David Charles King

• Ph.D.
• Harvard University

This paper proposes that strategic concerns about negotiations strongly influence whom parties select to be legislative leaders. Leaders tilt more extreme than the typical party member. Hence, they can credibly threaten to let negotiations break down if they find proposed legislation personally unacceptable. Such threats move negotiations towards t...

A US Federal election in which candidates from two major political parties compete for the votes of those undecided voters in a state who usually do not vote in US elections is considered. A mathematical model for evaluating the expectation of the margin of votes to be received from such voters by either candidate as a result of the election campai...

Political parties have recently rediscovered grassroots tactics for voter mobilization. The only solid evidence for the effectiveness of such get out the vote (GOTV) tactics is based upon non-partisan field experiments that may not accurately capture the effectiveness of partisan campaign outreach. In order to address this lacuna, during the 2002 M...

We examine links between local diaspora communities and U.S. foreign policy by exploring the history and contingent power of Armenian-Americans in the United States. This geographically concentrated diaspora has had disproportionate influence over U.S. foreign policy with respect to Armenia and Azerbaijan, culminating in the passage of Section 907...

Polling data in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois media markets are examined before and after Vice President Albert Gore's August 2000 campaign trip down the Mississippi River. We advance the argument that campaign resources spent on local visits allow candidates to make it into several media cycles, and during this Mississippi River Trip, this had a s...

Recent large-scale field experiments of get out the vote (GOTV) drives have been non-partisan and may not accurately capture the effectiveness of partisan campaign outreach. In the 2002 Michigan gubernatorial election, a large field experiment across 14 state house districts evaluated the cost effectiveness of three mobilization technologies utiliz...

We report the results of an experiment involving 820 randomly sampled adults. Half heard about a female Republican candidate for Congress. The other half learned of an otherwise identical male candidate. Democrat and Independent voters were more likely to trust, think qualified, view as a leader, and vote for the female Republican (contrasted with...

This paper tracks the relationship between a congressional district's two-party competition and a member's fidelity to voter interests. Median voter theory leads one to expect that fairly "centrist" candidates will emerge from competitive two-party districts. The paper outlines a theory of selective participation by political extremists whose activ...

The Maxwell School's Government Performance Project rated the management successes of the 50 states in several areas, such as capital management, human resources and information technology in 1998 and 2000. Variability among the states was significant. Viewing the Maxwell School data as something to be explained, we focus on political institutions,...

In 2000, an intensely fought battle for the Republican nomination for an open seat in Arizona's second district found Susan Bitter Smith, the only woman in the race, finishing a distant third to Jeff Flake. At the start of the campaign Bitter Smith was the favorite. She had several years of experience on the local city council, the backing of the l...

Among political practitioners, there is conventional wisdom about the outcomes of critical and salient legislative votes. 'This vote,' we hear, ' will either win by a little or lose by a lot.' Real-world examples suggest coalition leaders purchase 'hip-pocket' votes and "if you need me" pledges, which are converted to favorable votes when they will...

For most bills in American legislatures, the issue of turf—or which committee has jurisdiction over a bill—can make all the difference. Turf governs the flow and fate of all legislation. In this innovative study, David C. King explains how jurisdictional areas for committees are created and changed in Congress. Political scientists have long ma...

The 104th Congress, the first in four decades to be Republican-controlled, may prove to have ushered in an era of party dominance by congressional Republicans, or to be a transitory aberration. Either way, the 104th is a watershed in congressional history. Using the theatre metaphor to characterize the actions of Congress and to help make the insti...

Jurisdictions are the defining characteristics of committee systems, and they are central in any discussions about the U. S. Congress; yet we know little about them. Where do committee property rights come from? Are they rigid? Are they flexible? I introduce a distinction between statutory jurisdictions (which are written in the House and Senate Ru...

To help inform discussion of the educational value of community service, we report results of an experiment in integrating service-learning into a large undergraduate political science course. Students in service-learning sections of the course were significantly more likely than those in the traditional discussion sections to report that they had...

With a sample of nearly 900 voluntary associations, we give a detailed account of what membership benefits are provided by interest groups, and we place these results in the context of a typology of groups. Using a multivariate analysis of membership inducements, we show that the pursuit of collective goods by groups is not always a mere “by-produc...

Nothing is more important to committee systems than jurisdictions--the ways that public problems are divided up. Jurisdictions can have a tremendous impact on the types of policies that emerge out of the U.S. Congress, yet political scientists have virtually ignored where jurisdictions come from and how they change. Scholars have fundamentally misc...

We estimate a model of House members' roll call voting decisions embodying some hypotheses about representation, including estimates of the influence of district opinion on broad collective issues relative to personal economic interests, of the effect of electoral security on constituency responsiveness, and of the difference in constituency and pa...

The U.S. Congress, center of power and money in Washington and the brunt of countless jokes, has seen 21 decades of social and technological change in America. Now comes the Internet, still in its infancy, less than a decade old. Is the Internet good for Congress and will it fundamentally change the ways that politicians run for office? If it is he...

Driven by the high cost of multi-stage probability samples for face-to-face surveys and the alarming difficulties associated with the meteoric rise in reliance on the cell phone, Internet surveys now abound. Internet surveys, usually relying on the ―opt-in‖ (volunteer) panel as the method of recruiting respondents, are far less costly than face-to-...

I use two groups of surveys; one survey was provided by the Pew Center for Research on People and the Press; Andrew Cooley and Julie Curtis compiled the second while students at the Kennedy School of Government. In addition to the fine work by Andrew Cooley and Julie Curtis, I thank the following people for either reading drafts of this paper or fo...