A colleague recently flagged this paper on a polisci listserv. It seems an important antidote to speculation—e.g., this, from a year ago, by Adam Nagourney—about GOP gains in the governor’s mansion, however likely they may be.
Using panel data from US states over the period 1941-2002, I measure the impact of gubernatorial partisanship on a wide range of different policy settings and economic outcomes. Across 32 measures, there are surprisingly few differences in policy settings, social outcomes and economic outcomes under Democrat and Republican Governors. In terms of policies, Democratic Governors tend to prefer slightly higher minimum wages. Under Republican Governors, incarceration rates are higher, while welfare caseloads are higher under Democratic Governors. In terms of social and economic outcomes, Democratic Governors tend to preside over higher median post-tax income, lower posttax inequality, and lower unemployment rates. However, for 26 of the 32 dependent variables, gubernatorial partisanship does not have a statistically significant impact on policy outcomes and social welfare. I find no evidence of gubernatorial partisan differences in tax rates, welfare generosity, the number of government employees or their salaries, state revenue, incarceration rates, execution rates, pre-tax incomes and inequality, crime rates, suicide rates, and test scores. These results are robust to the use of regression discontinuity estimation, to take account of the possibility of reverse causality. Overall, it seems that Governors behave in a fairly non-ideological manner.
That is from a 2008 paper by Andrew Leigh. Here are gated and ungated versions.
The tendency to treat elections by as a horse race makes it hard to acknowledge that electing a new party may not change policy that much. After all, if policy won’t change much, why should we fixate on who is winning and losing during the campaign? This leads people to overestimate executive power and underestimate how much current policies can be protected by less visible actors, such as legislators, bureaucrats, and interest groups.
Policies, like political institutions, tend to be sticky. That’s hardly a novel point, but it bears repeating.
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The data are from 1941 to 2002? Okay, I haven’t read the paper, but just skimming the tables, the analysis doesn’t seem to have a time trend variable in there. So during the first thirty years or so of the data set, you have Democratic southern governors as the most conservative governors in the country. (Think George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Ross Barnett, etc.) That’s just got to be messing things up. Okay, maybe the “percent black” variable controls for southernness to some extent, but I’m thinking that you’d get much greater distinction between the parties’ governors if you limited the analysis to 1980 forward.
Just a guess.
I agree with Seth above that the findings of this particular study shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The authors of the article seem to be just throwing a bunch of variables into a regression. The real point, as John says, that large policy changes don’t happen very often, so, when you look at lots and lots of elections, the average effect of the governor’s party (say) will tend to be small.
In addition, perhaps the decisions of governors are constrained by a few factors: proximity to their constituents; a smaller number of other agents to blame things on; fewer compelling distractions like wars; and more visible cause-and-effect between income and resource streams versus costs of necessary state projects like roads and buildings.
Having to respond to real stuff tends to polish the decorative partisan fins and chrome off politicians, I surmise. Not that the partisans don’t have differing views, but that their freedom to indulge them is less.
John, thanks for the kind plug.
Seth, the paper includes year fixed effects.
Andrew, so far as I recall, other papers that look at the issue come up with the same result. Here’s one for mayors.
OK, now back to my own election campaign!
Andrew Leigh: Thanks for the link. Let me restate. Instead of saying, “the findings of this particular study shouldn’t be taken too seriously,” let me rephrase as, “the findings of this particular study can be understood in light of the general issue, pointed out by John, that that large policy changes don’t happen very often, so, when you look at lots and lots of elections, the average effect of the governor’s party (say) will tend to be small.”
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