Nationalization of gubernatorial elections

Abstract

Existing research points to the growing nationalization of American elections as presidential voting patterns are reflected in sub-presidential elections. However, previous scholarship possesses three important limitations that serve as the motivation for this dissertation. First, prior studies that focus on nationalization in gubernatorial elections ignore several temporal and geographic-political contexts. Second, existing nationalization research largely ignores out-of-state campaign contributions in its analyses. Third, previous individual-level assessments of nationalization in gubernatorial elections rely on exit polls or post-election surveys. This provides the opportunity for an analysis of nationalizing using a survey experiment to assess voters' pre-election intentions. To that end, this dissertation asks three major questions: (1) To what extent and under what temporal and geographic-political conditions does this nationalization trend persist over time? (2) To what extent does an out-of-state campaign contributions variable impact existing models of gubernatorial election outcomes and can these existing models be used to predict a measure of gubernatorial nationalization? (3) To what extent do national and state-level economic and campaign finance factors influence gubernatorial vote choice? This dissertation implements a three-part approach to answering these questions using the dissertation-by-article format. The first article analyzes the nationalization of gubernatorial elections over time across various temporal and geographic-political conditions. The second article replicates and extends the Lewis-Beck and Rice (1992) and Hummel and Rothschild (2014) models with a focus on nationalization in gubernatorial elections and the role of out-of-state campaign contributions. The third article implements a survey experiment to test the impact of both national and state economic and campaign finance factors on individual vote choice in hypothetical gubernatorial election scenarios. Collectively, this dissertation provides a more robust, comprehensive assessment of the nationalization trend in gubernatorial elections at both the aggregate and individual levels.--Author's abstract