Rewarded by Friends and Punished by Enemies: The CIO and the Taft-Hartley Act

The Wagner Act, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1935, provided unprecedented federal protections for American labor unions. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress just twelve years later, effectively rolled back significant parts of Wagner. Previous research on Taft-Hartley identifies three factors that led to this anti-labor backlash. First, the American public was repulsed by the large strike wave that followed the end of World War II. Second, southern Democrats were concerned that powerful labor unions would organize African Americans and upset the South's racial hierarchy. Third, the Republican Party was increasingly embracing a conservative, probusiness ideology. This article contributes a new angle to this old debate by exploring the role of the CIO, its 1943 decision to create the country's first political action committee (PAC), and the consequences of its informal alliance with the Democratic Party. Using original data on CIO density and congressional voting on the Taft-Hartley Act, we demonstrate that CIO strength polarized the parties: higher levels of CIO density led Democrats to vote in favor of organized labor but led Republicans to vote in an increasingly anti-labor manner.

The US Congress and Rogue States

Foreign policy has become one of the most polarizing issues in American politics. This paper investigates the extent to which this division extends to arguably one of the most bipartisan foreign policy issues: policies toward rogue states. Our examination of congressional voting and sponsorship data related to rogue states since 1991 finds that, while there is a high degree of bipartisanship on the issue, there are nuanced but significant partisan differences. First, we find that Democrats are significantly more likely to support a rogue state bill dealing with human rights concerns, whereas Republicans are significantly less likely to support a conciliatory bill. We also find that members of Congress are less likely to propose and support a rogue state bill in the presence of a co-partisan president. We thus conclude that, despite the overall high degree of bipartisanship on rogue state issues, partisanship plays an important role in influencing legislative behavior.

“Do Gun Policy Specifics Matter? Hyper-Polarization And The Decline Of Vote Splitting In Congress”

By tracing the changing electoral incentives and political circumstances of partisans in Congress over time, this paper unpacks how and why substantive policy content has lost its relevance for influencing Congressional voting on gun control. It argues that as gun control positions have crystallized to become part of partisan identity, policy specifics have come to matter less for partisans in Congress than the general pro gun control or pro gun rights position that a piece of legislation symbolizes. Today, regardless of the specific policy contents of a bill, a gun vote serves as a signaling device from members of Congress to their partisan supporters that they are either passionate defenders of the Second Amendment (Republicans) or fierce protectors of America’s children from gun violence (Democrats). That policy content has lost its relevance for Congressional voting on gun control is evident through the marked decline in vote splitting, the extinction of gun control moderates, and the all or nothing voting behavior of partisan shifters – those formerly pro-control Republicans, anti-control Democrats, and gun control moderates who shifted positions over time to vote the party line.

Contestation and Politicization of Security and Defence Policy

Votes in parliament reveal the degree to which foreign affairs are contested and politicized. Data from the US Congress since its first session in 1789 confirm the established narrative that foreign affairs have become politicized since the Vietnam War but also qualify the politicization narrative by showing that post-Vietnam levels of contestation are far from unusual if compared to the first 150 years of Congressional voting. While levels of contestation vary, foreign affairs have never been fully exempted from democratic politics. An analysis of voting behaviour in the German and the Dutch parliament confirm that democratic politics does indeed not stop at the water’s edge. A new dataset of deployment votes in eleven countries shows that dissent is also common in votes on military interventions but also highlights differences across countries. In many countries, the government is successful in building a broad coalition in support of the military intervention in question. The rising numbers of deployment votes indicate that military interventions have gained in saliency since the end of the Cold War.

Pro-Trade Blocs in the US Congress

Who supports trade in the US Congress? We uncover the ideological space of trade voting, focusing on trade agreements and development policy as two fundamental cleavages around globalization. We then cluster members of Congress into coherent voting blocs, and identify the most pro-trade voting blocs in each Chamber. We find that these blocs: cross party lines; are ideologically heterogeneous; and are over-represented on the committees with jurisdiction over trade. We then examine two leading theories of Congressional voting – on constituency characteristics and campaign contributions – and find support for each using our learned voting blocs. Members of pro-trade blocs have defended their constituents’ and contributors’ interests by speaking out to confront the Trump administration’s protectionism. We conclude that unsupervised learning methods provide a valuable tool for exploring the multifaceted and dynamic divisions which characterize current debates over global economic integration.

Metode Hibridasi Artificial Bee Colony dan Fuzzy K-Modes untuk Klasterisasi Data Kategorikal

Fuzzy K-Modes (FKMO) merupakan metode klasterisasi data yang efektif untuk data kategorikal. Metode ini menggunakan metode fuzzy dan pencocokan ukuran ketidaksamaan (dissimilarity measure) yang sederhana untuk memutakhirkan titik pusat klaster dan mendapatkan solusi yang optimal. Meskipun demikian Fuzzy K-Modes memiliki kelemahan adanya kemungkinan berhenti dalam solusi lokal optimal. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) merupakan metode optimasi yang efektif dan terbukti memiliki kemampuan mendapatkan solusi global. Penelitian ini mengusulkan penggunaan algoritma Artificial Bee Colony untuk melakukan optimasi terhadap Fuzzy K-Modes untuk klasterisasi data kategorikal (ABC-FKMO). Implementasi Artifical Bee Colony untuk optimasi Fuzzy K-Modes terbukti mampu meningkatkan performa klasterisasi data kategorikal khususnya dalam aspek nilai Objective Function, F-Measure, dan Accuracy. Hasil pengujian dengan dataset Soybean Disease, Breast Cancer dan Congressional Voting Records dari UCI data repository, menunjukkan rata-rata accuracy sebesar 0.991, 0.615, dan 0.867. Objective Function lebih baik rata rata sebesar 2,73 %, F-Measure lebih baik rata-rata sebesar 4,31 % dan Accuracy lebih baik rata-rata sebesar 5,16 %.

Coattails, Raincoats, and Congressional Election Outcomes

ABSTRACTMore than 60 years ago, Angus Campbell offered an explanation for why the president’s party regularly loses congressional seats in midterm elections. He argued that peripheral voters “surge” to the polls in presidential elections and support the president’s congressional co-partisans but “decline” to turn out in the midterm. In his turnout-based explanation for midterm loss, Campbell speculated that “bad weather or an epidemic may affect the vote” but largely dismissed weather’s utility to test his theory (Campbell 1960, 399). I revisit Campbell’s speculation and employ a new identification strategy to investigate the “surge and decline” account of midterm loss. I show that as the costs of voting increase—due to above-average rainfall on Election Day—the strength of the relationship between presidential and congressional voting weakens.

Klasterisasi Data Kategorikal Berbasis Fuzzy K-Modes Dan Artificial Bee Colony

Fuzzy K-Modes (FKMO) merupakan metode klasterisasi data yang efektif untuk data kategorikal. Metode ini menggunakan metode fuzzy dan pencocokan ukuran ketidaksamaan (dissimilarity measure) yang sederhana untuk memutakhirkan titik pusat klaster dan mendapatkan solusi yang optimal. Meskipun demikian Fuzzy K-Modes memiliki kelemahan adanya kemungkinan berhenti dalam solusi lokal optimal.Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) merupakan metode yang efektif untuk melakukan optimasi dan terbukti memiliki solusi global. Penelitian ini mengusulkan penggunaan algoritma Artificial Bee Colony untuk melakukan optimasi terhadap Fuzzy K-Modes (ABC-FKMO). Implementasi Artifical Bee Colony untuk optimasi Fuzzy K-Modes terbukti mampu meningkatkan performance klasterisasi khususnya dalam aspek nilai Objective Function, F-Measure, dan Accuracy. Hasil pengujian dengan dataset Soybean Disease, Breast Cancer dan Congressional Voting Records dari UCI data repository, menunjukkan rata-rata accuracy sebesar 0.991, 0.615, dan 0.867. Objective Function lebih baik rata rata sebesar 2,73 %, F-Measure lebih baik rata-rata sebesar 4,31 % dan Accuracy lebih baik rata-rata sebesar 5,16 %.

The Unsolid South

During the Jim Crow era, the Democratic Party dominated the American South, presiding over a racially segregated society while also playing an outsized role in national politics. This book provides an entirely new understanding of electoral competition and national representation in this exclusionary one-party enclave. Challenging the notion that the Democratic Party's political monopoly inhibited competition and served only the Southern elite, the book demonstrates how Democratic primaries—even as they excluded African Americans—provided forums for ordinary whites to press their interests. Focusing on politics during and after the New Deal, the book shows that congressional primary elections effectively substituted for partisan competition, in part because the spillover from national party conflict helped compensate for the informational deficits of elections without party labels. The book draws on a broad range of historical and quantitative evidence, including archival materials, primary election returns, congressional voting records, and hundreds of early public opinion polls that illuminate ideological patterns in the Southern public. Defying the received wisdom, this evidence reveals that members of Congress from the one-party South were no less responsive to their electorates than members from states with true partisan competition. Reinterpreting a critical period in American history, this book reshapes our understanding of the role of parties in democratic theory and sheds critical new light on electoral politics in authoritarian regimes.