5 - Diversity, persistence, and mobility

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explores three extensions of the basic model presented in chapters 3 and 4. These developments show how our framework is useful for analyzing a variety of issues in voting theory in a rich and realistic institutional setup.

We begin, in section 5.2, by exploring the case of heterogeneous parties. While in chapters 3 and 4 we assumed that both the president and the congressional delegation of a party have the same ideal policy, here we generalize our analysis by considering cases in which the president and the congressional delegatioq of the same party have different preferences. In chapter 3, we showed that, with homogeneous parties, the policy outcome was always in between the ideal policies of the two presidents: it was always the legislature which moderated the president. With heterogeneous parties, once again the voters use the “checks and balances” provided by the Constitution to achieve moderation; however, the president may now play a moderating role. Specifically, if the congressional delegation of a party is more extreme than the president of the same party, the final policy outcome may be in between the two ideal policies of the president and the legislators of the same party. In this case, the president moderates Congress.

In section 5.3 we address another institutional aspect of the American electoral system, namely the staggered terms of office for senators. This feature has important implications for voter behavior, but does not change the nature of our results concerning moderation.