L. Sandy Maisel

When to Risk It? Institutions, Ambitions, and the Decision to Run for the U.S. House

The health of any democratic system depends on political ambition to generate a steady supply of quality candidates for office. Because most models of candidate entry assume ambition rather than model it, previous research fails to understand its roots in individual and institutional characteristics. We develop a two-stage model of progressive behavior that distinguishes between the formation of ambition for higher office and the decision to enter a particular race. Using data from a survey of state legislators, we demonstrate that the intrinsic costs and benefits associated with running for and holding higher office shape ambitions but do not influence the decision to run. For progressively ambitious legislators, the second-stage decision is a strategic choice about when to run rather than whether to run. Our research highlights how institutional characteristics that foster progressive ambition also increase the likelihood that national or local political conditions will be translated into meaningful choices at the ballot box.

The Sense of a Woman: Gender, Ambition, and the Decision to Run for Congress

Do men and women differ in their decisionmaking calculus for higher office? To answer this question, we use a survey of state legislators (SLs) in 1998 to examine the conditions under which male and female SLs seek a position in the U.S. House of Representatives. We consider three ways in which gender may influence ambition and the decision to run—indirectly, directly, and interactively—and we find evidence of all three effects. Female state legislators are less ambitious than males for a U.S. House seat, a difference that largely stems from gender disparities in child-care responsibilities. However, despite their lower ambition, female SLs are just as likely as their male counterparts to seek a congressional position. This apparent puzzle is solved by the finding that the expected benefit of office mediates the relationship between ambition and the likelihood of running. Female SLs are much more responsive to the expected benefit of office than are males, offsetting their diminished ambition level. The sense of a woman is reflected in female state legislators’ increased sensitivity to the strategic considerations surrounding a congressional candidacy. Because men and women respond differently to the intersection of ambition and opportunity, gender constitutes an important, yet often neglected, explanatory variable in the decision-to-run calculus.

Incumbency Reconsidered: Prospects, Strategic Retirement, and Incumbent Quality in U.S. House Elections

Fundamental questions about incumbent safety have been difficult to answer because of the absence of adequate measures of incumbent prospects and incumbent quality. If incumbents retire because they are vulnerable, high reelection rates do not necessarily mean that electoral accountability is absent. Moreover, if the electoral success of incumbents reflects their high quality, high reelection rates do not necessarily indicate pathology in the system. Using explicit measures of incumbent prospects and personal quality based on district informant ratings, we find evidence of strategic retirement by incumbents in the 1998 elections, when standard prospects measures show no evidence of strategic withdrawal by incumbents. We also find an impact of incumbent quality on vote share consistent with the idea that high quality incumbents are rewarded in the electoral process. Although many are skeptical about the implications of incumbent safety in House elections, our results suggest a more optimistic reconsideration of incumbent electoral security.

National Party Efforts to Recruit State Legislators to Run for the U.S. House

We explore factors that influence the chances that a state legislator will be the target of national party recruitment to run for the U.S. House. Using data from a sample of legislators in 200 U.S. House districts, we find that national party contact reflects strategic considerations of party interests. State legislators serving in professional institutions and in competitive districts are most likely to be contacted by national party leaders. In addition, the analysis suggests that national party leaders may be sensitive to the potential costs to the state legislative party: legislators in institutions that are closely balanced between the parties are slightly less likely to be contacted.

The Negative Consequences of Uncivil Political Discourse

Congressman Alan West (R-FL) passed the incivility duck test when he described his fellow Floridian Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D) as “the most vile, unprofessional and despicable member of the House of Representatives.” That read like incivility, sounded like incivility, and was universally interpreted to be uncivil, thus it probably was.

The Politics of Government-Funded Research: Notes from the Experience of the Candidate Emergence Study

The design of our study involved two surveys administered by mail in 200 randomly selected U.S. House districts. The first survey was of approximately 20 informants in each district, chosen because they were likely to be knowledgeable about the politics of their districts. Our goal was to identify 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans in each sample constituency, most of whom were national convention delegates. We asked informants to name up to four individuals in their district who

The White House and Capitol Hill : the politics of presidential persuasion

Starting with the idea that presidents must persuade in order to succeed politically, Dr Bowles emphasizes the political and administrative importance of the Office of Congressional Relations (OCR), its symbolic value for a legislative presidency, and the damage which a weakened OCR caused President Johnson in the last years of his administration. Two additional chapters analyze the politics of Congressional relations under the Carter and Reagan administrations. The author has drawn extensively on papers in the Kennedy and Johnson libraries, as well as making significant use of President Johnsons archives.

Congressional Elections in 1978 The Road to Nomination, the Road to Election

This article examines two aspects of the 1978 congressional elections. The major task undertaken involves an analysis of the type and amount of electoral competition in each of the 435 districts. How often were there contested primaries and/or contested general elections? How competitive were these contests? In addition the article looks at the new members of the 96th Congress. The electoral process provides for recruitment of new House members. What can be said about the motives and characteristics of those recruited? While acknowledging that many questions remain unanswered, more attention must be devoted to the role of parties and to electoral rules as each has important implications for congressional recruitment.This article examines two aspects of the 1978 congressional elections. The major task undertaken involves an analysis of the type and amount of electoral competition in each of the 435 districts. H...

Book Review: Getting primaried: The changing politics of congressional primary elections

lished parties pursue different, often mutually incompatible electoral strategies, and that the success of new party families hurt the most traditional party families. Krouwel also considers the cultivation of individual personalities in the media as contradicting the cartel thesis. He concludes that principled opposition is alive, fuelled particularly by cultural conflicts and the competitive behaviour of party elites. The book presents original data sets on most of the analyzed dimensions, covers 142 parties, 65 years, and 15 countries, and it excels in imaginative new indices and data collection techniques. Concerning the latter, the most notable one is the Kieskompas method for mapping political parties. This method consists of the identification of salient, polarizing issues – distributed equally distributed among left, right, conservative, and progressive clusters – and the establishment of party positions on these issues, with the help of authoritative party documents and the selfplacement by the parties themselves. The book’s appendix contains information on all the analyzed parties, including the time and circumstances of their establishment, their family-membership, and the timing of splits, mergers, joint lists, and name changes. While the last sentence of the book, according to which political scientists are ‘silly’ if they keep on inventing new party models, sounds like a justified warning to the profession, the reader wonders whether the five models presented can be regarded as authoritative. As they are not based on logic, or on an exhaustive review of empirical reality or of the literature, doubts remain. They also hinder as much as help the empirical analysis. First, the insistence on placing the models into a strict chronological order complicates their applicability to cross-sectional data. Second, the types are claimed to differ in their genetic origin, but origin is understood differently for the different types. In the case of mass parties, the actual origin of individual parties is considered (extra-parliamentary), in the case of catch-all parties it is the previous phase of the stylized party development scheme (‘‘originates from mass parties’’), while for cartel parties one of the constitutive elements of the definition of the model (‘‘originates from fusion of parliamentary face of parties and the state apparatus’’ (p. 30)) is presented as origin. More importantly, the insistence on the five models for the empirical analysis compels the author to stretch the contours of these models beyond their established definitions. Elite or cadre parties are characterized as having strong party–voter links and as scoring high on ideological, principled politics (p. 39), cartel parties as having hierarchical and centralized control-structure, and catch-all parties as exhibiting ‘‘horizontal, open and de-centralized internal decision-making’’ (p. 44). For the author, the catch-all and cartel models entail ministerial recruitment that is ‘‘more political and less based on technical skills and expertise from nongovernmental domains’’ (p. 121), and the cartel thesis implies the dominance of the traditional party families. Next to these questionable interpretations the reader wonders whether it was a good idea to group parties according to countries and party families, since the book does not systematically investigate whether these are meaningful units of aggregation. What it lacks in conceptual rigour, the book more than makes up for in sharp observations, rich original datasets, and imaginative use of data. Above all, it offers a welldocumented, multi-dimensional picture of West European party politics between 1945 and 2010.

Book Review: Expressive Politics: Issue Strategies of Congressional Challengers

Robert Boatright takes on an intriguing dilemma that faces those who study congressional elections in the United States. How do challengers to incumbents in the US House of Representatives decide what issues to talk about during their campaigns? In overly simple terms, median voter theory predicts that candidates should assume positions closer to the median voters’ views than the incumbent, thereby maximizing their votes. But students of congressional elections know that incumbents win, and increasingly win overwhelmingly, so such a strategy for challengers, if it has been followed, has not achieved success. Boatright begins his study with a thorough examination of the theoretical literature on rational issue selection and of the literature on congressional elections. He then tries to rationalize the two. He argues that a candidate’s decision on position-taking is not dependent solely on that candidate’s perception of the position of the median voter, but rather that it is preceded by the candidate’s consideration of two other variables: probability of winning and non-instrumental policy preferences; that is, the candidate’s preferences on issues without regard to their impact on electoral success. Boatright argues persuasively that candidates view these variables sequentially, looking first at chances and then at what positions to take. As the chances of winning decrease, the likelihood that the candidate will follow his or her own personal policy preferences, without regard to the position of the median voter (or the impact on vote maximization), increases. Boatright employs two types of data to test this theory. First, he uses the 1996 Congressional Quarterly/Time survey of all major House candidates to determine candidate positions and their convergence with or divergence from perceived district preferences. He then interviews 52 candidates for Congress in 1996 from four states (or their surrogates in a few cases); he supplements these interviews with 14 parallel interviews in 2000, with candidates (or their surrogates) from four different states. In his analysis, Boatright divides challengers into three categories – long shots, somewhat competitive and very competitive – and he examines each group in separate chapters exploring: how much information the challengers have about the public opinion of the electorate; the issues on which they chose to campaign B O O K R E V I E W S