The 2000 presidential election made various electoral institutions—from ballot format to voting mechanisms—suddenly promi-nent in public debate. One institution that garnered little attention, but nonetheless affected the outcome, was apportionment. A few commentators, looking ahead to 2004, noticed that Bush would have won more comfortably had the...

Neighborhood context could condition voting decisions, but systematic investigation of whether (how) the traits of a given locale shape individual voting decisions is sparse. We explore the possibility that local partisan balance affects turnout and the use of convenience voting in particular. Using comprehensive registered-voter lists from four sw...

In the brief span of only a few years, the Facebook social networking site has emerged as a central forum for social interaction and communication. The fact that Facebook members may well be rich in “virtual social capital” could be important news from the standpoint of political engagement and mobilization, and, more broadly, in terms of the conte...

Scholars assume that citizens perform better when they know pertinent facts. Factual beliefs, however, become relevant for political judgments only when people interpret them. Interpretations provide opportunities for partisans to rationalize their existing opinions. Using panel studies, we examine whether and how partisans updated factual beliefs,...

Benford's law is seeing increasing use as a diagnostic tool for isolating pockets of large datasets with irregularities that deserve closer inspection. Popular and academic accounts of campaign finance are rife with tales of corruption, but the complete dataset of transactions for federal campaigns is enormous. Performing a systematic sweep is extr...

Benford's law is seeing increasing use as a diagnostic tool for isolating pockets of large datasets with irregularities that deserve closer inspection. Popular and academic accounts of campaign finance are rife with tales of corruption, but the complete dataset of transactions for federal campaigns is enormous. Performing a systematic sweep is extr...

Scholars of political behavior increasingly embed experimental designs in opinion surveys by randomly assigning respondents alternative versions of questionnaire items. Such experi-ments have major advantages: they are simple to implement and they dodge some of the difficulties of making inferences from conventional survey data. But survey experime...

Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8.4 (2005) 699-701 In advance of the 1996 and 2000 elections, Yale University Press published primers on the Electoral College by Lawrence Longley and Neal Peirce, long-time foes of the institution. Each book opened with an amusing "fantasy," portraying chaos in the aftermath of the upcoming election as a consequence of th...

Scholars have recently highlighted a critical, but previously neglected, facet of racially discriminatory public policies—such policies may be motivated by either economic or psychological forces. That is, racially discriminatory policy may be the result of self-interest and competition in the face of scarcity or prejudices and affects based on gro...

By examining connections between recent federal and state elections in Germany, we evaluate whether German elections seem to be maintaining some interesting preunification patterns broadly reminiscent of American elections, even as the re-absorption of the East has made the German party system more chaotic. Regional partisan stability does persist...

We argue that political science theory can provide insight into the information available to market actors about the partisan and policy consequences of political events and, in turn, how markets process this information. In the absence of a predictable political equilibrium (i.e., where no equilibria exist or where there are multiple equilibrium),...

We examine the limits of ecological inference methods by focusing on the case of split-ticket voting. Burden and Kimball (1998) report that, by using the King estimation procedure for inferring individual-level behavior from aggregate data, they are the first to produce accurate estimates of split-ticket voting rates in congressional districts. How...

We argue that political science theory can provide insight into the information available to market actors about the partisan and policy consequences of political events and, in turn, how markets process this information. In the absence of a predictable political equilibrium (i.e., where no equilibria exist or where there are multiple equilibrium),...

There has been much debate over whether the United States has changed in any lasting and fundamental manners since September 11, 2001. Immediately following the carnage, editorialists and pundits proclaimed a national loss of innocence, the end of American exceptionalism, the new globalization of terror, and other cataclysmic shifts. One year later...

How do domestic political institutions affect the outcomes of international trade negotiations? Specifically, are the aggregate trade barriers agreed upon by a democratic pair lower than those by a pair composed of a democracy and an autocracy? I revisit these important questions by highlighting some problematic aspect of the analysis by Mansfield,...

Introduction In recent years, the availability of online source material and online papers has increased instructors' concerns regarding plagiarism in the classroom. Many instructors do not realize, however, that the digital revolution has also created a niche for fast and (at least somewhat) reliable plagiarism-detection software.

We e xtend Collie's "Universalism and the Parties in the U.S. House o f Representatives, 1921-80" (1988). Detecting a strongly negative correlation between the time series of universalism and partisanship in roll- call votes for the 67 th through 96th US Houses, Collie concluded that consensus and partisanship a re a lternative, rival means of orga...

Prior to its publication, Gary Cox's Making Votes Count was widely and eagerly anticipated. (Indeed, some years ago, I received a referee report dismissing my submission as unnecessary because superior analysis would eventually appear in Cox's then forthcoming manuscript.) Upon its release in 1998, the book was instantly lauded: it collected multip...

Duverger's law is an unusually simple and specific elaboration on exactly how political institutions “matter”: It proposes that plurality rule elections result in two-party competition. Canada is commonly thought to violate the law at the national level, but to match its predictions at the district level, and thus not to constitute a genuine counte...

Burden and Kimball (1998) report that, by using the King estimation procedure for inferring individual-level behavior from aggregate data, they are the first to produce accurate estimates of split-ticket voting rates in congressional districts. There are, however, several reasons to doubt that the King estimation procedure does, in fact, produce ac...

British elections are traditionally understood to be dominated by parties and leaders. Local candidates are taken to be mere ciphers, whose impact on the outcome is negligible. Recently, however, several works have documented a change in MP behavior. Today's members do more constituency service than did their predecessors, in the belief that this w...

To evaluate theories about the impact of electoral law on party systems, it is useful to have an indicator of exactly how many parties are competitive in a given election. Several formulae convert the vote shares won by multiple parties into single number-of-parties indices. While these formulae are typically applied to national vote shares, it is...

The strength of political parties is taken to be one central difference between the political systems of the United States and the United Kingdom. We analyze defection from party line voting within the British Labour Party in the House of Commons between 1974 and 1979 to suggest that this dichotomy is overdrawn. In fact, the analysis shows that the...

Since the seminal studies of Stouffer and McClosky it has become accepted that political elites are markedly more committed to civil liberties and democratic values than is the public at large; so much so that political elites should be recognized, in McClosky's words, as ‘the major repositories of the public conscience and as carriers of the Creed...

two anonymous referees. Chad Atkinson and Sang-Hyun Lee provided research assistance.

∗ The passage of Proposition 198, which brought the blanket primary to California, was in plain defiance of the preferences and advice of most elites, including, notably, both of the major political parties. In this chapter, we briefly trace the chronology of primary elections in the Golden State, with an emphasis on how they have been in- tertwine...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Too often, a gulf separates academic political science and popular commentary on politics by journalists, practitioners, and interested citizens. Both scholars and pundits are keenly interested in what is required of citizens by democracies, and whether the public is informed and interested enough to play its part. Academic research can seem narrow...

Burden and Kimball (1998) report that, by using the King estimation procedure for inferring individual-level behavior from aggregate data, they are the first to produce accurate estimates of split-ticket voting rates in congressional districts. There are, however, several reasons to doubt that their analysis produced accurate cross-level inferences...

Gordon and Smith (2004) do a great service by introducing innovative and creative quantitative methods that incorporate information from qualita-tive sources. It is nevertheless important to examine the conditions under which the proposed estimators will be useful in practice. These condi-tions prove to be surprisingly restrictive: virtually all of...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1995. Submitted to the Department of Political Science. Copyright by the author.