Speaker: Jon MacKay
Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Join us for refreshments starting at 2 p.m. The lecture will start at 2:30 p.m. and run till approximately 3:30 p.m. A Q and A with the speaker will follow the lecture.
Abstract
Congressional parties are commonly viewed as unified legislative teams, but recent intraparty battles have revealed serious ideological divisions within the House Republican Party. Using annual ratings from nearly 300 interest groups, we estimate the ideological locations of Republican legislators in order to map their party’s factional structure. Based on the distribution of interest-group support from 2001 to 2012, we detect three Republican factions: worker oriented, pro-business, and ethno-radical. We find that Republican leaders block bills by legislators in the worker and ethno-radical subgroups, and that they advance bills by members in the corporate faction. (Working paper: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2700233)
Biography
Jon MacKay received a PhD in management sciences from the University of Waterloo. He recently returned from a research fellowship in the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. This paper is a joint work with William Bendix, a congressional scholar at Keene State College in New Hampshire and fellow graduate of the University of Waterloo (BA, MA).