Byengseon Bae

Byengseon Bae

Research

Algara, Carlos and Byengseon Bae. 2024. “Do Quality Candidates and Incumbents Still Matter in the Partisan World? Comparing Trends & Relationship Between Candidate Differentials and Congressional Election Outcomes, 1900-2022” Journal of Political Marketing. 1-23. Link

The increase in elite-level polarization and changing partisan nature of elections to the U.S. House led scholars to posit that candidate characteristics are minor considerations in determining these election outcomes. However, it is not clear if these trends extend to the U.S. Senate or if candidate considerations have lost the relatively minor predictive power they exhibited during the 2010s, particularly as partisanship continued to rise as a predictor of election outcomes. Using historical data on elections to the U.S. House and Senate from 1900 to the recent 2022 midterm elections, we test whether the incumbency advantage and candidate quality differentials are still salient predictors of congressional elections. We find that the incumbency advantage largely disappeared as a salient component of election outcomes for both chambers as partisanship increasingly shapes these outcomes. By contrast, we find that candidate quality differentials, while waning, still can play a considerable role in shaping congressional election outcomes, particularly in the Senate. We conclude by showing that the declining emergence of quality candidates may have played a pivotal role during the 2022 election cycle by costing Republicans control of the U.S. Senate.

The causes for persistently high and increasing maternal mortality rates in the United States have been elusive. We use the shift in the ideological direction of the Republican and the Democratic parties in the 1960s, to test the hypothesis that fluctuations in overall and race-specific maternal mortality rates (MMR) follow the power shifts between the parties before and after the Political Realignment (PR) of the 1960s. Using time-series data analysis methods, we find that, net of trend, overall and race- specific MMRs were higher under Democratic administrations than Republican ones before the PR (1915-1965)—i.e., when the Democratic Party was a protector of the Jim Crow system. This pattern, however, changed after the PR (1966-2007), with Republican administrations underperforming Democratic ones—i.e., during the period when the Republican Party shifted toward a more economically and socially conservative agenda. The pre-post PR partisan shifts in MMRs were larger for Black (9.5%) relative to White mothers (7.4%) during the study period. These findings imply that parties and the ideological direction of their agendas substantively affect the social determinants of maternal health and produce politized health outcomes.

Bae, Byengseon and Carlos Algara. 2023. “Fenno’s Paradox in a Polarized Age: How Polarization Lowers the Mass Public’s Assessments of Congress and Legislators.” Congress & the Presidency. 50(1): 76-107. Link

Fenno (1975) famously posited that the mass public’s assessments of the U.S. Congress are rooted in a paradox, with citizens holding negative evaluations of the collective Congress while holding favorable views of their individual members of Congress. Since the conceptualization of “Fenno’s Paradox,” Congress underwent pronounced changes due to increased ideological polarization between increasingly homogeneous parties comprised of more partisan loyal, ideologically extreme legislators. In this article, we ask whether this partisan polarization shifted the public’s assessments of Congress and their individual representatives over time. Leveraging over 45 years of new data measuring the monthly approval of Congress and legislators with generalized error correction models, we find that greater polarization lowers the approval rating of both over time, suggesting that greater polarization weakens Fenno’s Paradox by considerably lowering legislator approval. We explore the underlying mechanism of this finding at the individual level, finding that co-partisan support for Congress and opposing-partisan support for legislators has collapsed since 1980. Taken together, our results suggest that partisan polarization plays a large role in motivating the historic decline in congressional approval and the ability of legislators to amass a personal incumbency advantage.

The US two-party system was transformed in the 1960s when the Democratic Party abandoned its Jim Crow protectionism to incorporate the policy agenda fostered by the civil rights movement, and the Republican Party redirected its platform toward socioeconomic and racial conservatism. The authors argue that the policy agendas promoted by the two parties through presidents and state legislatures codify a racially patterned access to resources and power detrimental to the health of all. To test the hypothesis that fluctuations in overall and race-specific infant mortality rates (IMRs) shift between the parties in power before and after the political realignment (PR), the authors apply panel data analysis methods to state-level data from the National Center for Health Statistics for the period 1915 through 2017. Net of trend, overall, and race-specific IMRs were not statistically different between presidential parties before the PR. This pattern, however, changed after the PR, with Republican administrations consistently underperforming Democratic ones. Net of trend, non-Southern state legislatures controlled by Republicans underperform Democratic ones in overall and racial IMRs in both periods.