The recent midterm elections indicate that it is often the case that the party of the executive branch loses seats in the legislature. Why do citizens favor gridlock or divided government? My paper with Edward Lopez, "Divided We Vote," is now forthcoming at Public Choice and examines this question at the state level.
Abstract: Divided government is known to correlate with limited government, but less is understood about the empirical conditions that lead to divided government. This paper estimates the determinants of continuous and categorical measures of divided government in an empirical macro political economy model using 30 years of data from the American states. Voters support more divided government after increased government spending per dollar of tax revenues, but more unified government after worsening incomes and unemployment rates. Only conditional support is found for the strategic-moderating theory (Alesina and Rosenthal 1996) that focuses purely on midterm cycles and split-ticket voting absent economic conditions.
You can download a freshly revised copy at SSRN.
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