showing that citizens’ perceptions of the president’s issue position and the federal
government’s position tend to be different, Fiorina (1988, 449) suggests that voters
perceive the interaction between office holders. He also shows that the correlations
between these perceived positions have a lower value in a divided government than
in a unified one. Similarly, Lacy and Paolino (1998) show that in the 1996 election,
voters perceived a difference between a candidate’s policy position and the policy
position of the government with that candidate as the president. This difference
came from voters’ expectations about which party would control the legislature.
However, most research on electoral behavior ignores this problem and assumes
that voters’ decisions are based on which party’s platform they prefer most, not the
policy effect of the vote they cast. In this paper, I model an on-year election, which
elects both the president and legislators who together make national policy, and
show how policy motivated voters behave when they vote for two different offices in
simultaneous elections.
In my model, there are two parties with distinct ideal policies that compete for
votes in a one-dimensional policy space. The presidential and legislative elections are
held simultaneously. The president is elected by plurality rule and each legislator is
elected by plurality rule in a single-member district. Policy outcomes in this model
are a function of the ideal point of the party that holds the presidency and the party
that wins a majority in the legislature. More specifically, the policy outcome is a
weighted average of the policy positions of the president and the majority party in
the legislature, with the weights given exogenously.
Given such an electoral system, voters do not make an independent choice for
different offices. Voters to the left of the left party’s policy position should always
vote for the left party for both the president and the legislator. Also, for voters to
the right of the right party, always voting for the right party is the best strategy.
However, voters with ideal points between the left and right party’s positions may
not want to have a government dominated by one party because they prefer moderate
policy outcomes. Therefore, these voters take into account the interaction between
the executive and the legislature in forming a policy and strategically vote for a
divided government.
This model has an implication consistent with split-ticket voting behavior and
divided government, which has been an important issue in American politics. Em-
pirically, U.S. elections since the 1950s have seen a substantial number of voters who
vote for one party in the presidential election and for another party in the legislative
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Convention