Scott Ashworth

Electoral Selection, Strategic Challenger Entry, and the Incumbency Advantage

We study the comparative statics of the incumbency advantage in a model of electoral selection and strategic challenger entry. The incumbency advantage arises in the model because, on average, incumbents have greater ability than challengers. This is true for two reasons: high-ability candidates are more likely to win election (electoral selection) and high-quality incumbents deter challengers (strategic challenger entry). We show that this quality-based incumbency advantage is expected to be greater for high visibility offices, in polities with relatively small partisan tides, in unpolarized electoral environments, and in electorates that are relatively balanced in their partisan preferences.

Elections with Platform and Valence Competition

We study a game in which candidates first choose platforms and then invest in costly valences (e.g., engage in campaign spending). The marginal return to valence depends on platform polarization--the closer platforms are, the more valence affects the election outcome. Consequently, candidates without policy preferences choose divergent platforms to soften valence competition. Moreover, exogenous increases in incentives for valence accumulation lead to both increased valence and increased polarization--the latter because candidates seek to avoid the costs of extra valence. As a result, the increase in valence is smaller than it would have been with exogenous platforms. Finally, the model highlights the overlooked substantive importance of common modeling assumptions. Changing the source of uncertainty in our model from noise around the median voters ideal point to a shock to one candidates valence (as is common in the literature) leads to complete platform convergence for all parameter values.

Delivering the Goods: Legislative Particularism in Different Electoral and Institutional Settings

We analyze a model of legislative particularism to understand how the provision of constituency service responds to variations in institutional and electoral environments. We show that increased partisan balance in the electorate, single-member districts, and independent executives all increase incentives for legislators to provide constituency service. The results of the model are consistent with existing comparative-institutional empirical observations. Moreover, the model addresses over time trends in the United States that are not explained by existing models and yields novel hypotheses that are amenable to empirical evaluation.

Campaign Finance and Voter Welfare with Entrenched Incumbents

Two candidates compete for elective office. Each candidate has information she would like to reveal to the voters, but this requires costly advertising. The candidates can solicit contributions from interest groups to finance such advertising. These contributions are secured by promises to perform favors for the contributors, should the candidate win the election. Voters understand this and elect the candidate they like best, taking into account their expectations about promises to special interests. There is an incumbency advantage in fundraising, which is sometimes so great that the incumbent faces no serious opposition at all. Introducing partial public financing through matching funds improves voter welfare in districts that have advertising under the decentralized system, while it can reduce welfare in other districts. The optimal policy must strike a balance between these two effects.

Design, Inference, and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape (2003) presents an analysis of his suicide terrorism data. He uses the data to draw inferences about how territorial occupation and religious extremism affect the decision of terrorist groups to use suicide tactics. We show that the data are incapable of supporting Papes conclusions because he “samples on the dependent variable.”—The data only contain cases in which suicide terror is used. We construct bounds (Manski, 1995) on the quantities relevant to Papes hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about the relevant statistical associations from the data produced by Papes research design.

Informative Party Labels With Institutional and Electoral Variation

We study a model of party formation in which the informativeness of party labels and inter-party ideological heterogeneity are endogenously and jointly determined in response to electoral incentives. Parties use screening to increase the cost of affiliation for politicians whose ideal points diverge from the party platform. Because affiliation decisions are endogenous, increased screening decreases ideological heterogeneity, improving the informativeness of the party label. The model allows us to examine how the level of screening responds to changes in both the institutional and electoral environments. We find that screening (and, consequently, the informativeness of the party label and ideological homogeneity) is decreasing in the power of the executive branch, the polarization of party platforms, and the average size of partisan tides.

Does Advertising Exposure Affect Turnout

We identify an exogenous source of variation in exposure to campaign advertising in the 2000 presidential election, based on residence in battleground states. If exposure to campaign advertising makes a potential voter significantly more likely to vote, then we should see significantly greater turnout in battleground states. We do not. This result is robust to several specifications and evident in a natural experiment consisting of New Jersey residents. Conditional on existing campaign targeting strategies, campaigns do not affect the turnout decisions of the voters we study.

All Else Equal in Theory and Data (Big or Small)

The forms of explanation that dominate political science research in the formal theory and causal inference traditions are closely connected. Specifically, each makes essential use of different, but related, kinds of all-else-equal claims. The emergence of “big data” has already begun to alter the landscape of empirical social science by making new sources of information (and, thus, new phenomena) amenable to quantitative analysis. But neither the centrality of all-else-equal explanations, nor the challenges associated with providing them, will be altered in the least by big data.

Unified versus Divided Political Authority

Is unified or divided authority optimal for voter welfare? We study this question in a political agency model where a politician’s task-specific competences are correlated. The model highlights trade-offs both within and across facets of voter welfare. Regarding incentives, unified authority yields higher total effort, but an allocation of that effort across tasks less aligned with voter preferences. Regarding the selection of good types, unified authority yields more voter information but constrains voters to use that information less flexibly. Our comparative static analysis highlights a fundamental trade-off between determinants of the optimal institution—factors that make divided authority more attractive for incentives (e.g., voters focused on one task, highly correlated competences) make unified authority more attractive for selecting good types. For some parameter values there is nonetheless an unambiguously optimal institution. For other parameter values, the overall optimal institution depends on the heterogeneity of politician competences.