What would delegates do? When and how the delegate paradox affects estimates of ideological congruence

Abstract

The consensus that American politicians are more ideologically extreme than voters has been challenged by the observation that issue delegates – who adopt voters’ majority position on each issue – can be more extreme than the median voter. We show that this difference is conditional. Issue delegates are much more extreme than the median voter in left- and right-leaning constituencies, but not in evenly divided or ideologically pure constituencies. This means that these preference aggregation assumptions have a large effect on ideological comparisons between legislators and their party constituents, but little effect on comparisons between legislators and their general election constituents. We demonstrate this finding’s implications by replicating and extending two prominent studies. Although issue delegates representing full states are not much more extreme than the median voter, party issue delegates have moved to the extremes at nearly twice the rate of party median voters and are just as extreme as legislators.