The proximity paradox: the legislative agenda and the electoral success of ideological extremists

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to spatial models of legislative elections in which voters have preferences over the bundles of roll call votes implied by candidate loca- tions rather than over the locations themselves. With such preferences, voters with single- peaked, symmetric preferences and perfect information can sincerely prefer a distant candi- date to a more proximate candidate. Moreover, negative agenda control in Congress makes such preference orderings inevitable, so party agenda control can allow majority party ex- tremists to defeat more centrist minority party candidates. The model has implications for theories of parties in Congress, and spatial modeling more broadly.