Two Roles for Elections: Disciplining the Incumbent and Selecting a Competent Candidate

This paper presents a political economy model in which the voterswant to control moral hazard on the part of the incumbent andselect a competent candidate to be in office. We focus on electionswhich take place repeatedly as the basic disciplinary and screeningmechanism. It is shown that incomplete information of the votersabout the (economic) competence of the incumbent helps to overcomethe lame duck effect of a government with foreseeable end. Asecond finding is that economic performance strongly influences thereelection of the incumbent. In particular, in (stationary perfectBayesian) equilibrium, if economic performance is bad, theincumbent will not be reelected. We also prove that having thepossibility of reelecting a government increases the welfare of thevoters to the no reelection benchmark.     

Candidate Cues and Voter Confidence in American Elections

A primary objective of election administration is ensuring voter confidence. Logically, this entails meeting two conditions: procedures should insure that elections are fair and accurate, and voters should be aware of the procedures. Yet American election procedures such as ballot access and design, post-election audits and recounts, voter registration, and polling place operations are complex and highly decentralized. Given the complexity of the information environment and the relatively limited information most voters have about politics, what (if any) connection is there between election administration and voter confidence? We consider whether candidates fill the gap between election administration and voter confidence in elections. We test several hypotheses using an experimental design with multiple measures of voter confidence. The results show that candidates have a significant effect on voter confidence.     

Candidate and Party Strategies in Two-Stage Elections Beginning with a Primary

In the United States and Latin America, candidates for national and state-level office frequently must win primary elections in order to advance to the general election. We model policy and valence issues for office-seeking candidates facing such two-stage elections. We determine a Nash equilibrium for the candidates' optimal strategies, and we find that holding a primary is likely to increase a party's chances of winning the general election, particularly in situations where valence issues that involve the candidates' campaigning skills and that are not known prior to the campaign are more salient than policy issues. Furthermore, we find that primary elections are especially likely to benefit parties that expect to be underdogs in the general election. Our conclusions are directly relevant to U.S. politics and by extension to the strategic decisions that many Latin American parties currently confront, about whether it is strategically desirable to hold primaries.     

Strategic Candidate Entry and Congressional Elections in the Era of Fox News

Elections are designed to give voters the ability to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. For this to work, voters must be presented with credible alternatives from which to choose. In the United States, as in other weak-party systems, the decision to challenge an incumbent representative rests with individual, strategic-minded politicians who carefully weigh the available information. We investigate the role that one source of information—partisan media—plays in shaping electoral competition. We hypothesize that the haphazard expansion of the conservative Fox News Channel in the decade after its 1996 launch influenced congressional elections by affecting the decision calculus of high-quality potential candidates. Using congressional district-level data on the local availability of Fox News, we find that Fox News altered Republican potential candidates' perceptions about the vulnerability of Democratic incumbents, thereby changing their entry patterns.     

Candidate Valence and Ideological Positions in U.S. House Elections

We examine the relationship between the valence qualities of candidates and the ideological positions they take in U.S. House elections based on a study of the 2006 midterm elections. Our design enables us to distinguish between campaign and character dimensions of candidate valence and to place candidates and districts on the same ideological scale. Incumbents with a personal‐character advantage are closer ideologically to their district preferences, while disadvantaged challengers take more extreme policy positions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, challengers can reap electoral rewards by taking more extreme positions relative to their districts. We explore a possible mechanism for this extremism effect by demonstrating that challengers closer to the extreme received greater financial contributions, which enhanced their chances of victory. Our results bear on theories of representation that include policy and valence, although the interactions between these two dimensions may be complex and counterintuitive.     

Fit for the Job: Candidate Qualifications and Vote Choice in Low Information Elections

Cues and heuristics—like party, gender, and race/ethnicity—help voters choose among a set of candidates. We consider candidate professional experience—signaled through occupation—as a cue that voters can use to evaluate candidates’ functional competence for office. We outline and test one condition under which citizens are most likely to use such cues: when there is a clear connection between candidate qualifications and the particular elected office. We further argue that voters in these contexts are likely to make subtle distinctions between candidates, and to vote accordingly. We test our account in the context of local school board elections, and show—through both observational analyses of California election results and a conjoint experiment—that (1) voters favor candidates who work in education; (2) that voters discriminate even among candidates associated with education by only favoring those with strong ties to students; and (3) that the effects are not muted by partisanship. Voters appear to value functional competence for office in and of itself, and use cues in the form of candidate occupation to assess who is and who is not fit for the job.

     

Redistricting, Candidate Entry, and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century U.S. House Elections

The effects of redistricting on candidate entry patterns in contemporary House races has received growing attention in the scholarly literature, yet virtually no consideration has been given to this question in the context of historical elections. This is unfortunate as the wider variation in congressional redistricting during the nineteenth century gives us increased leverage in terms of understanding strategic candidate behavior. Utilizing a new dataset of candidate quality for nineteenth-century House races, we examine whether candidates with prior electoral experience are more likely to run in districts that are altered during the redistricting process, and provide an account of how differences in the prevalence of redistricting may affect strategic entry decisions of politicians. Our results suggest that entry decisions and electoral outcomes are affected by redistricting in this era. Moreover, our analysis provides an opportunity to use history to test contemporary theories of congressional elections in a broader context .     

Nothing to Hide,Nowhere to Run,or Nothing to Lose: Candidate Position-Taking in Congressional Elections

If candidates do not state clear issue positions, then voters cannot anticipate how the candidates will govern if elected nor hold candidates accountable for breaking campaign pledges. Yet, previous research argues electoral incentives lead candidates to avoid discussing the key issues of the day. Even though silence on issues is the modal campaign strategy, this paper argues that candidates systematically make clear issue statements on occasion. We identify three variables that predict whether a candidate will address an issue and the clarity of the candidate’s stance on that issue: (i) the public salience of an issue; (ii) ideological congruence between candidate and district; and (iii) candidate quality. This argument is tested using data on candidate position-taking regarding the Iraq War and gay marriage collected from the campaign websites of U.S. House candidates in 2006 and 2008.     

Strategic Interaction and Candidate Competition in U.S. House Elections: Empirical Applications of Probit and Strategic Probit Models

In recent work, Signorino (American Political Science Review93:279–297, 1999; International Interactions 28:93–115,2002) has sought to test statistical models derived from extensive-formgames in the context of international relations research focusingon conflict and interstate bargaining. When two or more actorsinteract with one another under conditions of uncertainty, Signorinodemonstrates that it is necessary to incorporate such strategicinteraction into the underlying model to avoid potential threatsto statistical inference. Outside the realm of internationalrelations research, however, there have been limited applicationsof Signorino's strategic probit model in understanding strategicinteraction. In this article, I present an empirical comparisonof probit and strategic probit models in the context of candidatecompetition in House elections during the 1990s. I show thatincumbent spending deters challenger entry and factors suchas minority party affiliation and redistricting significantlyaffect incumbent career decisions, findings that run counterto those reported in the nonstrategic model. Overall, the resultsillustrate that failing to account for strategic interactioncan lead to biased and inaccurate estimates related to challengerand incumbent entry decisions.     

Support for Le Pen in France: Two Elections in Trompe l'œil

There is a comforting consensus among political commentators that the 2007 presidential election marked the end of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a force in French politics. The shock election of the Front National leader to the presidential run-off in 2002, by contrast, is explained as a surge in the Le Pen vote specific to the prevailing electoral conditions. This article challenges that interpretation of both elections. It shows that, despite Le Pen's unforeseen success in 2002, there was no surge of support for him, and that despite Le Pen's supposed collapse in 2007, he won close to 4 million votes while popular agreement with his ideas rose to its highest recorded level. The article concludes that Le Pen remains a powerful presence in French politics and that his supporters continue to constitute a large and highly influential constituency.     

Assessing the Experience Bonus Through Examining Strategic Entry, Candidate Quality, and Campaign Receipts in U.S. House Elections

This article examines nonincumbent fundraising through the lens of two theories that have not been applied in other studies of fundraising—strategic candidate entry and ambitious amateur candidates—to test whether candidates with prior office experience are advantaged in raising funds for U.S. House campaigns. A selection model that takes into account the strategic entry of strong candidates demonstrates that electoral experience matters for only a select subset of experienced candidates. In contrast to previous research, the results show that much of the fundraising difference between amateurs and experienced candidates can be attributed to a selection process where the strongest candidates seek the best races. The results have implications for how we understand the relative importance of various conditions that shape fundraising. Competitive local or national conditions that encourage strong candidacies also allow nonincumbents to accumulate sufficient funds to mount credible campaigns.     

Elections in Western European parliaments

Parliaments often elect holders of important extra‐parliamentary offices such as heads of state, constitutional judges, heads of audit institutions and ombudsmen. What drives the behaviour of parliamentary actors and the outcome of such elections? This article explains actor behaviour theoretically, drawing on spatial factors, principal‐agent arguments about the importance of nonspatial candidate characteristics and signaling arguments about competitive considerations beyond the specific election. Empirically, it provides the first comparative analysis of such elections outside the United States Senate using original data on 100 elections for four external offices in 14 Western European parliaments. The findings show that spatial variables, nonspatial candidate characteristics and features of the competitive context systematically affect the election outcome. The article contributes to comparative parliamentary research in general by demonstrating how parliamentary activities, other than lawmaking, can be analysed using established theories and by showing that consensual aggregate outcomes can be explained within a competition‐based rational choice model.     

Multicandidate Equilibrium in American Elections

The United States presidential election of 1992 is anexample of a multicandidate contest involving bothDemocratic and Republican candidates. Using a spatialmodelling approach, I analyze candidate policystrategy for such elections, under the assumption thatvoters choose according to the multivariate votingmodel of behavioral research. This model representsvoters' decisions as probabilistic functions of theirpolicy preferences and political partisanship. Isuggest reasons why partisan voting motivatescandidates to locate near their party's partisans inthe policy space, and illustrate this argument withrespect to the 1992 presidential election. The resultsof computer simulations suggest that these motivationslead to multicandidate spatial equilibria, which arerobust to changes in the model's parameters.Partisanship appears to be an important source ofstability in multicandidate electoral competition.