Andrew Reeves

Published & Forthcoming Articles

• Douglas L. Kriner and Andrew Reeves. 2012. "The Influence of Federal Spending on Presidential Elections." American Political Science Review, 106(2).
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  • abstract [show || hide]
    Do voters reward presidents for increased federal spending in their local constituencies? Previous research on the electoral consequences of federal spending has focused almost exclusively on Congress, mostly with null results. In a county- and individual-level study of presidential elections from 1988 to 2008, we present evidence that voters reward incumbent presidents (or their party's nominee) for increased federal spending in their communities. This relationship is stronger in battleground states. Furthermore, we show that federal grants are an electoral currency whose value depends on both the clarity of partisan responsibility for its provision and the characteristics of the recipients. Presidents enjoy increased support from spending in counties represented by co-partisan members of Congress. We also find that at the individual level ideology conditions the response of constituents to spending; liberal and moderate voters reward presidents for federal spending at higher levels than conservatives. Our results suggest that although voters may claim to favor deficit reduction, the presidents who deliver such benefits are rewarded at the ballot box.
  
  
• Andrew Reeves and James G. Gimpel. 2012. "Ecologies of Unease: Geographic Context and National Economic Evaluations." Political Behavior, 34(2):221-249.
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  • media coverage: The New York Times | The Monkey Cage
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    Assessment of the nation's economic performance has been repeatedly linked to voters' decision-making in U.S. presidential elections. Here we inquire as to where those economic evaluations originate. One possibility in the politicized environment of a major campaign is that they are partisan determinations and do not reflect actual economic circumstances. Another possibility is that these judgments arise from close attention to news media, which is presumably highlighting national economic conditions as a facet of campaign coverage. Still a third explanation is that voters derive their national economic evaluations from living out their lives in particular localities which may or may not be experiencing the conditions that affect the nation as a whole. Drawing upon data from the 2008 presidential election, we find that varying local conditions do shape the economic evaluations of political independents. Moreover, unemployment is not the only salient factor, as fuel prices and foreclosures also figured prominently. Local economic factors, what we call geotropic considerations, shape national economic evaluations especially for those who aren't making these judgments on simple partisan grounds.
  
  
• Andrew Reeves. 2011. "Political Disaster: Unilateral Powers, Electoral Incentives, and Presidential Disaster Declarations." Journal of Politics, 73(4):1142-1151.
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  • related Los Angeles Times op-eds from an earlier version of the paper [1|2]
  • abstract [show || hide]
    I argue that presidents use unilateral powers for particularistic aims to gain electoral support. Specifically, I examine presidential disaster declarations, which allow presidents to unilaterally authorize potentially billions of dollars to specific constituencies. In an analysis extending from 1981 to 2004, I find that a state's electoral competitiveness influences whether they receive a disaster declaration from the president. A highly competitive state can expect to receive twice as many presidential disaster declarations as an uncompetitive state. This relationship has existed since the passage of the 1988 Stafford Act, which expanded the disaster declaration powers of the president. Additionally, I find that these decisions have the intended electoral benefits -- voters react and reward presidents for presidential disaster declarations. A president can expect over a one point increase in a statewide contest in return for a single presidential disaster declaration.
  
  
• Lanhee J. Chen and Andrew Reeves. 2011. "Turning Out the Base or Appealing to the Periphery? An Analysis of County-Level Candidate Appearances in the 2008 Presidential Campaign." American Politics Research, 39(3):534-556.
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  • media coverage: usnews.com | The Monkey Cage
  • abstract [show || hide]
    We examine county-level campaign appearances by the Republican and Democratic tickets during the 2008 general election. Our analysis reveals that the McCain-Palin ticket campaigned in a way that was quite different from the Obama-Biden ticket. McCain-Palin pursued a "base" strategy that was focused on counties where Bush-Cheney performed well in 2004. They also stayed away from counties that showed vote swings from 2000 to 2004 or population growth. On the other hand, the performance of the Kerry-Edwards ticket in 2004 was a very weak predictor of where Obama-Biden campaigned in 2008. They pursued a "peripheral" strategy that targeted counties that had experienced significant population growth. Their efforts to target peripheral, rather than base constituencies, have significant implications for our understanding of presidential campaign strategy.
  
  
• John T. Gasper and Andrew Reeves. 2011. "Make it Rain? Retrospection and the Attentive Electorate in the Context of Natural Disasters." American Journal of Political Science, 55(2):340-355.
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  • media coverage: The National Times of Australia
  • featured
  • abstract [show || hide]
    Are election outcomes driven by events beyond the control of politicians? Democratic accountability requires that voters make reasonable evaluations of incumbents. Although natural disasters are beyond human control, the response to these events is the responsibility of elected officials. In a county-level analysis of gubernatorial and presidential elections from 1970 to 2006, we examine the effects of weather events and governmental responses. We find that electorates punish presidents and governors for severe weather damage. However, we find that these effects are dwarfed by the response of attentive electorates to the actions of their officials. When the president rejects a request by the governor for federal assistance, the president is punished and the governor is rewarded at the polls. The electorate is able to separate random events from governmental responses and attribute actions based on the defined roles of these two politicians.
  
  
• Ryan T. Moore and Andrew Reeves. 2011. "The Job Market's First Steps: Using Research Tools to Simplify the Process." PS: Political Science & Politics, 44(2):385-391.
  • software page
  • using murl
  • using apsa2html
  • abstract [show || hide]
    Excitement about the political science job market builds around the time of the Labor Day Annual Meeting of the APSA, when schools start to post their openings for the next year. As we entered the job market, we found ourselves repeatedly collecting information about available positions as we prepared application materials. We monitored APSA's eJobs website, cut and pasted relevant job information into a single spreadsheet, and assembled letters using that information. Here, we introduce free and open-source tools to automate these data collection and letter generation procedures using R and LaTeX. Our system minimizes manual data entry by extracting and creating a spreadsheet from APSA's eJobs information. We walk applicants through the initial job search steps, including using eJobs, compiling position information, and producing attractive letters.
  
  
• Andrew Reeves, Lanhee J. Chen, and Tiffany Nagano. 2004. "A Reassessment of 'The Methods behind the Madness: Presidential Electoral College Strategies, 1988-1996'." Journal of Politics, 66(2):616-620.
  
  • related
  • replication materials
  • abstract [show || hide]
    Daron Shaw (1999) offers evidence for the predictable and systematic effects of campaign strategy. This article has influenced other scholars who rely on its findings in support of key assumptions about the strategic behavior of presidential candidates (Damore 2002; Heppen 2001; Prior 2001; Stoker and Bowers 2002). To conclude that candidates form campaign strategy based on predictable factors such as competitiveness, electoral vote share, and the cost of TV advertisements, Shaw (1999) claims to use "ordered probit" (1999, 906) instead of least-squares regression (LS) to avoid familiar problems with ordinal dependent variables. Then, to conclude that electoral college strategy is a strong exogenous predictor of campaign resource allocation, Shaw claims to use "two-stage least squares (2SLS)" (1999, 907) to avoid problems with endogeneity bias. Attempting to replicate Shaw's (1999) results, we discover that both analyses are actually LS regressions presented as if they were ordinal probit and 2SLS. When we perform ordinal probit and 2SLS analyses, all substantive findings in Shaw (1999) vanish.