Assistant Professor

 

State University of New York at Stony Brook
Department of Political Science
Ward Melville Social and Behavioral Sciences Building, 7th Floor
Room N-721
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4392

 

Phone: 631.632.6488
Fax: 631.632.4116

Email: rene.lindstaedt@stonybrook.edu

 

 

 

 

About Me

I am Assistant Professor of Political Economy at SUNY Stony Brook. I received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Washington University in May of 2006. I also hold an M.A. in Political Science and an M.A. in European Studies from Washington University. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Tübingen, Germany. My main areas of interest are Political Institutions, Bureaucratic and Legislative Politics, American Political Development, Political Methodology and Formal Theory.

 

Dissertation

Three Essays on the Political Economy of Separation-of-Powers Institutions

[pdf of Dissertation]

 

First Essay

Core Supporters or Swing Voters? The Geo-Politics of New Deal Spending

 

The central question of the article concerns the effect party has on the distribution of federal funds. In many ways, this is still very much an open question, with some researchers arguing that swing voters decide who wins elections and therefore should receive most of the attention by reelection-seeking politicians. Others, however, argue that targeting swing voters is a risky strategy that might or might not yield the desired outcomes, which is why most politicians opt to concentrate their reelection efforts on the so-called reelection constituency. The arguments are empirically tested with state- and county-level data on New Deal grants using multilevel statistical models. The article finds that partisanship played a prominent role in the spending decisions by the Roosevelt administration. Moreover, the Democratic Party's core supporters were the main beneficiaries of New Deal spending policies.

 

Second Essay

Roosevelt’s Congressional Strategy: Distributive Politics and New Deal Coalition Building

 

In this article, I focus on how Roosevelt balanced direct voter appeal with building a New Deal friendly coalition in Congress. Specifically, I assess three theories of vote buying. According to the partisan theory of vote buying, political entrepreneurs in general and presidents in particular try to build coalitions around their fellow party members in Congress. As a result, members of the president's party are the most likely recipients of various types of incentives to join policy coalitions. The committee-centered theory of vote buying acknowledges the central role committees play as legislative agenda setters. Therefore, members of the committees relevant to the president's legislative agenda are the most likely targets of presidential vote buying. Finally, the preference-based theory focuses on the preference similarity between the president and members of Congress. Vote buying in the preference-based theory takes the form of rewarding those members already closely aligned with the president, thereby signaling to other members the benefits of supporting the president. The theories are empirically tested with congressional district data on New Deal grants. The results show that Roosevelt followed a two-pronged strategy, targeting committee members as well as ideological friends. Partisanship did not factor into Roosevelt's coalition building strategy.

 

Third Essay

The Institutional Foundations of Delegation: Legislative Monitoring Regimes in Weak and Strong Party Systems

 

One of the most important recent developments in the study of delegation has been the move towards more comparative research. The reason is that, quite contrary to what this research agenda's late start might suggest, the comparative study of delegation holds the key to answering critical questions. Not least, this includes the question of how different political institutions vary in their impact on principal-agency relationships. In this paper, I am interested in how a country's party system determines the monitoring regime that a legislature will put in place to control its bureaucratic agents. Specifically, I develop two game-theoretic models. The models each feature two legislators who bargain over the provision of monitoring of a bureaucratic agent. While the weak party model is a straight-up bargaining game, the strong party model features a party leader who acts as a semi-altruist. The comparison of the two models demonstrates that legislators operating in strong party systems are less likely to face bargaining failure under certain circumstances, but not in others. In fact, for legislators to reap the benefits of party organization, partisanship needs to be quite strong.