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Title: Hiding and Hedging: Surviving the Ideological Center in the United States Senate
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2013
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Abstract: Are moderates in the United States Senate powerbrokers or weak legislators? While modern political science theories like the Pivotal Politics Model of Lawmaking would argue in favor of the idea of powerful moderates, this dissertation argues that previous theories neglect the electoral circumstances of moderates in the modern Senate era, and as such, overestimate their legislative power. I argue that unlike their ideological counterparts that are elected from states that share their ideological identity, moderates are elected from one of two constituencies: states that have a partisan lean to one party but have enough “swing voters” to vote in a moderate from the opposite party, or states that are nearly evenly divided in terms of partisanship. Because of this, moderate senators must avoid active participation on bills (by amending or even speaking in favor of them) so as to maintain their weak coalitions. In my empirical analysis of these states, in which I examine ideology and partisanship using survey and Census data, I have found that there indeed are true swing states as well as states with partisan advantages that elect moderates in addition to a large number of states that are partisan enough to never elect a moderate . This puts moderates in an undesirable position of having to appease two distinct constituencies in order to remain competitive for reelection. With the weak position that these moderates are in, their legislative behavior will differ from what other legislative theories propose. As a result, I argue that centrists focus more on avoiding traceability and maximizing ideological flexibility than maximizing policy outcomes. I test this by examining legislative behavior on two bills, the Affordable Care Act of 2009 and the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003. I find that for both pieces of legislation, the senators that were most active were not moderates, but ideologues. These findings suggest that moderates are indeed conflicted as they become less active on highly salient and controversial bills. They nearly disappear on legislative action, offer speeches that defer power to others, and even go as to vote against their own preferences in an effort to avoid news media attention. These conclusions have broad implications to the policymaking process. Lawmaking would need to be reevaluated to being much more variable and less moderating than previous theories supposed as the process relies less on the work of moderates and more on party leaders.
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Authors: Chaturvedi, Neilan Shrikant
Institution: University of California, Irvine
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Other
Countries: United States