The Macro-dynamics of Partisan Advantage

• Author: Matthew Tarpey,Jonathan Woon,Logan Dancey
• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912918793231
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912918793231

Political Research Quarterly

2019, Vol. 72(2) 450 –459

© 2018 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912918793231

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Article

Recent history demonstrates how dramatically parties’

reputations change alongside their legislative and elec-

toral fortunes. In 2006, the public seemed to have lost

complete faith in the Republican Party’s ability to govern.

Survey after survey showed that the public believed the

Democratic Party could do a better job handling almost

every major political issue: the war in Iraq, the economy,

taxes, federal spending, ethics, immigration, Social

Security, health care, and even gas prices. The Democratic

Party’s reputational advantage contributed to substantial

electoral gains in the midterm elections, resulting in the

Democrats retaking control of Congress. But just four

years later—even after capturing the presidency and

gaining additional seats in 2008—highly divisive legisla-

tive accomplishments gave way to a reversal of fortune.

This time, Democrats suffered heavy losses, and

Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives in

the 2010 midterms. By February 2013, the tides turned

again: the Republican Party now found itself unpopular

with the public and struggling to dictate the agenda of a

chamber it controlled, with the Republican majority in

the House finding itself on the losing side of high-profile

votes on changes in the tax code, hurricane relief, and the

Violence Against Women Act.

We might expect legislative success and party reputa-

tions to be tied to one another, but there is a surprising

lack of empirical support for the relationship between the

two concepts. Few studies have examined the link

between legislative performance and the parties’ fortunes

(e.g., Koger and Lebo 2017), despite the important link-

age between parties’ brand names and their ability to

carry out their legislative agenda in prominent theories of

political parties (e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005).

In this paper, we fill this void by exploring a key element

of the two parties’ reputations—their perceived handling

of public policy—and examine the extent to which

Congress influences the public’s view of it.

Relying on a dataset of quarterly evaluations of the

two parties’ perceived handling of issues from 1980 to

2016, our analysis shows that policy reputations are not

reliably tied to congressional evaluations. In addition, we

find no evidence to support the assumption that a party’s

lack of success at controlling the agenda in the House has

negative repercussions for its reputation. Instead, the

public looks predominantly to the president to form judg-

ments about the relative standing of the two parties. The

results raise important questions about how to square the

weak relationship between party reputations and congres-

sional evaluations with its presumed theoretical role in

motivating the value of House agenda control (Cox and

McCubbins 1993, 2005) and with recent evidence that

congressional approval is related to party evaluations at

the individual level (Jones 2015). In addition, the results

provide further evidence of the executive as a focal point

for citizens’ evaluation of political parties.

793231PRQXXX10.1177/1065912918793231Political Research QuarterlyDancey et al.

research-article2018

1Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA

2University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jonathan Woon, Department of Political Science, University of

Pittsburgh, 4600 Wesley W. Posvar Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.

Email: woon@pitt.edu

The Macro-dynamics of

Partisan Advantage

Logan Dancey1, Matthew Tarpey2, and Jonathan Woon2

Abstract

How do party reputations change over time? We construct a measure of the common movement in the parties’

perceived policy handling abilities for the period 1980 to 2016 and investigate its relationship with the public’s

evaluation of Congress and the president. In contrast to key claims made in theories of congressional parties, we

find an inconsistent relationship between evaluations of Congress and party reputations and find no evidence that

successful agenda control enhances the majority party’s reputation. Instead, our analysis shows a strong relationship

between party reputations and presidential approval, reaffirming the central role the president plays in shaping

party reputations.

Keywords

political parties, public opinion, party reputations, agenda control, aggregate opinion, time series