Explaining variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections, 1922–2004

Winer, Stanley L.; Kenny, Lawrence W.; Grofman, Bernard

doi:10.1007/s11127-014-0176-0

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…This is exactly the empirical pattern that Winer, Kenny, and Grofman (2014) find for U.S. Senate elections between 1922 and 2004: For a range of moderate states (i.e., a range of states with a PVI relatively close to zero), the estimated marginal effect of a state’s PVI on the vote difference between Democrats and Republicans is close to zero, while this marginal effect is much larger for states that are outside this range.…”

Section: Empirical Implicationssupporting

confidence: 79%

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Political Competition in Legislative Elections

Krasa

Polborn

2018

Am Polit Sci Rev

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We develop a theory of electoral competition in multidistrict legislative elections when nomination decisions are made by local policy-motivated party members, and voters care about both local and national positions. We show that the asymmetry generated by different national party positions reduces or even entirely removes the competitive pressure to nominate moderate candidates. The model has important implications for our understanding of policy divergence and, in particular, of the effects of gerrymandering.

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Section: Empirical Implicationssupporting

confidence: 79%

“… 1 See Table 1 in Winer, Kenny, and Grofman (2014) for evidence that a significant share of U.S. Senate elections are noncompetitive. In 29.4% of U.S. Senate elections between 1922 and 2004 without an incumbent running, the winner received a vote share that was at least 20 percentage points larger than the loser’s vote share.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Competition in Legislative Elections

Krasa

Polborn

2018

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…There are at least three reasons: (1) Parties impose constraints on themselves to preserve their credibility and coherence and to cater to donors (Demsetz 1982;Levy 2004;Roemer 2001). When circumstances change, some parties can adapt their programs faster than others; (2) In electoral systems with individual electoral districts, parties impose constraints on their local candidates to protect their national reputation, a situation studied by Austen-Smith (1987), Callander (2005), Winer, Kenny, and Grofman (2014), and others. This tether prevents local candidates from situating their own platforms close to their major opponent if this involves a substantial departure from the national party platform.…”

Section: Political Competitivenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Competition and the Study of Public Economics

Winer

Ferris

2022

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Why is an understanding of political competition essential for the study of public economics and public policy generally? How can political competition be described and understood, and how does it differ from its strictly economic counterpart? What are the implications of the fact that policy proposals in a democracy must always pass a political test? What are the strengths and weaknesses of electoral competition as a mechanism for the allocation of economic resources? Why are tax structures in democratic polities so complicated, and what implications follow from this for normative views about good policy choice? How can we measure the intensity of political competition, why and how does it vary in mature democracies, and what are the consequences? This Element considers the approach to answer these questions, while also illustrating some of the interesting theoretical and empirical work that has been done on them.

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“…In other words, as the parties become more sharply differentiated, Democratic (Republican) candidates in constituencies with a right (left) of center median voter find it harder to compete successfully, since they will not be able to convincingly offer a position close to that constituency's median voter. The nature of the constraints will affect which seats are competitive and which are not (Winer et al, 2014). Moreover, when the party's legislative incumbents are more homogeneous ideologically, it is much easier for activists to seek to enforce ideological conformity on party candidates and to threaten to run opponents if they do not toe the party line.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Replacement in the U.S. House

2014

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We know that most House seats remain within the same party over the course of a redistricting decade. For example, over 75% did so in the last decade. This gives rise to the question: “Why do some seats change hands and others not?” We seek to go beneath the standard answers (such as extent of electoral vulnerability as indicated by the previous victory margin, challenger qualifications, relative spending of challenger and incumbent, midterm loss affecting districts newly won by the president’s party, realignment effects that made Democrats in the South vulnerable) to examine the conditions of ideological competition that affect each of these factors and the concomitant probability of electoral defeat. We offer a general model of unidimensional party competition across multiple constituencies, where a party “chases the outliers” of the other party that are closest to its own ideological mean, thus eliminating “anomalous” districts which should be vulnerable to change in party control, and we test that model with data from the U.S. House of Representatives 1980–2006. Over time, Democrats capture liberal and moderately liberal districts held by Republicans, while Republicans capture conservative and moderately conservative districts held by Democrats. In a neo-Downsian world where candidates do not locate at the preferences of the median voter in the district but, rather, are shifted in the direction of their own party mean, we show that this outlier-chasing dynamic can be expected, in the long run, to “empty” out the center. This results in an equilibrium of ideologically distinct parties and a high level of polarization, involving a self-reinforcing dynamic in which the seats that become vulnerable change as the parties become more distinct. Indeed, rather than puzzling about why so much polarization exists, our work suggests that the real puzzle is why it has taken so long to get to the level of polarization we presently enjoy. We suggest that the combination of incumbency advantage, and multidimensionality of political competition might be the answer, with the Civil War role of race as an independent dimension slowly wearing off.

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Explaining variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections, 1922–2004

Cited by 6 publications

References 55 publications

Political Competition in Legislative Elections

Political Competition in Legislative Elections

Political Competition and the Study of Public Economics

Replacement in the U.S. House

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