Party balancing and voting for congress in the 1996 national election

We extend Fiorina's balancing theory by developing and testing inferences f rom a simple and general spatial model of partisan preference in two instit utional dimensions. This model contains a number of theoretical and methodo logical insights that have not yet been articulated in the growing literatu re on the origins of divided government. We focus here on the model's most basic implications, emphasizing first that the act of party balancing requi res that voters have nonseparable partisan preferences across the electoral arenas of U.S. government. We show how it follows that the institution-spe cific partisan preferences of balancers are not defined on the metric that contains the partisan preferences of nonbalancers. We examine the empirical relevance of this result by estimating a variety of statistical models of congressional voting preference. Analysis proceeds in two directions, first with illustrations of a changepoint land a resultant heteroskedastic error variance) problem in simple models of voter choice and then with results f rom more elaborate model specifications. The evidence weighs heavily in fav or of the empirical relevance of party balancing in the 1996 congressional election. We conclude by pointing to a number of theoretical and methodolog ical issues that merit further attention in future research on balancing.