Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T23:34:51.387Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The 2011 Debt-Ceiling Controversy and the 2012 US House Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2015

James E. Monogan III
James E. Monogan III*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article considers how a key legislative vote—that is, the August 2011 vote to raise the federal debt ceiling—influenced the 2012 elections for the US House of Representatives. Two outcomes are analyzed: (1) the incumbents’ ability to retain their seats through the 2012 general election, and (2) their share of the two-party vote for members who faced a general-election competitor. In developing this study, the research design was registered and released publicly before the votes were counted in 2012. Therefore, this article also illustrates how study preregistration can work in practice for political science. The findings show that seat retention did not vary with the treatment; however, incumbents who voted against raising the debt ceiling earned an additional 2.4 percentage points of the two-party vote.

Type
Features
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 420 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abramowitz, Alan I. 2004. Voice of the People: Elections and Voting in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Abramowitz, Alan I., and Segal, Jeffrey A.. 1992. Senate Elections. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen D., Snyder, James M., and Stewart, Charles. 2001. “Candidate Positioning in U.S. House Elections.” American Journal of Political Science 45: 136–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brady, David W., Cogan, John F., Gaines, Brian J., and Rivers, Douglas. 1996. “The Perils of Presidential Support: How the Republicans Captured the House.” Political Behavior 18 (4): 345–68.Google Scholar
Canes-Wrone, Brandice, Brady, David W., and Cogan, John F.. 2002. “Out of Step, Out of Office: Electoral Accountability and House Members’ Voting.” American Political Science Review 96 (1): 127–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carson, Jamie L., Koger, Gregory, Lebo, Matthew J., and Young, Everett. 2010. “The Electoral Costs of Party Loyalty in Congress.” American Journal of Political Science 54 (3): 598–616.Google Scholar
Cox, Gary W., and Katz, Jonathan N.. 2002. Elbridge Gerry’s Salamander: The Electoral Consequences of the Reapportionment Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Currinder, Marian. 2013. “Campaign Finance: Campaigning in a Post–Citizens United Era.” In The Elections of 2012, ed. Nelson, Michael, 119–44. Washington, DC: CQ Press.Google Scholar
Draper, Robert. 2012. Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Erikson, Robert S., and Wright, Gerald C.. 1980. “Policy Representation of Constituency Interests.” Political Behavior 2: 91–106.Google Scholar
Hanmer, Michael J., and Kalkan, Kerem Ozan. 2013. “Behind the Curve: Clarifying the Best Approach to Calculating Predicted Probabilities and Marginal Effects from Limited Dependent Variable Models.” American Journal of Political Science 57 (1): 263–77.Google Scholar
Harbridge, Laurel, and Malhotra, Neil. 2011. “Electoral Incentives and Partisan Conflict in Congress: Evidence from Survey Experiments.” American Journal of Political Science 55 (3): 494–510.Google Scholar
Humphreys, Macartan, de la Sierra, Raul Sanchez, and van der Windt, Peter. 2013. “Fishing, Commitment, and Communication: A Proposal for Comprehensive Nonbinding Research Registration.” Political Analysis 21 (1): 1–20.Google Scholar
Iacus, Stefano M., King, Gary, and Porro, Giuseppe. 2011. “Multivariate Matching Methods That Are Monotonic Imbalance Bounding.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 106 (493): 345–61.Google Scholar
Iacus, . 2012. “Causal Inference without Balance Checking: Coarsened Exact Matching.” Political Analysis 20 (1): 1–24.Google Scholar
Imai, Kosuke, and van Dyk, David A.. 2005. “A Bayesian Analysis of the Multinomial Probit Model Using Marginal Data Augmentation.” Journal of Econometrics 124 (2): 311–34.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Gary C. 2013. “Congress: Partisanship and Polarization.” In The Elections of 2012, ed. Nelson, Michael, 145–72. Washington, DC: CQ Press.Google Scholar
Monogan, James E III. 2013. “A Case for Registering Studies of Political Outcomes: An Application in the 2010 House Elections.” Political Analysis 21 (1): 21–37.Google Scholar
Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 1997. Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rosenbaum, Paul R., and Rubin, Donald B.. 1983. “The Central Role of the Propensity Score in Observational Studies for Causal Effects.” Biometrika 70 (1): 41–55.Google Scholar
Woodward, Bob. 2012. The Price of Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Monogan III supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Monogan III supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 259.8 KB