Sarah Anderson and Daniel Butler - Rejecting Compromise: Legislators’ Fear of Primary Voters
Sarah Anderson, Associate Professor of Environmental Politics, UC Santa Barbara
,Daniel Butler, Associate Professor of Political Science, UC San Diego
Legislative solutions to pressing problems like balancing the budget, climate change and poverty usually require compromise, but we show that many legislators at different levels of government reject compromise proposals that move policy in their preferred direction. Why do legislators reject such compromise offers? We find that legislators exacerbate gridlock by rejecting compromise proposals because they fear being punished in primary elections. In this way, legislators’ electoral interests can cause them to act in ways that hurt their policy interests and may lead to representation of the uncompromising positions held by a subset of their voters at the expense of the broader electorates’ preferences. While this rejection of compromise due to fear of primary voter punishment is likely exacerbating gridlock, we show that negotiating outside of the public spotlight may improve the likelihood of achieving compromise.
Sarah Anderson arrived at the Bren School in 2007, bringing expertise in political structures and dynamics, which profoundly influence environmental policy. Her research interests include legislatures, political parties, public policy, statistical methods, and environmental politics. Those interests are reflected in her experience in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a U.S. congressman’s legislative assistant and also researched legislation to brief members of the House National Parks and Public Lands Subcommittee. Her current projects include an extension of her dissertation work, in which she analyzed (and found serious limitations to) the three main models for predicting government spending at the level of appropriations bills. In other projects, she is working to quantify the impact of environmentally concerned constituents on congressional voting, and seeking to determine the degree to which environmental voting, agricultural voting, and voting in other policy areas reflect more general voting in Congress.
Dan Butler studies American Politics. He focuses on questions related to representation and the behavior of elites and often uses experiments to do so. He is author of the book Representing the Advantaged (Cambridge University Press). His research has also appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and various other journals. Butler primarily teaches course in American politics.