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Party Competition and Coalitional Stability: Evidence from American Local Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2020

PETER BUCCHIANERI Open the ORCID record for PETER BUCCHIANERI [Opens in a new window]
PETER BUCCHIANERI*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
*
Peter Bucchianeri, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Effective Lawmaking, Vanderbilt University, peter.r.bucchianeri@vanderbilt.edu
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Abstract

For decades, political scientists have argued that competition is a fundamental component of a responsible party system, such that when one party dominates politics, legislative coalitions destabilize and democratic accountability suffers. In this paper, I evaluate these predictions in an important but largely unexplored legislative environment: American local government. Using an original collection of roll-call records from 151 municipal councils, I show that legislative behavior is more one-dimensional when elections are partisan and the electorate is evenly balanced between the parties. When either of these features is absent, however, elite behavior remains unstructured, with coalitions shifting over time and across issues. These differences across institutional and competitive contexts suggest that partisan elections—and the party organizations that nearly always come with them—are critical for translating electoral insecurity into organized government, raising questions about the capacity for electoral accountability in a growing set of one-party dominant governments across the country.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 1055 - 1070
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

This paper was previously titled “Legislative Factions under Democratic One-Party Rule: Evidence from American Local Government.” For helpful comments and discussions throughout the course of this project, I thank Pam Ban, Dan Carpenter, Devin Caughey, Chris Chaky, Katie Einstein, Ryan Enos, Claudine Gay, Jennifer Hochschild, Connor Huff, Chris Lucas, Dan Moskowitz, Max Palmer, Jon Rogowski, Jack Santucci, Jim Snyder, Chris Warshaw, Alan Wiseman, and the participants at Harvard’s American Politics Research Workshop and Political Economy Workshop. In addition, I am grateful to Harvard’s Inequality and Social Policy Program and Institute for Quantitative Social Science for providing generous support that aided in the development and completion of this project. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8ZT2ID.

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