In Chapter 8, we showed that the incumbency advantage (as measured by the standard methodology) tended to be larger for Republicans than for Democrats after the mid-1960s. In this chapter, we seek to explain this and other party differences.

In outline, our argument is as follows. First, the abrupt disappearance of pro-Republican bias in the translation of congressional votes into congressional seats (outside the South) led to an abrupt structural decline in the short- and medium-term probability that the Republicans would be able to secure a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. This decline in the Republicans' chances of securing a majority raised the expected value of a House seat for Democrats but depressed it for Republicans, leading to a syndrome of entry and selection effects that, among other things, explain the party differences uncovered in Chapter 8.

The rest of the chapter proceeds as follows. The first section outlines a simple model of a candidate's decision to enter a House race. We then use that model to explain why candidates of the two parties should have had different valuations of a House seat and how the valuation gap evolved over the post-World War II era. The key variable in this discussion is the probability that each party would secure a majority in the House. The third section explains the consequences that should have followed as the valuation gap rose and fell. We then test these predictions, discuss our findings, and conclude.

the decision to enter

Consider a candidate deciding whether to enter a race for a House seat.

Previous studies of the incumbency advantage have focused on how much running an incumbent for reelection boosts the incumbent party's expected vote share. Incumbents, however, can decide whether to run for reelection, and their decisions are based partly on anticipation of the vote share they might win were they to run. Thus, while the presence of an incumbent may boost the incumbent party's vote share, forecasts of this vote share may determine whether there is an incumbent in the race to begin with.

All current measures of the incumbency advantage risk overestimating how much incumbency matters, by neglecting the possibility that incumbents tend to seek reelection when the prospects for their party are better, while retiring when those prospects are poorer. To the extent that incumbents are good at forecasting votes, one will find the incumbent party's vote share larger when there is an incumbent (who correctly forecast the favorable vote and hence ran for reelection) and smaller when there is no incumbent (the incumbent having retired in the face of a bad expected vote, which the nonincumbent replacing her to some extent inherits). In technical terms, the argument just given amounts to saying that there is a species of simultaneity bias afflicting current measures of the incumbency advantage.

It is not just incumbents' entry strategies that pose analytic challenges, however. When high-quality challengers (defined as those who have previously won elective office) enter the fray, they presumably do so partly on the basis of favorable vote forecasts. Their decisions to enter accordingly may bias estimates of how much the presence of a strong challenger boosts the challenging party's vote share.

In the previous chapter, we focused on redistricting plans drawn prior to the courts' entry into the redistricting process. During this precourt period, reversionary plans – that is, the plans that would stand in force should the state legislature and governor be unable to agree on a new plan – were automatic. Both their content and the conditions under which they would come into force were prespecified and did not depend on the decisions of any strategic actor. In contrast, after the Supreme Court's reapportionment decisions, individual courts decided both the content of the reversionary plan and, to some degree, the conditions under which it would be invoked. In this chapter, we begin to consider the political consequences of this change from automatic to discretionary reversions.

The first two sections consider how the partisan complexion of the courts supervising (or potentially supervising) redistricting actions in the 1960s might in theory have affected the plans ultimately used. Based on an extension of the model developed in the previous chapter, we argue that one should expect court partisanship to affect the partisan bias and responsiveness embodied in the implemented plan, even if the court did not impose a plan and even though bias and responsiveness were not justiciable.

The third section provides qualitative evidence that each court's partisan complexion did affect its decisions. The fourth section provides quantitative evidence that each court's partisan complexion, relative to that of the plan it was judging, affected the level of malapportionment it was prepared to tolerate. The final section concludes.

Jurisprudentially, the Supreme Court's reapportionment decisions have long been recognized as revolutionary. Administratively, they led to a wave of extraordinary court-supervised redistricting actions in the mid-1960s whose ostensible purpose was to eradicate then-massive levels of malapportionment. Politically, however, they seem not to have sparked much change.

Some claimed that court-mandated redistricting in the 1960s favored the Democrats, others that it favored the Republicans, but the nearconsensus of the literature has been that redistricting did not produce substantial net gains for either party. Some suspected that redistricting in the 1960s sparked the storied growth of the incumbency advantage, but the consensus of the literature is that it did not. Almost everyone expected a substantial change in policy, from a pro-rural to more prourban stance, but the near-consensus of the literature is that no such change was forthcoming (for a dissenting view, see McCubbins and Schwartz 1988).

This book has reexamined the electoral consequences of the reapportionment revolution. In this chapter, we first review three major proximal effects: the wave of redistricting in the 1960s, the change in the frequency and regularity of redistricting, and the change in the reversionary outcome of the redistricting process. We then tie these proximal changes to fundamental changes in the nature of electoral competition, both between Democrats and Republicans and between incumbents and challengers.

proximal effects

Redistricting in the 1960s

The first proximal effect of the Court's decisions was that most of the nation's congressional (and state legislative) districts were redrawn in a series of extraordinary redistricting actions.

In Chapter 3, we generated several predictions about how bias and responsiveness in a state's congressional elections should vary as a function of the political context obtaining when the state's district lines were drawn. In this chapter, we put those predictions to the test.

Substantively, we focus on how redistricting in the 1960s affected the partisan outcome of nonsouthern congressional elections. The conventional wisdom is that redistricting is unlikely in general to produce net partisan gains nationwide. Moreover, previous studies of the 1960s in particular have either found no net partisan advantage for either party or claimed that the advantage lay with the Republicans. Nonetheless, we show that nonsouthern Democrats were substantial net beneficiaries of redistricting in the 1960s. Our results explain a long-standing puzzle in the literature on congressional elections: the sudden disappearance of pro-Republican bias in the translation of votes into seats in nonsouthern elections circa 1966.

The rest of the chapter proceeds as follows. We first review work on “the case of the disappearing bias” and consider whether redistricting might help explain this mystery. We then test our theoretical expectations about redistricting – derived in Chapter 3 – against the empirical record in the 1960s. Unlike several previous studies of postwar redistricting, we find that a model in which parties are the key actors explains the data well and that control of state government typically translated into substantial redistricting gains for a party throughout the period prior to the reapportionment revolution. We also find that the legal reversion (or default outcome) of the redistricting process had a systematic and thus-far-neglected impact on how congressional votes translated into seats prior to Baker v. Carr and Wesberry v. Sanders.

In the previous part of the book, we focused on why pro-Republican bias in nonsouthern congressional elections abruptly disappeared in the 1960s. In this part of the book, we turn to an even more famous pair of puzzles in the literature: why incumbents' margins of victory increased abruptly in 1966, and why the so-called incumbency advantage increased – again abruptly, again in 1966.

In this chapter, we set the stage for the analyses to come in three ways. First, we explain the two incumbency-related puzzles in more detail. Second, we articulate the principles behind our investigation in this part of the book, sketching the connections between incumbents' electoral fortunes and the reapportionment revolution. Third, we show that there are previously unnoticed partisan differences associated with each puzzle: the Republican marginals vanished more than did the Democratic marginals, and the Republican incumbency advantage increased more than did the Democratic incumbency advantage. We thus add two more items to the list of explananda that a complete model of postwar congressional elections must address.

incumbents' margins and advantages

The Vanishing Marginals

A marginal district is one that is not firmly held by either major party. Operationally, marginal districts are usually defined as those in which the winner garners 50–55% (or sometimes 50–60%) of the two-party vote, the idea being that such a slim margin of victory might well be overcome in the next election.

In a famous article, Mayhew (1974) showed that marginal districts (defined by the 50–55% criterion) were fairly common in early postwar elections but rather abruptly less common after 1966. Moreover, open seats showed no trend in marginality; only districts defended by incumbents became less often marginal.

In the previous chapter, we presented a model of the role of the courts in the 1960s redistricting process. In this chapter we test two of the key predictions of that model, those regarding bias and responsiveness.

The first section deals with the operational details of our tests. The second section shows that Democratic courts supervised plans that had more pro-Democratic bias, while Republican courts supervised plans that had more pro-Republican bias, controlling for partisan control of state government. It also shows that responsiveness tended to be higher in plans written by unified states facing friendly rather than hostile courts. Both of the bias-responsiveness predictions articulated in the previous chapter, in other words, are supported by the data.

The third section shows that there were many more Democratic than Republican courts with jurisdiction over congressional redistricting cases in the 1960s – part of the legacy of Democratic hegemony in the New Deal era. Putting the predominance of Democratic courts together with the impact of court partisanship on plan bias helps explain why Republican partisan gerrymanders in the 1960s produced such low levels of pro-Republican bias; why bipartisan Republican plans in the 1960s produced lower levels of pro-Republican bias than they had earlier; and thus why what had been about a 6% pro-Republican bias outside the South abruptly disappeared.

The fourth and fifth sections consider the extent to which judges appear to have pursued partisan interests and the role – dynamic or constrained – of the judiciary. The sixth section concludes.

operational matters

Obviously, the Democratic seat share in a state should increase as the Democratic vote share in that state increases.

In this chapter, we first describe the basic facts of the reapportionment revolution: the Court's decisions, the malapportionment problem they addressed, and the wave of redistricting action that followed. We then characterize what the literature has said about the last of these three elements – court-ordered redistrictings in the 1960s. Were these redistrictings simply partisan gerrymanders? Were they mostly incumbentprotecting gerrymanders? Were they a bit of both? Were they neither? Finally, we explain why we believe the answers given in the literature need to be reconsidered.

a sketch of the reapportionment revolution

The Court's Decisions

On March 26, 1962, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of Baker v. Carr (369 U.S. 186), thus initiating what has since been known as the reapportionment revolution. The suit was brought by urban plaintiffs in Tennessee, who challenged their state legislature's failure to reapportion despite widespread population shifts that had made urban districts vastly more populous than their rural counterparts. The ramifications of the case were clearly national, because urban and especially suburban Americans were significantly underrepresented in state legislatures throughout the country (Hacker 1964). Thus, although the Court limited itself to declaring that state legislative reapportionment was justiciable, leaving more specific action in the case to the lower courts, its decision was immediately seen as a revolutionary step – one the Court had repeatedly declined to take (most recently in Colegrove v. Green 328 U.S. 529).

The immediate consequence of Baker was more litigation. Indeed, within a year of the decision, all but 14 states were involved in reapportionment suits, and the Supreme Court used some of these cases to stake out a clearer substantive position.

In Chapters 4–6, we argued that pro-Republican bias in nonsouthern congressional elections disappeared in the mid-1960s as a consequence of (1) a change in partisan control of state governments away from unified Republican control, (2) a change in the legal reversion to the redistricting process, and (3) the role of the largely Democratic federal judiciary in supervising the redistricting actions of the states. If our account is correct, redistricting during the 1960s should have affected Democratic and Republican incumbents differently.

Perhaps the simplest way to state our expectations is by contrasting them with Edward Tufte's well-known hypothesis that the wave of 1960s redistricting was mostly an exercise in incumbent protection – a position that fit well with then-emerging evidence that incumbents' margins of victory were increasing. Our thesis is that the wave of 1960s redistricting had a distinct anti-Republican cast to it, making most districting plans less Republican-friendly than their predecessors. In this chapter, we investigate whether the partisan differences we expect appear in the empirical record.

The first purpose of this chapter, then, is to provide further (albeit indirect) evidence for the main thesis of this part of the book. The second purpose is to reconsider some alternative hypotheses about the case of the disappearing bias. The final purpose is to begin to introduce the topic of the next part of the book: how redistricting affected the electoral performance of incumbents and the much-debated rise of the incumbency advantage.

We state our predictions regarding how redistricting should have affected district-level vote shares in the first section. We then test them in the second section, finding that redistricting had a systematically different impact on the two parties' electoral fortunes.

At first glance, the welfare states of the rich democracies appear to be alive and well. Governments in these nations devoted an average of 24 percent of national economic product to social protection in 1995; in 1980, the comparable figure was 20 percent. Indeed, most observers of social welfare policy agree with Paul Pierson (1994, 1996) that the systems of social protection created during the first half of the twentieth century, and dramatically expanded during the third quarter of the century, have not been dismantled during the current era. At the same time, it is equally clear that the welfare states of advanced capitalist democracies have come under serious pressure. During the 1980s and 1990s, conservative governments in Britain, the United States, and the other Anglo democracies have reduced the generosity of benefits, tightened program eligibility, implemented cost controls in service delivery, and encouraged privatization of some social insurance and many social services. Neoliberal policy changes have not been confined to these right-of-center governments; Swedish, German, and other Western European governments of all ideological complexions have on occasion reduced pension and other social insurance benefits, limited benefit indexation, and restricted eligibility for unemployment compensation and social assistance. They have also imposed budget caps, user co-payments, and other cost-control measures for health and social services. Moreover, these efforts to restrain the welfare state have occurred at a time of rising need for social protection (Clayton and Pontusson, 1998).

As a final step in this analysis, I present in Table B.1 the results from alterative estimations of the “baseline” model of preceding sections. To minimize the proliferation of results (and because results are very similar for any dimension of capital mobility), I focus on the liberalization of capital markets. The liberalization of capital markets is significantly related to other dimensions of capital mobility (e.g., 1960–92 correlations of lagged liberalization with total flows, direct investment, and capital market borrowing are statistically significant and substantively moderate or large). Also, in the case of every direct effect and interaction effect from Tables 3.2 to 3.5, two of the three alternative estimators confirm the findings; in the large majority of cases, all three alternative estimators produce the same result.

As discussed in the section on methodology in Chapter 3, I present (along with my “baseline” model) a “full” fixed effects model with a lagged endogenous variable and a generalized error correction model. To make the table manageable, I report complete model results (institutions and general controls) for the equations that estimate the linear effects of capital liberalization on social welfare effort. I present results for the individual interactions that are obtained from individual estimations of the complete model with the focal interaction and display significance levels, but not standard errors for the interactions.

As Table B.1 reveals, the primary findings about the welfare state effects of international capital mobility and its mediation by national political institutions are systematically confirmed.

In this chapter, I present a quantitative analysis of the central questions of this study. I initially provide a brief overview of the structure and recent development of the contemporary welfare state in advanced capitalist democracies. This exercise, significantly augmented in the country studies of subsequent chapters, brings into concrete relief the changing fortunes of the welfare state across the latter years of welfare expansion and the contemporary era of retrenchment initiatives and restructuring. Subsequently, I discuss my methodological approach to the quantitative analysis of internationalization and social policy change, addressing measurement issues, econometric model development, and statistical estimation techniques. In the main body of the chapter, I present assessments of the direct welfare state effects of international capital mobility, the impacts of internationalization on the dynamics of welfare state convergence and divergence, and the contingent and conjunctural policy effects of capital mobility (following the supplementary hypotheses outlined in the preceding chapter).

I also provide a series of analyses of the ways in which national institutions shape the domestic policy consequences of internationalization. I evaluate my arguments about the foundational role of democratic institutions by examining how capital mobility affects total social welfare effort in different institutional contexts across the entire sample of years and countries (i.e., 1965–93 in 15 developed democracies). To deepen the analysis, I then analyze the direct welfare state impacts of international capital mobility on three key dimensions of social welfare protection – income maintenance, the social wage, and government provision of health care – for the entire sample and within three clusters of welfare states defined by programmatic attributes (and, indirectly, by political institutional contexts).