Dissertation Work

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My dissertation examines bargaining, compromise, and legislative coalitions in city councils. Much of the research on legislative coalitions suggests that they will tend to be narrow in size and ideology, though most of this research has been done at the national or state level. I argue that the focus on higher-level legislators has obscured the incentives of local legislators, who prioritize inclusive representation over re-election minded representation. The impact of this difference is legislative bargaining, compromise, and governing, that is far more consensual than what is seen in national politics.

The first chapter of my dissertation provides a theoretical examination of the distinctions between local and national legislative bargaining with an observational test of the implications. There are three plausible causes for the difference between local and national politics: (1) the geographical proximity of legislators to other districts, (2) the role of partisanship in bargaining, and (3) the competitiveness of elections. The first pathway, geographic proximity, represents the extent to which representatives and constituents of one district interact with and are affected by policies in another district. When districts are far apart there is little incentive to consider the impacts of a policy on the other district, but when they are close legislators are more likely to consider additional perspectives to mitigate any consequences of policy spillover. Under conditions of closer proximity, legislators work more inclusively to resolve rather than redistribute policy harms. Parties and elections interact to illustrate the second and third pathways. Parties act as both legislative and electoral coalitions that constrain member activity in order to promote the party brand. At the national level, parties are highly focused on legislative behavior in order to deliver a clear message to voters who will elect them to go back and deliver similar policy victories for them. The lack of party influence and the less competitive elections at the local level free legislators from a narrow focus on winning the support of their electoral constituency. Without concern for winning re-election, legislators instead choose to pursue good policy with no constraint on which citizens it impacts. The result is an increased focus on the entire represented area rather than their own district. I test this theory through an analysis of legislative coalition size using a cross-section of local and national roll call votes using an original dataset of local roll call votes. The creation of this dataset for the local level provides for a comparison to readily available national data and is a major contribution to the field.

Building upon the theory that local governments act more consensually, the second and third chapters of my dissertation investigate the limits to their inclusive governing style. The second chapter focuses on the role of issue urgency, partisan elections, and legislature composition on coalition size. Urgency increases the stakes of bargaining and drives individuals to reduce the barriers to compromise for the achievement of a majority coalition. Barriers can be reduced by either lowering the policy demands needed to be included in the majority coalition or by reducing the size of the majority coalition. Diverse legislatures bring greater diversity in preferences, making bargaining more costly and reducing the incentives for large coalitions. Partisan competition drives legislative competition, providing electoral benefits to legislative bargaining that make legislating zero-sum and diminish the incentive for large coalitions. I test these theories using an observational analysis of an original dataset of local roll call votes. I find weak support for urgency reducing coalition size, while partisan elections have a significant, but small effect. Larger shares of women and non-white representatives are shown to have a negative relationship with coalition size.

The third chapter focuses on the relationship between bargaining conditions and citizen evaluations of compromise, which provide incentives to legislators. Specifically, I examine the effect of issue urgency, minority race, and compromise size on compromise approval. I test these relationships using a survey experiment. The experiment analyzes the effect of a legislative minority’s racial identity on perceptions of the way they are treated in compromises. Evidence from the inequality literature suggests that, in evaluating progress made on inequality, white and Black individuals tend to use different baselines. This causes perceptions of the same existing conditions to be significantly different. When perceptions of current conditions vary dramatically, beliefs over the priority of addressing inequality and the extent of policy change needed to address it will vary. As large differences in policy preferences can act as a barrier to compromise, sufficiently large gaps can lead to a reduction in majority coalition size. I find that Black subjects uniquely condition their approval of compromise on the extent to which it addresses inequalities among marginalized groups, while white subjects rely simply on the urgency of the issue.