The main idea in this research is that the meaning of an election is socially constructed. There may or may not be a signal or mandate in the election, but there isn’t an objective empirical way to determine whether or not this mandate is real. It is possible, however, measure how the media perceives and constructs the meaning of an election. In particular, the key to the media perceiving an election as a mandate is not the size of the presidential margin of victory. Instead, it is the consistency of the winning party’s gains across all elected offices that matter. When one party wins the presidency easily, gains seats in the House, the Senate, and in Governor’s mansions, the media is more likely to see the election as have a clear ideological signal.
These constructed meanings are fleeting. As the Congressional session proceeds, the election’s meaning is re-constructed and the perception of a mandate fades.
These fleeting moments of unusual politics, however, are quite consequential. In our first paper “Congressional Response to Mandate Elections” (co-authored with Larry Grossback, Amy Gangl, and Jim Stimson), we demonstrate that members of Congress respond to these mandate beliefs by changing their pattern of roll call votes. MC’s respond to the signal they receive about the preferences of their constituents from both the national media construction of the meaning of the election, and the signal they received on Election Day from their own constituents.
Our second paper, “Comparing Competing theories on the Causes of Mandate Elections” (co-authored with Larry Grossback and Jim Stimson) tests if the signal that MC’s respond to stems more from presidential election outcomes of congressional election outcomes. Are results show that presidential elections are not an important predictor of how Congress reacts. Instead, MC’s respond to what the election means for Congress.
The third paper “Electoral Mandates in American Politics” (co-authored with Larry Grossback and Jim Stimson) in this agenda addresses, among other things, the policy implications of these reactions to mandate elections. In it, we simulate the outcome of roll call votes if MC’s had not changed their voting patterns as a result of the mandate perception. We show that several of the most important pieces of legislation in the last 50 years would have either failed or been gutted if it were not for the mandates.
All of these ideas are further explored in our book, “Mandate Politics” (co-authored with Larry Grossback and Jim Stimson). In addition, we develop the theory of how the media constructs these messages in more detail, demonstrate how the mandates altered the behavior and identities of the key “pivots” in Congress, and look at the electoral implications of responding to what may have been an erroneous mandate interpretation of the previous election.
More recently, Julia Azari and I have been working on a new manuscript updating some of the previous work and combining the theoretic approach Julia uses in her work. We find that the rhetorical attempts by the president to frame elections as mandates has significant effects on the roll call voting of MCs.