Jeremy C. Pope

Primary Elections and Candidate Ideology: Out of Step with the Primary Electorate?

This article draws on a new dataset of House primary- and general-election outcomes (1956–98) to examine the relationship between primary elections and candidate ideology. We show that, like presidential candidates, congressional candidates face a strategic-positioning dilemma: should they align themselves with their general- or primary-election constituencies? Relative to general-election voters, primary voters favor more ideologically extreme candidates. We show that congressional candidates handle the dilemma by positioning themselves closer to the primary electorate. This article thus supports the idea that primaries pull candidates away from median district preferences.

Polarization in the American Public: Misconceptions and Misreadings

A lthough we are surprised that Abramowitz and Saunders continue to advance arguments that we have rebutted in other publications, we are grateful to the Journal for providing another opportunity to address some misconceptions in the study of popular polarization. We will reply pointby-point to the Abramowitz and Saunders critique, but given that our responses have been elaborated at length elsewhere, we refer interested readers to these sources for more detailed discussions (Fiorina and Abrams 2008; Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2006; Fiorina and Levendusky 2006;). Before proceeding, we emphasize one observation that partially vitiates several of the Abramowitz and Saunders criticisms. Much of the data they view as contradicting our conclusions consists of vote reports, election returns, and approval ratings. These variables obviously are of paramount political concern, but they can not be used as evidence of polarization—for or against. As explained in Culture War? centrist voters can register polarized choices, and even if the beliefs and positions of voters remain constant, their voting decisions and political evaluations will appear more polarized when the positions candidates adopt and the actions elected officials take become more extreme. When statistical relationships change, students of voting behavior have a tendency to locate the source of the change in voter attitudes, but unchanging voters may simply be responding to changes in candidate strategy and behavior. Abramowitz and Saunders exemplify this tendency and much of their critique goes astray as a result.

Measuring District-Level Partisanship with Implications for the Analysis of U.S. Elections*

Studies of American politics, particularly legislative politics, rely heavily on measures of the partisanship of a district. We develop a measurement model for this concept, estimating partisanship in the absence of election-specific, short-term factors, such as national-level swings specific to particular elections, incumbency advantage, and home-state effects in presidential elections. We estimate the measurement model using electoral returns and district-level demographic characteristics spanning five decades (1952–2000), letting us assess how the distribution of district partisanship has changed over time, in response to population movements and redistricting, particularly via the creation of majority-minority districts. We validate the partisanship measure with an analysis of congressional roll-call data. The model is easily extended to incorporate other indicators of district partisanship, such as survey data.

Made in Congress? Testing the Electoral Implications of Party Ideological Brand Names

We investigate the connection between legislative parties and election outcomes, focusing on ideological party brand names that inform voters. If the source of information conveyed by brand names is the partys aggregate roll-call record, then changes in legislative party membership should influence election returns. We formalize the argument with an expected utility model of voting and derive district-level hypotheses, which we test on U.S. House elections from 1952 to 2000. We test alternative specifications that vary with respect to the specificity of voter information and find that party positions and heterogeneity both affect vote share independently of incumbents’ positions. The results provide modest support for the expected utility model but nevertheless suggest that Congress is an important source of the publics beliefs about the parties, and this effect is clearest for challengers, rather than incumbents, who run under the partys label.

Tea Time in America? The Impact of the Tea Party Movement on the 2010 Midterm Elections

By winning the presidency and strengthening its majority in both chambers of Congress, the 2008 election gave control of the government to the Democratic Party. However, as the 2010 election season unfolded, the news for the Democratic Party could not have been much worse. Economic conditions had not improved dramatically. A bitter and lengthy fight over health care reform signaled to citizens that little had changed in how Washington, DC, governed. The stimulus package and its impact on the federal debt caused unease in a segment of the electorate that was concerned with the size of government. In this context, observers of American politics began to take note of the number of citizens affiliating with, or at least expressing favorability toward, a loose coalition of groups known as the Tea Party movement. Tea Party rallies began to occur throughout the United States, seeking to draw attention to the movements primary issues.

A Field Experiment on Legislators’ Home Styles: Service versus Policy

We conducted a field experiment involving roughly 1,000 letters sent by actual individuals to nearly 500 different legislative offices in order to test whether legislative offices prioritize service over policy in their home style. We find strong evidence that both state and federal legislative offices are more responsive to service requests than they are to policy requests. This pattern is consistent with the desire of legislators to gain leeway with their constituents in order to pursue their own policy goals. We also find that at the federal level Democrats prioritize service over policy more than Republicans and at the state level legislators who won by larger margins are more likely to prioritize service over policy. Finally, our results suggest that the decision to prioritize service occurs in how the office is structured. Among other things this suggests that legislators may be microtargeting less than is often supposed.

Measuring Changes in American Party Reputations, 1939-2004

Scholars increasingly emphasize that party reputations are valuable electoral assets. The authors measure temporal change in the parties’ relative reputations across several distinct policy areas and find that each party tends to have advantages on certain issues but that the patterns are far from permanent. Democrats have strong advantages on social welfare issues, but Republicans have made some gains. Republican advantages on taxes and “law and order” have been weaker. The authors also find that party competition has strengthened impressions of the parties. Results support the notion that parties carry a collective—if occasionally transitory—reputation on a host of issues.

Measuring Aggregate-Level Ideological Heterogeneity

Ideological heterogeneity is a key variable for the study of legislative and electoral politics. Scholars have long recognized that members with more ideologically heterogeneous constituencies behave differently than members with more homogeneous ones. empirical tests of these theories, however, have typically been stymied by a lack of appropriate measures. w e corrected this shortcoming by developing a measurement model for ideological heterogeneity, and we used our method to generate estimates for the 50 u.S. states and 435 congressional districts. Beyond the specific results presented here, a key contribution of our model is its flexibility: our technique can be used to produce similar estimates in a variety of contexts. Ideological heterogeneity is a key explanatory variable for the study of legislative politics. Seminal works by Fenno (1978) and Fiorina

Who Caucuses? An Experimental Approach to Institutional Design and Electoral Participation

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the question of mass participation in primaries and caucuses became unusually salient, with a close Democratic race calling special attention to these often overlooked procedural elements of America’s democratic system. This study adds a new element to scholarship on institutional design and citizen participation by way of a survey-based experiment conducted in the midst of the 2008 campaign. The results show that institutional choices are not neutral. Nominating candidates through caucuses rather than primaries not only reduces the number of participants, but also significantly affects the ideological composition of the electorate. Caucuses produce a more ideologically consistent electorate than do primaries, because policy centrists appear to avoid caucuses. This experimental finding is strongly buttressed by the observational data on Obama and Clinton voters. In the 2008 Democratic presidential primary Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton by a very narrow margin – a margin that was largely due to his success in caucus states. Clinton won only 174 pledged delegates in caucuses to Obama’s 312 pledged delegates in the caucus format – almost two-thirds of the total going to Obama. The result in primaries was quite different: Clinton won 1,379.5 delegates 1 to Obama’s 1,371.5 – essentially a tie, though one that Clinton actually won narrowly. In the eyes of a die-hard Clinton supporter this result is, no doubt, striking – and possibly a bit infuriating. After all, it holds out the tantalizing possibility that, had all states used primary elections, Hillary Clinton could well have become the nominee. Of course, because different states held primaries and caucuses that margin might really have nothing to do with process; it could be due to differences between the states. Such an explanation could not, however, account for the results in Texas, where the Democratic party awarded 126 pledged delegates based on the results of the primary held during the day on March 4, 2008, and sixty-seven delegates based on the results of caucuses held in the evening on the same day. Texas serves as a useful natural experiment because the two procedures came from potentially the exact same electorate, 2 but the different processes produced different results. 3 While Clinton won a three-point victory in the primary election, she lost by nearly thirteen points in the caucuses. This meant that Obama received four more delegates than Clinton in the state

Voting for a Founding: Testing the Effect of Economic Interests at the Federal Convention of 1787

Previous work measuring the voting patterns of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention largely focused on either individual delegate positions for a handful of key votes or on state delegation positions for a far broader set of votes. We remedy this limitation by modeling the key first two months of the Convention including both some individual-level and all delegation-level voting, while simultaneously estimating the effect of various economic interests on that voting, controlling for various cultural and ideological factors. The findings suggest that economic factors mattered a great deal at the Convention. The effect of such interests vary however by the dimension of debate—representation, national institutional design, or federalism. We conclude that economic interests exerted a powerful influence on the deep structure of voting at Convention, though not consistently by issue or dimension. Specific interests only mattered on specific dimensions.