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

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.     

Ideology and candidate evaluation

How does the expressed political ideology of voters influence their evaluation of presidential candidates? The classic answer to this question is provided by the spatial theory of electoral choice in which utility for a candidate is a function of the proximity between the voter and candidate positions on the liberal-conservative continuum. We have argued elsewhere that spatial theory, while intellectually appealing, is inadequate as an empirical model of mass behavior. We have developed a directional theory of issue voting that we believe provides a more realistic accounting of how specific policy issues influence utility for a candidate. Directional theory is based on the view that for most voters issues are understood as a dichotomous choice between two alternative positions. While ideology is widely understood as a continuum of positions, the directional model can be applied to the relationship between ideology and candidate evaluation. In this paper we compare the two theories using National Election Study data from 1972 to 1988. The results tend to favor the directional model over the traditional proximity model. We conclude by briefly tracing out the implications of this finding.     

Bases of political judgments: The role of stereotypic and nonstereotypic information

Three experiments investigated the role of stereotypic and nonstereotypic criteria in judgments of political candidates. The effects of physical attractiveness, political party, and stands on specific issues on both absolute and comparative judgments of political candidates were examined to evaluate three hypotheses about stereotype and attribute use. In the absence of other information, candidates' physical attractiveness (conveyed through photographs) had a substantial influence on subjects' global evaluations of them and inferences of both their personal qualities and their political ideology. When other information about the candidates' party membership and stands on specific issues was available, however, the candidates' attractiveness had no effect on the evaluations of them. When subjects made judgments of only one candidate, subjects relied exclusively on the candidate's voting record. When subjects were asked to make comparative judgments of two candidates, however, they based their judgments on each candidate's party membership and not on their respective voting records. Implications of these results for the processes that underlie political judgments and decisions are evaluated.     

Constituent errors in assessing their Senators

We attempt to explain why some constitutents are well informed and others are poorly informed about the positions taken by their U.S. Senators. The acquisition of political information is modeled in a Bayesian framework. A constituent with virtually no information about a candidate assigns him an average position on a liberal/conservative spectrum. As more political information is acquired with more political involvement, the constituent shifts her prior toward the politician's actual position and thus has a smaller error in assessing positions taken by her representative. In the Bayesian framework, voters make larger errors in evaluating the records of party mavericks than of typical party members. The model is tested using data from the 1982 American National Election Study. Data on the respondent's perceived ideology of their Senators and their socioeconomic characteristics are combined with information on the Senators' actual ideology, length of time in the Senate, political party, and candidacy for re-election in 1982. The empirical analysis provides support for our predictions.     

Why representatives are ideologists though voters are not

Though few voters appear to hold consistent ideological views, the roll call votes of congressmen and senators can be well predicted by ideological terms. An explanation for this puzzle is that ideology allows candidates to succinctly explain their views. Because it is difficult to explain detailed positions to voters, a candidate who presents his position in ideological terms may be able to defeat a candidate who supports a set of issue positions that would, in toto, be preferred by a majority of well-informed voters were the voters aware of all the views of that candidate. This effect can be a powerful one. Moreover, ideology may be a source of electoral stability, and a means of providing regularity and structure to elite political debate.Amihai Glazer acknowledges support from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Bernard Grofman received partial support from Grant SES #85-06376, Decision and Management Science Program, National Science Foundation, and NSF Grant BNS #80-01194 to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, at which he was a 1985–86 Fellow. We are indebted to Gordon Tullock for his comments.     

Does Sex Encourage Commitment? The Impact of Candidate Choices on the Time-to-Decision

The sex of a congressional candidate can influence voting choices, but does candidate sex also influence the timing of those choices? This paper examines that question in light of other information that voters weigh in making their decisions. Using a national survey from the 2006 election, and a unique dataset of political informants, we find that the sex of the candidate conveys ideological information that permits voters to make swifter judgments. Additionally, it reduces the probability of a delayed decision by supplying information helpful to the choice between candidates—even in the absence of ideology. In fact, the impact of candidate sex rivals other variables that are traditionally used to explain the time-to-decision. Consistent with the literature on sex stereotypes, we find a stronger influence for Democratic than Republican female candidates.     

Do political budget cycles work? A micro-level investigation of pre-electoral budgeting and its electoral consequences

One of the most puzzling empirical patterns in political economy is the disconnect between the regular use of fiscal instruments for re-election purposes by incumbents (otherwise known as political budget cycles) on the one hand and their relative electoral ineffectiveness on the other. This article engages with this puzzle by shifting the analysis from the macro to the micro-level. It shows that when taking into account individual-level heterogeneity in the electoral response, one can gain a more nuanced understanding of the political consequences of pre-electoral budgeting. By relying on a set of multi-level random-effects regressions using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral System surveys, it points to two such sources of heterogeneity: social status and ideology. In particular, higher status individuals are considerably less responsive to pre-electoral deficits, though the effects depend on the composition of fiscal measures. Results for ideology are somewhat less consistent across different operationalizations of ideology as well as model specification.     

Ideological externalities, social pressures, and political parties

Members of political parties may influence each other. For example, a liberal in a party of moderates may moderate his views. At the same time, the moderates in the party may become more liberal. Voters in a district who favor such effects may care about the ideology of officeholders in other districts. They may therefore prefer a candidate who affiliates with a party over an independent with the same position.     

Political ideology and nuclear energy: Perception,proximity, and trust

Political ideology is an increasingly powerful force in support of public policy. Historically, nuclear energy has found more support among political conservatives. This study updates the literature on political ideology and support for nuclear energy by examining how political ideology is associated with perceptions of nuclear energy and trust of nuclear information sources. After excluding participants with incomplete data, and participants within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor, the analytical sample size for the analysis examining political ideology and perceptions of nuclear energy was 4153. The analytical sample includes a total of 1035 participants within a 50-mile radius of INL, 710 participants from within Idaho who lived further than 50 miles from INL, 1899 participants from other states (more than 50 miles from a nuclear reactor), and 509 Non-Idaho participants living within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor. Logistic regression was used to determine how political ideology was associated with perceptions of nuclear energy and trust in different sources regarding radioactive waste, after controlling for demographics and location. While liberal participants near INL were less favorable towards nuclear energy, and more trusting in impact scientists to tell the truth about radioactive waste than their conservative counterparts, this was not consistent across the US. Our findings reveal the complexity of political ideology and the perceptions of nuclear issues and how proximity influences perceptions. The perceptions of political moderates were particularly important in providing a more complex understanding of political ideology and nuclear energy issues.     

Attentiveness to television news and opinion change in the fall 1992 presidential campaign

This paper examines the extent to which attention to television news impacted affective evaluations of presidential candidates during the last two months of the 1992 campaign. Our analyses show that attentiveness to campaign news significantly influenced evaluations in a manner consistent with the tone of news coverage for each candidate. We disaggregate the data by party and ideology, however, and discover this effect to be conditional, depending critically on the character and intensity of political predispositions. Throughout the paper we emphasize the interplay between political predispositions and the valence of network coverage, underscoring the contingent effect of media messages. We conclude with a brief discussion of our results and stress the importance of partisan reinforcement, which we found was a major consequence of news media reception during the fall 1992 campaign.     

The Indirect Effects of Discredited Stereotypes in Judgments of Jewish Leaders

Can stereotypes of ethnic groups have an indirect impact on voters' judgments even if voters reject them? We examine the case of Jewish leaders and hypothesize that acceptable political stereotypes (Jews are liberal) are linked in voters' minds to unacceptable social stereotypes (Jews are shady); consequently, a cue to the candidate's shadiness works indirectly by increasing the perception that the candidate is liberal, even as the shady cue is rejected. Using three national survey‐experiments we randomly varied a candidate's Jewish identity, ideology, and shadiness. The cue to the rejected social stereotype indeed activates the more legitimate political stereotype. Moreover, voters give more weight to the candidate's perceived liberalism in their evaluation. Consequently, the candidate's support suffers. However, when the candidate takes a more extreme ideological position on issues, the effects disappear. The indirect influence of discredited stereotypes and the limits of those stereotypes have implications for our understanding of voting and of the legacies of discrimination.     

Electoral Choice,Ideological Conflict,and Political Participation

Generations of democratic theorists argue that democratic systems should present citizens with clear and distinct electoral choices. Responsible party theorists further argued that political participation increases with greater ideological conflict between competing electoral options. Empirical evidence on this question, however, remains deeply ambiguous. This article introduces new joint estimates of citizen preferences and the campaign platforms chosen by pairs of candidates in U.S. House and Senate races. The results show that increasing levels of ideological conflict reduce voter turnout, and are robust across a wide range of empirical specifications. Furthermore, the findings provide no support for existing accounts that emphasize how ideology or partisanship explains the relationship between ideological conflict and turnout. Instead, I find that increasing levels of candidate divergence reduce turnout primarily among citizens with lower levels of political sophistication. These findings provide the strongest evidence to date for how mass political behavior is conditioned by electoral choice.     

Political socialization,political gender gaps and the intergenerational transmission of left-right ideology

While left and right are the main terms to distinguish political views in Western Europe, the family socialization of citizens has mainly been studied in terms of partisan preferences rather than identification with these ideological blocks. Therefore, this study investigates the intergenerational transmission of left-right ideological positions in two European multiparty systems. To investigate expectations regarding gendered patterns in political socialization, ideological transmission between mothers, fathers, daughters and sons are analyzed, making use of German and Swiss household data. The results underline the relevance of the family in the transmission of political ideology in multiparty systems, showing high contemporary parent–child concordance in ideological positioning in line with classic work in political socialization. Moreover, the study demonstrates how the gender-generation gap in political ideology is consequential for this process. Young women consistently place themselves on the left of men across all combinations of parental ideology, which indicates that the gender-generation gap trumps other gendered patterns in intergenerational transmission. Consequently, daughters are less likely than sons to take over their parents’ rightist positions, while parent–son transmission is equally large on the left and the right. This also means that left-leaning parents have a general advantage over right-leaning parents in having their ideological identification reproduced by their daughters. The study highlights the importance of differentiating between the transmission of left- and right-wing ideology in political socialization processes. Moreover, it demonstrates that the distinction by offspring gender is imperative when studying the intergenerational transmission of traits that display gender differences within and between parental and offspring generations. The findings point at the active role of especially female offspring in the political socialization process, as they seem to be more strongly impacted by influences outside the family that sustain generational processes of further gender realignment.     

Ideology and Interests in the Political Marketplace

I develop a statistical method to measure the ideology of candidates and political action committees (PACs) using contribution data. The method recovers ideal points for incumbents that strongly correlate with ideological measures recovered from voting records, while simultaneously recovering positions for PACs, unsuccessful challengers, and open‐seat candidates. As the candidate ideal points are estimated independently of voting records, they represent a useful new resource for testing models of legislative behavior. By incorporating nonideological covariates known to influence PAC contributions, the method also shows promise as a platform for furthering our understanding of PAC contribution behavior.     

Choosing the Right Candidate: Observational and Experimental Evidence that Conservatives and Liberals Prefer Powerful and Warm Candidate Personalities,Respectively

A comprehensive literature relates voters’ electoral decisions to their perceptions of candidates’ personalities. Yet the mechanisms through which voters are attracted to certain candidates and not to others remain largely unresolved. To answer this question, this article integrates two recent interdisciplinary insights. First, leader and candidate preferences are found to be strongly dependent on levels of contextual conflict. Second, individual differences in political ideology are shown to be rooted in psychological orientations leading conservatives and liberals to perceive society in fundamentally different ways: Conservatives tend to perceive the social world as dangerous and threatening, whereas liberals to a larger degree see society as a safe place characterized by cooperation. Based on this, it is predicted that conservatives and liberals will also prefer different candidate personalities. Specifically, conservatives are predicted to value candidate power and “strong leadership” more than liberals, whereas liberals are predicted to value candidate warmth more than conservatives. The prediction is supported observationally using the 1984–2008 American National Election Studies and experimentally in two original experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. Consequences and scope conditions for trait-based voting are discussed.     

Do Moderate Voters Weigh Candidates’ Ideologies? Voters’ Decision Rules in the 2010 Congressional Elections

Models of voting behavior typically specify that all voters employ identical criteria to evaluate candidates. We argue that moderate voters weigh candidates’ policy/ideological positions far less than non-moderate voters, and we report analyses of survey data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study that substantiate these arguments. Across a wide range of models and measurement strategies, we find consistent evidence that liberal and conservative voters are substantially more responsive to candidate ideology than more centrist voters. Simply put, moderate voters appear qualitatively different from liberals and conservatives, a finding that has important implications for candidate strategies and for political representation.     

Political Trust, Ideology, and Public Support for Government Spending

This article analyzes the relationship between political trust, ideology, and public support for government spending. We argue that the political trust heuristic is activated when individuals are asked to sacrifice ideological as well as material interests. Aggregate- and individual-level analysis shows that the effects of political trust on support for government spending are moderated by ideology. Consistent with the unbalanced ideological costs imposed by requests for increased government spending, we find that the effects of political trust are significantly more pronounced among conservatives than among liberals. The analysis further demonstrates that ideology conditions the effects of political trust on attitudes toward both distributive and redistributive spending. Our findings suggest that political trust has policy consequences across a much broader range of policy issues than previously thought.     

A Turn Toward Avoidance? Selective Exposure to Online Political Information, 2004–2008

Scholars warn that avoidance of attitude-discrepant political information is becoming increasingly common due in part to an ideologically fragmented online news environment that allows individuals to systematically eschew contact with ideas that differ from their own. Data collected over a series of national RDD surveys conducted between 2004 and 2008 challenge this assertion, demonstrating that Americans’ use of attitude-consistent political sources is positively correlated with use of more attitudinally challenging sources. This pattern holds over time and across different types of online outlets, and applies even among those most strongly committed to their political ideology, although the relationship is weaker for this group. Implications for these findings are discussed.     

Correspondence

The paper argues for the possibility of reworking the concept of ideology in such a way as to depend neither on a problematic of truth and error, nor on a division of the world into two parts one of which is more real than the other, nor on an expressive relation of subjects to meaning. The political force of the concept can be retained if ideology is thought as a provisional state of discourse (a function of its appropriation and use) rather than as a content or an inherent structure. Any discursive system produces a particular configuration of subject-positions which are the conditions of entry of individuals into discourse; but these acquire political significance only through the (historically variable) codification of discourse in terms of a play of relations of power, and the positions available can be refused or undermined. Some implications of this argument for models of the social and for discourse theory are discussed     

Evaluations of candidates’ non-policy characteristics from issue positions: Evidence of valence spillover

Why do most winning candidates adhere to partisan orthodox positions? While some prior work has examined how issue positions signal candidate ideology, this paper instead focuses on how candidate issue positions affect evaluations of valence. In light of important inferential limitations in using the correlation between observed candidate positions and electoral performance to assess voter responses, we present a large-scale candidate vignette experiment that reveals issue positions affect perceptions of non-ideological characteristics. Candidates with only one of three positions that stray from the “typical” position for their party – being too extreme, bipartisan, or ideologically unusual – are perceived as less effective legislators. This suggests party-consistency may be reinforced by the electorate through changes in perceived valence, and that the observed correlation between candidate performance and issue positions might arise for reasons apart from ideology.