Party Competition, Personal Votes, and Strategic Disloyalty in the U.S. States

• Date: 01 December 2021
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912920953210
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 74(4) 1024 –1036

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920953210

Political Research Quarterly

© 2020 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912920953210

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Article

In April of 2019, the New York state legislature passed a

state budget of $175 million. Democratic majorities, in

charge of both the state’s Assembly and Senate for the

first time in nearly a decade, passed the landmark bill that

included reforms to the state’s criminal justice spending

priorities, increases in education spending for schools

in the state’s poorer communities, alterations to transit

pricing in major cities, as well as other modifications

to health care spending and environmental protections.

Governor Cuomo and the majority leaders of both cham-

bers praised the budget as one of the most progressive in

New York’s history. Despite what appears to have been a

significant political victory for the state’s Democrats,

Assemblyman Charles Barron [D-Brooklyn] voted

against his party’s budget, railing that it did too little to

address inequality in the state and failed to fund a state

commission for publicly financed elections. Barron was

one of the only two Democrats to oppose his party’s

budget in the State Assembly.1

For traditional models of spatial voting, such “protest”

votes can be puzzling. However, recent research focusing

on “strategic party disloyalty” offers an explanation for

protest voting that centers on legislators’ efforts to signal

ideological purity to constituents via this type of grand-

standing vote (Kirkland and Slapin 2017, 2018; Slapin

et al. 2018). And recent research on Congress finds that

such “ends against the middle” voting is reasonably prev-

alent in the U.S. Congress (Duck-Mayr and Montgomery

2019). This argument suggests that legislators seeking to

develop a personal vote will occasionally oppose their

own party as part of a symbolic effort to demonstrate

ideological commitment when they can portray their own

party’s legislation as not moving far enough in an ideo-

logical direction. Indeed, Charles Barron, in the wake of

his vote against his own parties’ budget, posted several

videos on his webpage in which he highlighted how the

budget represented a failure to address a racist and

unequal capitalist society, an argument likely to fit well

with his Brooklyn district, but reflecting views to the left

of the Democratic Party mainstream. By voting against

the budget and his own party, he gave himself a prime

opportunity to reiterate his views and to distinguish his

position from that of the party center.2 Barron could use

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PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920953210Political Research QuarterlyBurke et al.

research-article2020

1University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA

2University of Zurich, Switzerland

Corresponding Author:

Justin H. Kirkland, Department of Politics, University of Virginia, S162

Gibson Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.

Email: jhk9y@virginia.edu

Party Competition, Personal Votes, and

Strategic Disloyalty in the U.S. States

Richard Burke1, Justin H. Kirkland1, and Jonathan B. Slapin2

Abstract

Legislators will sometimes vote against their party’s position on roll-call votes to differentiate themselves from the

party mainstream and to accrue a “personal vote.” Research suggests that the use of rebellion to generate a personal

vote is more common (1) among majority party members and (2) among ideological extremists. But these majority

party extremists only have a strong incentive to rebel in situations where the accrual of a personal vote is electorally

useful. In this manuscript, we evaluate variation in rebellion rates of state legislators in the United States conditional

on ideological extremism and majority control. Using donation-based measures of ideology and roll call–based

measures of party loyalty over a twenty-year period across more than 30,000 legislators, we find that when legislators

have little incentive to differentiate themselves from their parties, this “strategic” party disloyalty among majority

party ideological extremists is limited. However, when legislators have strong incentives to craft a personal vote,

ideological extremists defect from their party more often than their moderate counterparts. In particular, we find

greater evidence for this type of strategic party disloyalty in states with high intra-party competition and low inter-

party competition and less evidence in states with high inter-party competition.

Keywords

state legislatures, party competition, party loyalty