Charles J. Finocchiaro
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
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A
copy of my curriculum vitae is available in .pdf format as
well. Publications: Michael H. Crespin and Charles J. Finocchiaro. 2008. "Distributive and Partisan Politics in the U.S. Senate: An Exploration of Earmarks." In Why Not Parties? Party Effects in the United States Senate , ed. Nathan W. Monroe, Jason M. Roberts, and David W. Rohde. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 229-251. Charles
J. Finocchiaro and Jeffery A. Jenkins. 2008. "In Search of Killer
Amendments in the Modern U.S. House." Legislative
Studies Quarterly
33: 263-294. Charles
J. Finocchiaro and David W. Rohde. 2008. "War for the Floor: Partisan
Theory and Agenda Control in the U.S. House of Representatives." Legislative
Studies Quarterly. 33: 35-61. Jamie
L. Carson, Michael H. Crespin, Charles J. Finocchiaro, and David W. Rohde. 2007. "Redistricting
and Party Polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives." American
Politics Research
35: 878-904. Charles
J. Finocchiaro and David W. Rohde. 2007. "Speaker David Henderson
and the Partisan Era of the U.S. House." In Party Process, and
Political Change, Volume 2: Further New Perspectives
on the History of Congress,
David W. Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, eds. Stanford: Stanford University
Press. Charles J. Finocchiaro and Bryan W. Marshall. 2004. "Committee Power and Amendment Rights in the U.S. House." American Review of Politics 25: 265-284. Charles
J. Finocchiaro. 2003. "An Institutional View of Congressional
Elections: The Impact of Congressional Image on Seat Change in
the House." Political
Research Quarterly 56: 59-65. Jamie
L. Carson, Charles J. Finocchiaro, and David W. Rohde. 2002. "Partisanship,
Consensus, and Committee-Floor Divergence: A Comparison of Member
Behavior in the 96th
and 104th Congresses." American Politics Research 30: 3-33.
Selected Working Papers: Charles
J. Finocchiaro and Tse-min Lin. "The Hazards of Incumbency: An Event
History Analysis of Congressional Careers." Presented at the 2001
meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Currently revise
and resubmit, Electoral Studies. Charles
J. Finocchiaro. " Credit Claiming, Party Politics, and the Rise of Legislative Entrepreneurship in Congress." Revised version of paper presented at APSA 2006. Charles
J. Finocchiaro. " Constituent Service, Agency Decision Making, and Legislative Influence on the Bureaucracy in the Post-Civil War Era ." History of Congress Conference, George Washington University, May 2008. Michael H. Crespin, Charles J. Finocchiaro, and Eric Wilk. "Are All Votes Treated Equally? Party, Accountability and Electoral Fortunes in the U.S. House of Representatives." SPSA 2006. Charles
J. Finocchiaro and Jeffery A. Jenkins. "Distributive Politics, the Electoral Connection, and the Antebellum U.S. Congress: The Case of Military Service Pensions."
Revised version of paper presented at MPSA 2006. Michael H. Crespin and Charles J. Finocchiaro. "Parties and the Politics of Pork in the U.S. Senate." Charles
J. Finocchiaro and Gregg B. Johnson. "Committee Property Rights, Executive Dominance, and Political Parties in Latin American Legislatures." Revised version of papers presented at MPSA 2005. Michael H. Crespin, Charles J. Finocchiaro, and Emily Wanless. "Perception and Reality in Congressional Earmarks." Charles
J. Finocchiaro. "Revisiting the Partisan Era of the U.S. House:
A Critique of 'Joseph G. Cannon: Majoritarian from Illinois'." An
updated version of the paper presented at the 2001 meeting of the American
Political Science
Association. Jamie
L. Carson, Charles J. Finocchiaro, Eduardo L. Leoni, and David W. Rohde. "Measuring
The Effects of Differential Turnout on House Elections in the 1990s." Presented
at the 2001 meeting of the Southern Political Science Association. Jamie
L. Carson, Charles J. Finocchiaro, and David W. Rohde. "Consensus, Conflict, and Partisanship in House Decision Making: A Bill-Level Examination of Committee and Floor Behavior." Revised version of paper presented at the 2001 meeting of the Midwest
Political Science Association.
Abstracts
The
literature on seat change in U.S. House elections is rife with explanations
regarding
the factors contributing to the biennial change in the partisan balance of
the body. While a number of theoretically and empirically appealing models
have been presented, most if not all base their explanations around presidential
politics and a variety of factors exogenous to the goings-on of members
of
Congress. In this paper, I argue that scholars developing models of congressional
seat change should consider how the actions of the institution and its
corresponding
public image impact the electoral success of its members. I describe and
test a series of models that include variables capturing the influence
of the public's
perception of Congress and inter- and intra-institutional conflict on party
seat change. The results underscore the importance of endogenous factors
in
explaining aggregate seat change in the U.S. House of Representatives. "War for the Floor: Partisan Theory and Agenda Control in the U.S. House of Representatives " This paper extends recent research on partisan agenda control in the U.S. House of Representatives to the issue of procedural control of the legislative agenda via special rules. In particular, we draw out a facet of cartel and conditional party government theories that has been not been addressed in prior analyses—the simultaneous interrelationship between positive and negative agenda control. This perspective is then examined using roll call data on two procedural matters—votes to order the previous question on a special rule and votes to adopt a special rule—covering the period from 1953-2002. We find that in the area of procedural control of the floor agenda, the majority party’s amount of agenda control is dependent to a significant degree upon the party’s homogeneity and power. "Revisiting the Partisan Era of the U.S. House: A Critique of 'Joseph G. Cannon: Majoritarian from Illinois'" This
paper replicates and extends the analysis of one study in the growing body
of research
testing theories of congressional politics historically-Keith Krehbiel and
Alan Wiseman's "Joseph G. Cannon: Majoritarian from Illinois," Legislative
Studies Quarterly 26, 3 (August 2001): 357-389. Krehbiel and Wiseman examine
House members' committee portfolio values for evidence that (1) members
of
the majority party were better off than their minority counterparts and (2)
that Speaker Cannon appreciably sanctioned members for defecting on key
votes.
They find support for neither hypothesis, and instead put forward the notion
of Cannon as majoritarian. Using Krehbiel and Wiseman's data, I present
a
number of issues concerning their analysis and challenge their characterization
of Cannon. The absence of significant effects for party status and member
behavior in their estimates is largely a result of model specification,
exceptionally
high levels of collinearity among the central variables of interest, and
the construction of their hypothesis tests in such a way as to predispose
their
results to Type II errors. My findings reveal general benefits in committee
portfolio values accruing by virtue of majority party status and specific
member sanctions resulting from defection from Cannon's coalition. Thus,
the
pattern of behavior during the Cannon era appears to be more plausibly linked
to the expectations of partisan theory, developed here and elsewhere, as
opposed
to those of majoritarian theory. "Measuring The Effects of Differential Turnout on House Elections in the 1990s" Extant
research on congressional elections attributes changes in the partisan
composition
of the House of Representatives to familiar variables such as the presence
of a quality challenger, campaign spending, incumbent performance, and
the
underlying strength of the partisan base in each district. To date, however,
little systematic attention has been given to the effects of district-level
turnout on incumbents' electoral fortunes. In this paper, we examine the
effect
of differential turnout on House elections in the 1990s, with particular
attention given to the 1994 and 1998 midterm elections. We employ a dataset
including
traditional variables, along with data tapping population growth and voter
turnout throughout the 1990s. We find that not only is differential turnout
an important variable to include in such analyses of congressional elections,
but in the context of a more fully specified model, traditional variables
such as challenger quality decline in explanatory power, with differences
across the two major parties. "The Hazards of Incumbency: An Event History Analysis of Congressional Careers" Studies
of leadership duration employing advanced event history techniques are
quite
common in comparative politics, but relatively few analyses of this type
have been conducted on American congressional careers. The exceptions
to this are
often unsatisfactory because they presuppose hazard functions that are either
constant or monotonically decreasing. In this paper, we explore the impact
of congressional tenure on the hazards of electoral termination while allowing
for general forms of time-dependence. Employing logistic models with indicator
variables, we seek to build a more comprehensive and compelling theory of
the risks associated with congressional careers. Our findings show that
the
likelihood of electoral defeat sharply decreases at the early stage of a
member's career, with the incumbent becoming entrenched after the third
term. In addition,
the hazards increase slightly beyond the tenth term, suggesting constituents'
weariness of a long career. "Speaker David Henderson and the Partisan Era of the U.S. House" In
this paper, we consider a puzzle of the purportedly “partisan
era” of
the U.S. House from 1890-1910. It centers on the Speakership of
David B. Henderson, who served two terms in that office following the
retirement of Thomas B. Reed in 1899. This was a time when the conditions
for strong leadership were likely at their peak, yet Henderson was by
many accounts a relatively weak leader. We draw on the theory of conditional
party government and a variety of sources in seeking to account for the
role and impact of party leadership in this chapter of congressional
history. |
© 2006-2008 Charles J. Finocchiaro