Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

 In November, 2012, after the members of the 83 rd Texas legislature were elected, Professor Mark Jones authored a Baker Institute Blog post entitled: “Which Party best Mirrors Texas in Austin?” As Professor Jones noted: The 95-member GOP caucus is almost exclusively Anglo, with 88 Anglos (93 percent), three Hispanics (3 percent), 3 African Americans (3 percent), and 1 Asian American (1 percent). On the other side of the aisle will be a much more diverse 55-member Democratic caucus, comprised of 30 Hispanics (55 percent), 15 African Americans (27 percent), eight Anglos (15 percent), and two Asian Americans (4 percent). He then uses the Loosemore and Hanby Index (LHI), an index of disproportionality, to determine which political party in the legislature is more representative of Texas. He concludes that: The composition of the Democratic delegation in the House comes closest to reflecting the entire Texas population, while the Republican delegation comes closest to...

It’s time to update the figure on party identification in Texas. In a UT-Texas Tribune poll conducted in October 2012, respondents reported the following percentages in party identification: As you can observe, not much has changed since the May poll, but one wouldn’t expect much change, given the purported stability in party identification. Interestingly, the percentage of strong Republicans increased slightly (by 1 percent), and the percentage of strong Democrats decreased slightly (by 2 percent); weak partisans increased in both parties (Republicans by 4 percent and Democrats by 6 percent); Republican learning independents decreased by 2 percent, and Democratic leaning independents decreased by 3 percent. The percentage of pure independents decreased by 2 percent. If we only consider the percentage of partisans and independents, there was little change in party identification in Texas: 31 percent identified as Republicans; 29 percent identified as Democrats; 37 percent ide...

In July, 2012, as the runoff in the Republican and Democratic primary election approached, Professor Mark Jones argued that voter turnout in the Republican primary runoff election could be predicted based on the early voting turnout in the most populous fifteen counties in Texas (his blog post is here ). He provided early voting figures from the first Republican primary, which allowed twelve days for early voting, compressed the data into five days to be comparable to the five days of early voting allowed in the runoff primary election. He stated that if a comparison of early voting (early voting in the runoff/early voting in the first primary) was a low percentage, then turnout would likely be closer to the low estimate for voter turnout in the runoff primary. On the other hand, if the proportion were large, then turnout would likely be closer to the high estimate for voter turnout in the runoff primary. His figure is reproduced below: Professor Jones admits that accuratel...