The Potential Electoral Disadvantages of a Catch-All Party

Abstract

In two-party competition, the more ideologically concentrated party may be advantaged in that its party median may be closer to the overall median voter than is that of the more dispersed party. Because of party activists and the intermediating effects of party primaries which tend to lead to the selection of candidates near the party median, voters often choose in a general election between candidates with widely divergent views. It follows that a smaller, but more ideologically cohesive, party may find its candidate closer to the overall median voter than is the candidate of the larger party. Such a party should be able to win elections that mere numbers of identifiers would suggest it ought not be able to win. In American politics, it is widely accepted that, in terms of voter ideology, the Democratic Party is more of a catch-all party than the Republicans; i.e. its partisan identifiers are more ideologically dispersed. This insight, however, is based primarily on (a) national-level data and (b) data from a period when Democratic identifiers far outnumbered Republican identifiers and when a very high fraction of southern voters were both Democratic in partisan affiliation and conservative in ideology. We look at American National Election Study data from a 1988-92 panel which uses states as its sampling frame to see the extent to which Republican Party identifiers are more ideologically united than Democratic identifiers in each of the 50 states. Even when we look within individual states, we find that Republicans are considerably more ideologically homogeneous then Democratic identifiers. Thus, for contests fought at the state level, we would expect to see Republicans electorally advantaged relative to their actual number of party identifiers.