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Candidate positioning and responsiveness to constituent opinion in the U.S. House of Representatives

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Abstract

In this paper, I develop a survey-based measure of district ideology for the House of Representatives. I use this index to document and study ways in which patterns of candidate positioning depart from perfect representation. These findings help distinguish between competing theories of candidate positioning. My findings present evidence against theories that attribute divergence to the preferences of voters and the locations of primary constituencies. My findings are potentially consistent with the policy-motivation and resource theories, which attribute divergence to the polarization of political elites.

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Notes

  1. This highlights an added advantage of survey-based methods over election outcome-based methods—we can separate ideological dimensions from ‘valence’ dimensions of candidate evaluation.

  2. I used the most recent Convention Delegate Study that was publicly available.

  3. Treier and Hillygus (2009) reach a similar conclusion about self-identification measures.

  4. Primary voting behavior is not available for many of the respondents because they were surveyed before the primary election or because the item was not asked for these respondents.

  5. For example, one might speculate that Democratic and Republican primary voters would be more extreme than Democratic and Republican identifiers, but this pattern was not found in the NAES data.

  6. An advantage of using the 2000 NAES here (as opposed more recent studies) is that we are able to link the NAES data to the locations of both incumbents and challengers.

  7. For Ansolabehere et al.’s data, I employed the authors’ index including imputed values. For Burden’s data, I imputed data for candidates that served in the 107th House using their W-Nominate scores.

  8. A primary election was defined to be competitive if the winning candidate received less than 60 % of the vote.

  9. See Adams et al. (2005, 2010), and Peress (2011) for further evidence regarding the base-mobilization theory.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dan Butler, Kevin Clarke, Dick Niemi, and Lynda Powell for their helpful suggestions. I would like to thank Barry Burden for proving some of the data used in the analysis.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA

    Michael Peress

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Correspondence to Michael Peress.

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Peress, M. Candidate positioning and responsiveness to constituent opinion in the U.S. House of Representatives. Public Choice 156, 77–94 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0032-z

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