Ryan J. Vander Wielen

• Ph.D.
• Temple University

The extent to which legislators pursue their privately held preferences in office has important implications for representative democracy and is exceedingly difficult to measure. Many models of legislative decision-making tacitly assume that members are willing and able to carry out the wishes of their constituents so as to maximize their reelectio...

The influence of partisan news is presumed to be powerful, but evidence for its effects on political elites is limited, often based more on anecdotes than science. Using a rigorous quasi-experimental research design, observational data, and open science practices, this book carefully demonstrates how the re-emergence and rise of partisan cable news...

This chapter studies the voting behavior of members of the House of Representatives. If the presence of Fox News in a district shapes potential candidates’ perceptions about district party composition and the constituency’s electoral preferences, there are good chances that the same can be said of sitting House members. Here, of course, the expecta...

This chapter focuses on collective representation, examining whether Fox News affects how the American public is represented. Chapter 5 revealed Fox News effects on dyadic representation; we cannot assume similar effects on collective representation. Yet, in some ways, the path by which Fox News would affect collective representation is clearer tha...

This chapter highlights the role media play in political accountability. If Fox News’ entry and presence can shape candidate and member perceptions about what districts want (as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4), can Fox News also shape how responsive representatives are to constituents’ policy preferences? This responsiveness to the district – also know...

This chapter sets up our main research question, which is what effect, if any, did the arrival and proliferation of Fox News have on US politicians? It summarizes the history of Fox News and describes the natural experiment created by the haphazard rollout of Fox News. It goes on to summarize the scholarly literature on media effects and, specifica...

In this concluding chapter, we review our findings in the context of our initial pre-analysis plan and discuss the limitations of our studies. We then analyze the implications of our study and findings for their scholarly contributions and discuss next steps for future research. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of our fin...

This chapter begins with a description of the arrival and proliferation of Fox News across the United States during its early years and concludes with a description and some analyses of Fox News’ content. Both demonstrations are critical to our case. The former is required because our identification strategy requires that we satisfy the assumption...

In this chapter, we investigate whether Fox News’ presence in districts shaped the competitive electoral landscape by influencing potential candidates’ perceptions about the partisan make-up of the constituency in the district and shaping their perceived chances of winning or losing. Specifically, in this chapter, we test whether the entry of Fox N...

The influence of partisan news is presumed to be powerful, but evidence for its effects on political elites is limited, often based more on anecdotes than science. Using a rigorous quasi-experimental research design, observational data, and open science practices, this book carefully demonstrates how the re-emergence and rise of partisan cable news...

The influence of partisan news is presumed to be powerful, but evidence for its effects on political elites is limited, often based more on anecdotes than science. Using a rigorous quasi-experimental research design, observational data, and open science practices, this book carefully demonstrates how the re-emergence and rise of partisan cable news...

Several prominent theories of legislative organization contend that members coalesce into parties to minimize the collective action problems inherent in pursuing goals that have the character of public goods. Models in that vein ascribe a constrained and primarily reactive role to party leaders, affording them little independent discretion. Such an...

In American politics, the truth is rapidly losing relevance. The public square is teeming with misinformation, conspiracy theories, cynicism and hubris. Why has this happened? What does it mean? What can we do about it? In this volume, leading scholars offer multiple perspectives on these questions, and others, to provide the first comprehensive em...

In American politics, the truth is rapidly losing relevance. The public square is teeming with misinformation, conspiracy theories, cynicism and hubris. Why has this happened? What does it mean? What can we do about it? In this volume, leading scholars offer multiple perspectives on these questions, and others, to provide the first comprehensive em...

Assumptions and implications regarding status quo locations are a common feature of theories of legislative politics. Yet challenges with measuring status quo locations have frustrated scholars for decades. This article introduces a method for measuring status quo distributions within individual, majority-rule legislatures. In particular, our ident...

Elections are designed to give voters the ability to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. For this to work, voters must be presented with credible alternatives from which to choose. In the United States, as in other weak‐party systems, the decision to challenge an incumbent representative rests with individual, strategic‐minded pol...

Previous studies find that legislators who adopt a partisan voting record are penalized come election time. To date, these studies examine the electoral effects of aggregate legislative behavior. While useful for identifying macro-level relationships, this approach discards valuable information about the timing of elite partisanship that contribute...

Incremental Polarization: A Unified Spatial Theory of Legislative Elections, Parties, and Roll Call Voting. By Justin Buchler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 206p. $99.00 cloth, $31.95 paper. - Volume 17 Issue 1 - Kevin Arceneaux, Ryan J. Vander Wielen

Response to Justin Buchler’s review of Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability - Volume 17 Issue 1 - Kevin Arceneaux, Ryan J. Vander Wielen

While there is a substantial literature highlighting the presence of social dynamics in legislatures, we know very little about the precise processes that generate these social dynamics. Yet, whether social dynamics are due to peer pressure, frequency of interaction, or genuine learning, for example, has important implications for questions of poli...

News media play a central role in democratic politics, yet we know little about how media affect the behavior of policy makers. To understand the conditions under which news media influence political elites, we advance a theory of strategic responsiveness, which contends that elected representatives are more likely to heed their constituents' prefe...

News media play a central role in democratic politics, yet we know little about how media affect the behavior of policy makers. To understand the conditions under which news media influence political elites, we advance a theory of strategic responsiveness, which contends that elected representatives are more likely to heed their constituents' prefe...

Technological innovations over recent decades gave rise to the partisan news media. We contend that the emergence of partisan media should have decisive effects on the strategic calculations of elected representatives, who are chronic consumers of news media. Moreover, we theorize that partisan news media's influence on legislative behavior will be...

The voting behavior literature has advanced two prominent theoretical models of partisanship: the social psychological and rational models. Implicit to both stylized models is the assumption that all partisans process information similarly. Yet, growing research in psychology suggests that individuals possess different motivations when evaluating i...

Little scholarly literature has examined why the chambers of the US Congress use conference committees to reconcile inter-cameral legislative differences. Historically, conference committees handle the most important legislation. Why would the chambers be willing to delegate conciliation authority to a subset of the membership that is then granted...

While there is a vast literature highlighting the social dynamics that underlie political behavior, we know very little about the processes by which political behavior and practices disseminate among political actors. Drawing upon recent innovations, we study the diffusion of behavior within the U.S. House of Representatives. Specifically, we exami...

Legislators and legislative parties must strike a delicate balance between pursuing collective and member-level goals. While there are both legislative and reputational returns to coordinated behavior, party loyalty is known to have a detrimental effect on members' electoral success, which at least partially undermines parties' goal of seat maximiz...

Parliamentary institutions and partisan norms are complex, and new members of parliament are unlikely to possess an innate awareness of optimal behavior. This paper examines how new legislators adopt the behavioral patterns of incumbent members in the 6th European Parliament. The 6th EP provides an excellent opportunity to study such adaptive behav...

This article examines the representativeness of conference committees in the U.S. Congress by measuring the difference in observed policy preferences between the conference delegations and the parent bodies. We predict and find significant differences between the House and Senate in terms of the partisan bias of conference delegations. House confer...

We examine legislative shirking under conditions of imperfect constituent monitoring. Our core argument states that variation in information costs and constituent memory leads to systematic variation in constituent monitoring over time. Assuming that legislators are responsive to multiple cues, we expect to observe time-dependent legislative shirki...

Measures of party divisiveness have been widely used in scholarly literature for a variety of different purposes. However, conventional measures of party divisiveness, such as the percentage of party votes in a particular Congress, fail to consider important changes in the agenda from one Congress to the next. We introduce a measure that controls f...

Parties value unity, yet members of parliament have incentives to deviate from the party line. This article examines how members of the European Parliament (EP) respond to competing demands from national parties and European party groups. We examine ideological shifts within a single parliamentary term to assess how election proximity affects party...

This article examines the effect that the spatial location of conference committees relative to the parent bodies has on congressional policy outcomes. The article presents a theoretical model proposing that conferees choose policies that maximize their policy utility subject to the constraint of gaining House and Senate majorities on the conferenc...

The process of resolving inter-cameral dierences using conference committees extends to sub- sets of the membership institutional advantages in policy formation, which generates opportunities for bias. Our paper addresses that bias by measuring the dierence between the conference delega- tions and the parent houses and committees. We take the addit...

Theories of statutory interpretation abound. Scholars, judges and commentators have long puzzled over the best method to locate the meaning of a statute and to this end have proposed a range of approaches that rely on various forms of evidence, including statutory text, legislative intent, agency interpretations, cultural norms, and judicial preced...

This paper replicates the findings that appeared in the article “Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress,” published in the American Journal of Political Science (44:316–325), in which Lawrence Rothenberg and Mitchell Sanders incorporated a new research design and, contrary to all previous studies, found evidence of...

PREFACE The American Congress has long been one of the most powerful legislative bodies in the world. Congress is now struggling with momentous issues such as the regulation of the health care industry, public investment in rapidly changing electronic technologies, campaign finance reform, the war against terrorism, and the place of the United Stat...

Little scholarly literature has examined why the chambers of the U.S. congress use conference committees to reconcile inter-cameral legislative differences. Conference committees occur frequently and handle the most important legislation. Why would the chambers be willing to delegate conciliation authority to a subset of the membership that is then...

Several scholars have addressed the effects that media projections in presidential elections have upon voter turnout. We, however, believe that much of this research does not adequately address the influence that demographics and election specific factors have upon turnout. By controlling for voter and election specific variables across states, we...

Students of congressional politics have long recognized that the Rules Committee serves as a procedural and strategic tool of the House leadership. More specifically, scholars agree that the House Speaker's ability to influence the legislative agenda is accomplished by means of his appointment power. To date, however, little research has addressed...

Students of congressional politics have long recognized that the Rules Committee serves as a procedural and strategic tool of the House leadership in furtherance of the party's central goals. More specifically, scholars agree that the House Speaker's ability to influence the legislative agenda is accomplished by means of his appointment power. To d...