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Pivotal Politics and the ideological content of Landmark Laws

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2017

Thomas R. Gray  and
Jeffery A. Jenkins
Thomas R. Gray
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Dallas, School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, USA E-mail: [email protected]
Jeffery A. Jenkins
Affiliation:
University of Southern California, Price School of Public Policy, USA E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The Pivotal Politics model (Krehbiel) has significantly influenced the study of American politics, but its core empirical prediction – that the size of the gridlock interval is negatively related to legislative productivity – has not found strong empirical support. We argue that previous research featured a disconnect between the exclusively ideological theory and tests that relied on outcome variables that were not purely ideological. We remedy this by dividing landmark laws (Mayhew) into two counts – those that invoke ideological preferences and those that do not – and uncover results consistent with Pivotal Politics’ core prediction: the size of the gridlock interval is negatively related to the production of ideological legislation. We also find that the size of the gridlock zone is positively related to the production of nonideological legislation. These results hold up in the face of various sensitivity analyses and robustness checks. We further show that Pivotal Politics explains variation in ideological legislation better than alternative theories based on partisan agenda control.

Keywords

gridlocklawmakinglegislative productivitypivotal politicsspatial modelsUS Congress
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Public Policy , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 115 - 142
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2017 

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA; the 2016 annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in workshops at Columbia University, the University of California, Merced, the University of Chicago and the University of Southern California.

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