Home Michael A. Bailey
		Working Papers Tea Party · Bailey, Mummolo and Noel. “Tea Party Influence: A Story of Activists and Elites” Forthcoming in American Politics Research Understanding how the Tea Party has affected congressional elections and roll call voting helps us understand not only an important political movement, but how movements affect politics more generally. We investigate four different ways in which the movement might influence political outcomes: activists, constituent opinion, group endorsement activity and elite-level self-identification. Our ability to distinguish the effects of these interrelated areas of strength is enhanced by the surprisingly low correlation of measures for each. We find consistent evidence that activists mattered both electorally and for roll call voting on issues of importance to the movement. Constituent opinion had virtually no impact on either political outcome. Group endorsement activity had possible effects on elections, but mostly no effect on congressional voting. Self-identification among elites did not enhance -- or harm -- Republican electoral fortunes, but did affect congressional votes important to the movement. These divergent results illustrate how movement politics can influence outcomes through multiple channels and call into question the usefulness of the ``Tea Party'' moniker without important qualifiers. Campaign Finance · “Do Campaign Contributions Lead to Policies That Favor the Wealthy? An Examination of Taxing and Spending in the American States” Understanding if and how campaign contributions affect policy is important for many policy and normative debates. In this paper, I use data on gubernatorial spending and state level policy from 1978 to 2000 to assess three competing perspectives on money in politics: the wealth bias perspective, the minimal effects perspective and the neo-pluralist perspective. The results are most consistent with the neo-pluralist perspective, as increased campaign spending appears to have systematic effects (contradicting the minimal effects thesis) and that these effects are not in the direction of policies benefiting the wealthy (contradicting the wealth bias perspective). Campaign spending is associated with higher spending in areas where spending has broad public support and is associated with lower spending where that is not the case. You may also be interested in the following published and forthcoming works.
·