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Same Party (same + party)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	75%

Selected Abstracts

State Obligation, Sovereignty, and Theories of International Law

POLITICS & POLICY, Issue 3 2001
Marc G. Pufong
Much of what constitutes the business of international relations is undertaken by states in response to their perceived self-interest, and the commitments of states create duties and obligations. This paper assesses critical values that permeate substantive understanding of state duties and obligations. It explores how states traditionally gain community standing and how their choices bind them to existing community norms, even though some are often contested. Assuming a state to be a bona-fide and recognized member of the international community, its self-interested activities, praise-worthy or controversial, create obligation, i.e., a moral and legal duty recognized and actionable by law. In practice, what actually constitutes obligation may not be the same in all situations, or be fulfilled similarly by the same parties, or confer the same rights. It is difficult to establish a uniform reference with which to grapple with state obligation across all situations. This difficulty, however, does not enlighten debates on state responsibilities with regard to the binding force of international law where human rights abuses and other moral/legal violations are concerned. The argument is presented that since community membership, statehood, and state capacity provide the prima-facie basis for state obligation, attempts by rogue states to raise and frame secondary issues of sovereignty and autonomy in order to fence-out noncompliance are invalid States, therefore, are obligated and duty bound by community norms despite subsequent defenses that are raised in an effort to expunge transgressions. [source]

Party loyalty as habit formation

JOURNAL OF APPLIED ECONOMETRICS, Issue 3 2003
Ron Shachar
In most democracies, at least two out of any three individuals vote for the same party in sequential elections. This paper presents a model in which vote-persistence is partly due to the dependence of the utility on the previous voting decision. This dependence is termed ,habit formation'. The model and its implications are supported by individual-level panel data on the presidential elections in the USA in 1972 and 1976. For example, it is found that the voting probability is a function of the lagged choice variable, even when the endogeneity of the lagged variable is accounted for, and that the tendency to vote for different parties in sequential elections decreased with the age of the voter. Furthermore, using structural estimation the effect of habit is estimated, while allowing unobserved differences among respondents. The structural habit parameter implies that the effect of previous votes on the current decision is quite strong. The habit model fits the data better than the traditional ,party identification' model. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Fiscal Policy and Presidential Elections: Update and Extension

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2000
ALFRED G. CUZÁN
This article updates, deepens, and extends previous articles published in this journal on the relation between fiscal policy and presidential elections. It presents evidence that is consistent with the view that voters reward fiscal frugality and punish fiscal expansion. The relationship is robust with respect to economic conditions, presidential incumbency, number of consecutive terms in the White House by presidents of the same party, and war. An intriguing finding is that, when fiscal policy is controlled for, incumbency advantage practically disappears. It is hoped that these findings will stimulate more political scientists, especially students of the presidency, to pay more attention to the role of fiscal policy in presidential elections. [source]

Using Multimember District Elections to Estimate the Sources of the Incumbency Advantage

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2009
Shigeo Hirano
In this article we use a novel research design that exploits unique features of multimember districts to estimate and decompose the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Like some existing related studies we also use repeated observations on the same candidates to account for unobserved factors that remain constant across observations. Multimember districts have the additional feature of copartisans competing for multiple seats within the same district. This allows us to identify both the direct office-holder benefits and the incumbent quality advantage over nonincumbent candidates from the same party. We find that the overall incumbency advantage is of similar magnitude as that found in previous studies. We attribute approximately half of this advantage to incumbents' quality advantage over open-seat candidates and the remainder to direct office-holder benefits. However, we also find some evidence that direct office-holder benefits are larger in competitive districts than in safe districts and in states with relatively large legislative budgets per capita. [source]