Scholars@Duke
John Aldrich

John Aldrich CV

Pfizer, Inc./Edmund T. Pratt, Jr. University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Political Science
Box 90209, Durham, NC 27708-0289
404B Old Chemistry, Box 90204, Durham, NC 27708-0289
CV

Selected Publications

The fundamental voter: American electoral democracy, 1952-2020

Book · June 20, 2024 This book asks three questions. How have American national elections changed in the last seventy years? Why have they changed as they did? What are the consequences of these changes for democracy in America? Chapter 1 shows that elections up through 1984 d ... Full text Cite

Duncan Black: Heir to Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment

Journal Article National Institute Economic Review · November 3, 2023 Duncan Black, like Adam Smith before him, was trained at, and taught at, the University of Glasgow. Like Smith, Black followed the Enlightenment in appreciating the importance of theory and of its empirical applications. Black sought to apply the ideas of ... Full text Cite

Understanding people’s choice when they have two votes

Journal Article Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties · October 1, 2020 This paper introduces a model of vote choice in mixed-member proportional representation systems where electors cast two votes. Despite the growing popularity of mixed systems around the world, a recent stream of literature suggests that the candidate vote ... Full text Cite

New forms of mobilization, new people mobilized? Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems

Journal Article Party Politics · September 1, 2020 Mobilization efforts by parties and candidates during election campaigns tend to reach those who are more likely to vote in the first place. This is thought to be particularly consequential for turnout among the young. Harder and less cost-effective to rea ... Full text Cite

Does a partisan public increase democratic stability?

Chapter · January 1, 2020 Philip Converse argued that partisanship was itself a stable attribute over time, with parental socialization the key mechanism of transmission and source of stability. He implied that stability in partisanship was an important source of stability in democ ... Full text Cite

Incognizance and Perceptual Deviation: Individual and Institutional Sources of Variation in Citizens’ Perceptions of Party Placements on the Left–Right Scale

Journal Article Political Behavior · June 1, 2018 In this paper we use comparative study of electoral systems data to understand the variation in citizens’ perceptions of political party placements on the left–right scale. We estimate multilevel models to assess the extent to which individual characterist ... Full text Cite

Why Parties Matter Political Competition and Democracy in the American South

Book · January 10, 2018 Why Parties Matter argues that a competitive party system is essential in order to have the public's preferences and wants expressed and satisfied in elections. ... Cite

Does the gift keep on giving? House leadership PAC donations before and after majority status

Journal Article Journal of Politics · October 1, 2017 Party leaders face a significant trade-off financing races when the party is out of power: while they care about gaining control of the House, they do not know how willing a potential representative will be to work with and for the party once elected. Lead ... Full text Cite

Party, Policy, and the Ambition to Run for Higher Office

Journal Article Legislative Studies Quarterly · May 1, 2017 This article examines why some state legislators run for Congress and others do not. Our main argument is that there are differences in the expected value of a state legislative seat and the expected benefits of being a member of Congress. One key componen ... Full text Cite

Party politics in America

Book · January 1, 2017 The seventeenth edition of Party Politics in America continues the comprehensive and authoritative coverage of political parties for which it is known while expanding and updating the treatment of key related topics including interest groups and elections. ... Full text Cite

TURNOUT AND THE CALCULUS OF VOTING: Recent advances and prospects for integration with theories of campaigns and elections

Chapter · January 1, 2017 After a review of the basics of the calculus of voting with respect to turnout, this chapter considers two relatively new theoretical advances: the development of a fully articulated theory of expressive voting; and specification of the utility function. I ... Full text Cite

Getting out the vote in the social media era: Are digital tools changing the extent, nature and impact of party contacting in elections?

Journal Article Party Politics · March 1, 2016 This paper compares the spread and impact of new digital modes of voter mobilization with more traditional methods (phone, mail and in person canvassing) in recent national elections in the US and UK. We develop hypotheses regarding the relative effects of ... Full text Cite

Joseph A. Schlesinger In Memoriam

Journal Article PS-POLITICAL SCIENCE & POLITICS · October 1, 2015 Link to item Cite

How the public in the US, Latin America, and East Asia sees an emerging China

Journal Article European Review · March 25, 2015 The People's Republic of China's dramatic transformation has not only benefited its people, but has also led it to become a major player in the world. Here we examine how deeply perceptions of China have penetrated into the public's perceptions in a wide v ... Full text Cite

Did Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison "Cause" the U.S. Government Shutdown? the institutional path from an eighteenth century republic to a twenty-first century democracy

Journal Article Perspectives on Politics · March 6, 2015 This address asks how we got to today's politics in America; a politics of polarized political parties engaged in close political competition in a system of checks and balances. The result has often been divided control of government and an apparent inabil ... Full text Cite

How do Americans view the rising China?

Journal Article Journal of Contemporary China · March 4, 2015 The dramatic increase in China’s economic and hence political power and influence is a common story around the world. Just how clearly and well does this story get across to citizens of some nations other than China, itself? In particular, we ask what Amer ... Full text Cite

Blame, Responsibility, and the Tea Party in the 2010 Midterm Elections

Journal Article Political Behavior · September 2014 Full text Cite

Interdisciplinarity: Its Role in a Discipline-based Academy

Book · August 7, 2014 Their emergence at that time fundamentally altered how universities were constructed and how they did their business. It is the model on which the academy of the twenty-first century operates. ... Cite

Change and Continuity in the 2012 Elections

Book · April 7, 2014 The 2012 edition, with its current scholarship and its excellent use and display of data, covers the most recent presidential and Congressional elections, voter turnout, and the social forces, party loyalties, and prominent issues that ... ... Cite

Sophisticated and myopic? Citizen preferences for Electoral College reform

Journal Article Public Choice · March 1, 2014 Different institutions can produce more (or less) preferred outcomes, in terms of citizens' preferences. Consequently, citizen preferences over institutions may "inherit"-to use William Riker's term-the features of preferences over outcomes. But the level ... Full text Cite

Revisiting Media Effects in Authoritarian Societies: Democratic Conceptions, Collectivistic Norms, and Media Access in Urban China

Journal Article Politics and Society · January 1, 2014 We argue that, to effectively understand media effects in authoritarian societies, researchers must assess different types of media strategies adopted by authoritarian leaders. Using survey data from two Chinese cities, we examine the effects of two types ... Full text Cite

Polarization and ideology: Partisan sources of low dimensionality in scaled roll call analyses

Journal Article Political Analysis · January 1, 2014 In this article, we challenge the conclusion that the preferences of members of Congress are best represented as existing in a low-dimensional space. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations altering assumptions regarding the dimensionality and distribution of m ... Full text Cite

2000-2004 Presidential Donor Survey

Dataset · October 1, 2013 Following the 2000 United States presidential election a team of faculty conducted a mail survey of donors who had contributed to any of eight presidential candidates. These included two Democrats (Bill Bradley and Al Gore), five Republicans (Gary Bauer, G ... Cite

The British general election of 2010 under different voting rules

Journal Article Electoral Studies · March 1, 2013 The 2010 British election resulted in what the British refer to as a " hung Parliament" for the first time in over a generation. This result further heightened the debate over the fairness and utility of the nation's centuries-old first-past-the-post (FPTP ... Full text Cite

Bifurcated images of the U.S. in Urban China and the impact of media environment

Chapter · January 1, 2013 The Chinese public’s prevailing admiration and respect for the United States was widely observed in the 1980s when reforms first began. However, since the early 1990s significant anti-American sentiments have started to emerge in China. Such a dramatic shi ... Full text Cite

House Appropriations After the Republican Revolution

Journal Article Congress and the Presidency · September 1, 2012 This article applies the theory of "conditional party government" (CPG) to the interaction between the majority party and the Appropriations Committee in the period following the Republican Revolution of 1995. We extend the analysis of Aldrich and Rohde (2 ... Full text Cite

Analytical and biological methods for probing the blood-brain barrier.

Chapter · January 2012 The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is an important interface between the peripheral and central nervous systems. It protects the brain against the infiltration of harmful substances and regulates the permeation of beneficial endogenous substances from the blood ... Full text Cite

Improving public opinion surveys: Interdisciplinary innovation and the American national election studies

Journal Article Improving Public Opinion Surveys: Interdisciplinary Innovation and the American National Election Studies · December 5, 2011 The American National Election Studies (ANES) is the premier social science survey program devoted to voting and elections. Conducted during the presidential election years and midterm Congressional elections, the survey is based on interviews with voters ... Cite

Introduction to the volume

Book · December 5, 2011 Full text Cite

Bifurcated images of the U.S. in Urban China and the impact of media environment

Journal Article Political Communication · July 1, 2011 The Chinese public's prevailing admiration and respect for the United States was widely observed in the 1980s when reforms first began. However, since the early 1990s significant anti-American sentiments have started to emerge in China. Such a dramatic shi ... Full text Cite

Elinor Ostrom and the "just right" solution

Journal Article Public Choice · June 1, 2010 Elinor Ostrom is justly valued for her contributions to understanding the nature of and solution to common pool resource problems (CPRs). Her solution is generally referred to as balancing the aim of reducing the high costs associated with political soluti ... Full text Cite

Change and continuity in the 2008 elections

Book · January 1, 2010 One of the first texts to make use of the 2008 National Election Study results, this new edition of Change and Continuity will put the momentous recent elections into historical context for your students. Questions considered include: What were the impact ... Full text Cite

Consequences of Electoral and Institutional Change: The Evolution of Conditional Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives1

Chapter · January 1, 2010 The U.S. Congress has changed in many ways over the last fifty years, but perhaps the most dramatic has been the changing role of the political parties. David Mayhew’s study of the Congress (published in 1974) argued that political parties were weak instit ... Full text Cite

Comparing Strategic Voting Under FPTP and PR

Journal Article Comparative Political Studies · January 2010 Based on recent work that suggests that voters in proportional representation (PR) systems have incentives to cast strategic votes, the authors hypothesize that levels of strategic voting are similar in both first-past-the-post (FPTP) and PR syste ... Full text Cite

Elinor Ostrom and the ‘just right’ solution

Journal Article Public Choice · 2010 Cite

Turnout as a Habit

Journal Article Political Behavior · 2010 Full text Cite

A Review of 'Party Influence in Congress'

Other Congress and the Presidency · 2009 Cite

Parties, Partisanship, and Democratic Politics

Other Perspectives on Politics · January 1, 2009 Full text Open Access Cite

The invisible primary and its effects on democratic choice

Journal Article PS - Political Science and Politics · January 1, 2009 Full text Cite

The Human Face of Economic Globalization: Mexican Migrants and their Support for Free Trade

Journal Article Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies · 2009 Cite

The Eitm Approach: Origins and Interpretations

Chapter · August 21, 2008 This article describes the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s initiative to close the gap between theory and methods. It also deals with the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) as currently understood as a way of thinking about causal infe ... Full text Cite

Treatment Spillover Effects across Survey Experiments

Journal Article Political Analysis · 2008 Cite

Fear in the voting booth: The 2004 presidential election

Journal Article Political Behavior · June 1, 2007 Every presidential election offers interesting questions for analysis, but some elections are more puzzling than others. The election of 2004 involves two linked and countervailing puzzles. The first is: How did President George W. Bush manage to win at al ... Full text Cite

"It's the electability, stupid" - or maybe not? Electability, substance, and strategic voting in presidential primaries

Journal Article Electoral Studies · June 1, 2007 In an experiment that tests the effects of different information on the role of electability and policy considerations in people's evaluations of presidential candidates, we find that both substance and electability affect those assessments. In the context ... Full text Cite

On Elections

Chapter · 2007 Cite

Do voters vote for government coalitions? Testing downs' pessimistic conclusion

Journal Article Party Politics · November 1, 2006 In many countries, elections produce coalition governments. Downs points out that in such cases the rational voter needs to determine what coalitions are possible, i.e. to ascertain their probability and to anticipate the policy compromises that they entai ... Full text Cite

Foreign policy and the electoral connection

Journal Article Annual Review of Political Science · July 14, 2006 Public opinion is central to representation, democratic accountability, and decision making. Yet, the public was long believed to be relatively uninterested in foreign affairs, absent an immediate threat to safety and welfare. It had become conventional to ... Full text Cite

The 2004 Presidential Election: The Emergence of a Permanent Majority?

Journal Article Political Science Quarterly · March 2005 Cite

The 2004 presidential election: The emergence of a permanent majority?

Journal Article Political Science Quarterly · January 1, 2005 Full text Cite

Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models

Journal Article Political Analysis · September 2003 Cite

Introduction to the Special Issue

Journal Article Political Analysis · 2003 This special issue is devoted to original articles that reflect recent progress in one of the most exciting developments in Political Science, the National Science Foundation's (NSF) initiative called Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (E ... Full text Cite

Conditional Party Government in the States

Journal Article American Journal of Political Science · September 2002 Cite

Were Voters Strategic?

Chapter · 2002 Cite

Congress: The Electoral Connection: Reflections on Its First Quarter-Century

Journal Article PS - Political Science and Politics · January 1, 2001 Full text Cite

The republican revolution and the house appropriations committee

Journal Article Journal of Politics · January 1, 2000 This study applies the theory of "conditional party government" to the interaction between the Republican party and the Appropriations Committee in the 104th House, seen in the context of developments since the 96th Congress. As expected by the theory, we ... Full text Cite

Southern Parties in State and Nation

Journal Article Journal of Politics · 2000 Cite

Challenges to the American two-party system: Evidence from the 1968, 1980, 1992, and 1996 presidential elections

Journal Article Political Research Quarterly · January 1, 2000 Recent successes by independent presidential candidates raise questions about the stability of the American two-party system. Students of electoral behavior point to party decline, whereas analysts of party organization see growth and transformation. Analy ... Full text Cite

Issues and the Presidency Primary Voter

Journal Article Political Behavior · September 1994 Cite

A Model of a Legislature with Two Parties and a Committee System

Journal Article Legislative Studies Quarterly · August 1994 Cite

Individual and Contextual Variations in Political Candidate Appraisal

Journal Article American Political Science Review · March 1994 Cite

The Antifederalists, the First Congress, and the First Parties

Journal Article The Journal of Politics · May 1993 Full text Cite

Turnout and Rational Choice

Journal Article American Journal of Political Science · February 1993 Cite

Presidential Selection

Chapter · 1993 Cite

A Game-Theoretic Model of Party Affiliation of Candidates and Office Holders

Journal Article Mathematical and Computer Modeling · 1992 Cite

“Sophisticated” Voting in the 1988 Presidential Primaries

Journal Article American Political Science Review · January 1, 1992 Voters in multicandidate contests may confront circumstances under which it is in their interest to vote for a second- or even lower-ranked candidate. The U.S. electoral system, typically offering a choice between only two major contenders, rarely presents ... Full text Cite

The political economy of sugar legislation

Journal Article Public Choice · June 1, 1991 The findings of this paper are a rather straightforward account of the political economy of senatorial voting on the sugar program. In the spirit of Stigler and Peltzman's accounts of interest group activity, voting on sugar is indeed related to the concen ... Full text Cite

On equilibrium of political institutions

Journal Article Mathematical Social Sciences · December 1990 Full text Cite

Foreign Affairs and Issue Voting: Do Presidential Candidates “Waltz Before a Blind Audience?”

Journal Article American Political Science Review · January 1, 1989 While candidates regularly spend much time and effort campaigning on foreign and defense policies, the thrust of prevailing scholarly opinion is that voters possess little information and weak attitudes on these issues, which therefore have negligible impa ... Full text Cite

A model of party constraints on optimal candidate positions

Journal Article Mathematical and Computer Modelling · 1989 Full text Cite

Progressive Ambition among United States Senators: 1972-1988

Journal Article Journal of Politics · February 1987 Cite

Turnout in American National Elections

Journal Article Research in Micropolitics · 1986 Cite

A Downsian Spatial Model with Party Activism

Journal Article American Political Science Review · December 1983 Cite

The Decline of Electoral Participation in America

Journal Article American Political Science Review · September 1982 Cite

A Dynamic Model of Presidential Nomination Campaigns

Journal Article American Political Science Review · September 1980 Cite

The Relationship Between Size and Stability in the Major Power International System

Journal Article American Journal of Political Science · November 1978 Cite

A Method of Scaling with Applications to the 1968 and 1972 U.S. Presidential Elections

Journal Article American Political Science Review · March 1977 Cite

Some Problems in Testing Two Rational Models of Participation

Journal Article American Journal of Political Science · November 1976 Cite