Walter J. Stone

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.

When Candidates Value Good Character: A Spatial Model with Applications to Congressional Elections

We add to the literature that examines the relationship between candidate valence and policy strategies by arguing that candidates intrinsically value both the policies and the personal character of the winning candidate. In making this argument, we distinguish between two dimensions of candidate valence: strategic valence refers to factors such as name recognition, fundraising ability, and campaigning skills, while character valence is composed of qualities that voters and candidates intrinsically value in office holders, including integrity, competence, and diligence. Our model considers challengers who value both the policies and the character-based valence of the incumbent and assumes that the incumbent’s policy position is fixed by prior commitments. Under these conditions, we show that challengers who are superior to the incumbent in their character-based valence have incentives to moderate their policy positions. We report empirical tests of this good-government result of our model, using data on t...

Winning May Not Be Everything, But It's More than We Thought: Presidential Party Activists in 1980

Recent studies of party activists in the United States have shown an influx of issue-oriented activists into the presidential nominating process since the 1960s. These new activists are described as dogmatic ideologues more interested in promoting their issue concerns than in nominating an electable candidate. Based on our survey of 17,628 delegates attending party conventions in 11 states during the 1980 Democratic and Republican presidential nomination campaigns, we show that activists in both parties weighed electability more heavily than ideology in choosing a party nominee. This finding is in sharp contrast to a strong preference among these same activists for ideological purity over electability when they are presented with questions, typical of past studies, that pose the trade-off only in very general and abstract terms. A partial replication using data from the CPS survey of delegates to the 1972 Democratic national convention supports our findings and leads us to assert that previous studies have underestimated the concern of contemporary party activists with winning.

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.

Candidate Support in Presidential Nomination Campaigns: The Case of Iowa in 1984

We analyze three explanations of candidate choice in presidential nomination campaigns: (1) a preference model, which contends that nomination choice is based on the ideological, issue, or candidate preferences of the voter; (2) a candidate-chances explanation that argues choice is motivated by the chances candidates have of winning the nomination or the general election; and (3) an expected utility model that includes both preferences and candidate chances by discounting ideological, issue, and candidate-trait preferences by the perceived chances each candidate has of winning in November. We test these explanations on samples of Democratic caucus attenders and state convention delegates from Iowa in 1984. The expected utility model most successfully predicts candidate choice in both samples. Even with appropriate controls for candidate affect, both preference and candidate chances measures have significant independent effects on candidate choice. Our analysis suggests that the interests of individual nomination participants and party organizations may not be as disparate as many critics of the contemporary process believe.

Candidates Matter: Policy and Quality Differences in Congressional Elections

We reexamine voting choice in congressional elections by using panels of district experts to identify the ideological positions and leadership qualities of candidates running in a national sample of districts. We show that: (1) candidate-quality differences affect voting choice; (2) that the effect of candidate quality increases with reduced differences between candidates on ideology; and (3) that the effect of issues on voting depends on candidate differences in quality and ideology. The conditional nature of these effects has consequences for candidate position taking that challenge conventional wisdom because candidates with a quality advantage have an incentive to moderate while candidates who are at a quality disadvantage do not. Analyses that do not include competitors’ differences on both ideology and quality are incomplete because the effects of moderation depend on the position of the opponent and which candidate has the quality advantage.

The Dynamics of Constituency: Electoral Control in the House

This study offers a longitudinal analytic model designed to tap the degree to which members of the U.S. House of Representatives are responsive to constituency opinion in a dynamic sense. This, after all, is what constituency electoral control means: Regular elections are supposed to assure ongoing constituency control and force the representative to change his or her policy making behavior with changes in constituency opinion. The study employs roll call data and the University of Michigan national election survey series to show evidence of constituency electoral control when there is a decline in the margin of victory for the incumbent over time or when there is actual turnover. Under more normal conditions, however, and even when there is a visible source of change in constituency opinion (redistricting), there is little evidence of ongoing constituency control resulting in responsiveness.

Sex and the Caucus Participant: The Gender Gap and Presidential Nominations

Most analysis of the gender gap has focused on the mass electorate. But over the past 20 years, women have also come to play a much more important role in presidential nominations in both parties. Looking at caucus participants across parties, we find sex differences greater than those discovered at the mass level. Female caucus participants are significantly more liberal than males. Within each party sex differences are strong for womens issues and foreign policy issues; and for both sets of issues the differences are greater within the Republican party. Sex differences hold up with controls for demographics as well. The strong findings on sex differences in attitudes fail to translate into sex differences in candidate choice. Confronted with a very complicated political environment, both males and females choose candidates on largely nonideological bases.

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.