We revisit Arunachalam and Watson's contention that a person's physical height may be used as instrument for income because it affects economic well-being solely by causing more conservative political preferences among people who are taller. To evaluate whether other early-life and genetic factors might serve as mechanisms connecting height and political preferences, we analyze a unique data source that includes political, economic, and demographic data on same-gender siblings. Models that include fixed effects for siblings provide a strong test of the Arunachalam and Watson thesis. We find that height is not a consistent predictor of political preferences once shared sibling characteristics are controlled in this way, raising doubt about whether height can in fact be used as an instrument for income.

Though the overreporting of voter turnout in the National Election Study (NES) is widely known, this article shows that the problem has become increasingly severe. The gap between NES and official estimates of presidential election turnout has more than doubled in a nearly linear fashion, from 11 points in 1952 to 24 points in 1996. This occurred because official voter turnout fell steadily from 1960 onward, while NES turnout did not. In contrast, the bias in House election turnout is always smaller and has increased only marginally. Using simple bivariate statistics, I find that worsening presidential turnout estimates are the result mostly of declining response rates rather than instrumentation, question wording changes, or other factors. As more peripheral voters have eluded interviewers in recent years, the sample became more saturated with self-reported voters, thus inflating reported turnout.

In an earlier issue of this journal I brought attention to the fact that estimates of voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections from the National Election Study (NES) series have been increasingly biased. Although researchers had already noted that the NES overestimated turnout, I was concerned with the growing severity of the problem. While admitting that other factors were at work, my explanation centered on the representativeness of surveys, in particular that selection bias in the sample is correlated with the likelihood of voting (Burden 2000). Martinez (2003) and McDonald (2003) offer three possible additions to my argument. First, panel effects are responsible for particularly egregious discrepancies in a few presidential elections, particularly in the 1996 survey. Second, official turnout statistics that rely on the Voting Age Population (VAP) are themselves biased and lack perfect comparability with the NES. Third, the degree of misreporting might also depend on actual voter turnout.

Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article highlights the president, who has extensive opportunities, both ex ante and ex post, to influence the distribution of federal outlays. We analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24-year period—the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled. Using district and county fixed-effects estimation strategies, we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays. We find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president's party represent them.

American politics is dominated by two major parties and has been for a century. The duopoly enjoyed by the Democrats and Republicans is largely the result of Duverger's Law: the tendency of a single-member district system to produce two-party competition (Duverger 1963). Minor parties ultimately fail in a single-member district system because (1) the winner-take-all approach does not reward candidates who finish third and (2) citizens vote strategically to avoid “wasting” their votes on hopeless candidates and spoiling the election (Cox 1997; Riker 1982). Because the U.S. two-party system is so dependent on its majoritarian electoral rules, one might suspect that other election regulations would have little effect on the number of parties.A longer version of this paper was presented at the conference, “2008 and Beyond: The Future of Election and Ethics Reform in the States,” Columbus, OH, January 16–17, 2007. I thank Richard Winger of Ballot Access News for comments and information.

In the final days of the 2004 election, independent candidate Ralph Nader hardly resembled the same man who ran for president four years earlier. In 2000, Nader had catapulted himself from consumer activist to Green Party nominee, pledging to build a new progressive alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties. He raised $8.4 million, appeared on 44 state ballots, earned almost three million votes nationwide, and was widely blamed for Al Gore's defeat in Florida. Four years later, Nader had shed his Green Party affiliation, raised only $4.6 million, appeared on just 35 ballots, and earned a meager .38% of the popular vote. The controversial third party candidate who drew so much attention for his pivotal role in the 2000 election outcome had become a mere footnote by 2004.I thank Phil Jones for research assistance, Theresa Amato for Nader travel information, and participants in the Riker Seminar at the University of Rochester for comments.

Can government institutions strengthen the influence of public opinion on policymaking? While institutions often limit representation, I identify two institutional features of state lawmaking that may enhance democratic control, but in somewhat different ways. I hypothesize that one institution external to the state legislature—the ballot initiative—improves representation on specific issues, while one institution internal to the legislature—the committee discharge procedure—enhances responsiveness to mass preferences generally. This difference emerges because legislators engage in repeated interactions and logrolling across a wide range of issues while advocates of ballot initiatives do not. My analyses largely, although not entirely, support these hypotheses, with the initiative making abortion policy more responsive and committee discharge making policy generally more responsive. These results suggest a domain-specific influence of institutions that were previously thought to have similar effects on policy representation.