House Elections Research Articles

State-dependent effect on voter turnout: The case of US House elections

In models of voter participation, the effects of election margin and campaign expenditure can be shown to be state-dependent – varying with low/high turnout. We empirically assess these implications for observed turnout, employing data from US House elections from 2000 to 2008 by means of quantile regression analysis. We document that the effects of expected election margin and campaign spending on turnout are state-dependent: the later is positive and decreasing, whereas the former is negative and U-shaped. Other determinants’ influence on turnout (e.g. education, population density) is also shown to vary across the conditional distribution of turnout rate. Our findings are robust to a number of extensions.

The Impact of Incumbent Scandals on Senate Elections, 1972–2016

In recent decades, a growing body of literature focused on the effects of scandals on congressional elections. The studies concluded that scandals decrease candidates’ vote totals, and that certain types of scandals have a more deleterious effect than others. Virtually all of these studies focus on House elections. The obvious differences between the two chambers calls into question the applicability of these findings for Senate elections. This study examines the impact that incumbent scandals had on senatorial elections from 1972 to 2016. Scandals are categorized based on the nature of the transgression in order to determine if the type of scandal made a difference. The results reveal that senators seeking reelection while confronting a scandal suffered a 4% decrease in the popular vote. Scandals involving political misdeeds, financial improprieties, and controversial statements hurt incumbents the most. Scandals also attracted challengers who spent more money against the incumbents.

2018년 미국 중간선거와 정당재편성 : 중서부의 연방 하원선거를 중심으로

본 논문에서는 2018년 미국 중간선거를 중서부 5개 주 연방 하원선거에서 나타난 저학력 백인 유권자들의 정당지지 행태에 초점을 맞추어 보고 있다. 이는 2016년 대통령선거에서 이들 중서부 5개 주에서 저학력 백인 유권자들을 중심으로 한 정당지지 행태의 커다란 변화가 트럼프의 대선 승리에 결정적인 기여를 했기 때문이다. 이에 2016년에 중서부 지역에서 나타났던 이러한 정당지지 변화가 일시적인 현상인지, 아니면 2018년 중간선거에서도 지속되고 있는 현상인지를 정당재편성의 관점에서 밝히는 데 본 논문의 목적이 있다. 분석을 통하여 2018년 중서부 5개 주 하원선거에서 공화-민주당 득표율 격차가 2016년 대통령선거에서 공화-민주당 득표율 격차보다 크게 줄어들고 있음을 확인할 수 있었다. 또한 저학력 백인 유권자들과 관련된 변수들이 이러한 득표율 격차 변화에 미치는 영향력 역시 약화되고 있음을 확인할 수 있었다. 이러한 분석 결과는 2016년 대선에서 나타났던 중서부를 중심으로 한 정당재편성이 일단은 일시적인 현상으로 그쳤음을 시사하고 있다. 하지만 공화당이 중서부의 오하이오등 3개 주의 주지사 선거에서 치열한 경쟁을 뚫고 승리하였을 뿐 아니라 미주리 등 3개 주에서도 민주당 현역 상원의원을 꺾고 승리한 선거 결과들을 볼 때, 중서부 지역에서 공화당의 지지 기반이 완전히 약화되고 있다고 보기는 어렵다. 특히 저학력 백인 유권자들의 인종적 분노와 이러한 백인들의 인종적 분노를 더욱 자극하는 비백인 인구 증가가 지금처럼 빠르게 지속되는한, 계기만 주어진다면 인종적 분노를 갖고 있는 저학력 백인 유권자들이 결집될 가능성은 매우 높고, 이로 인한 정당 지지기반의 변화가 저학력 백인 유권자들이 집중되어 있는 중서부지역을 중심으로 이루어질 가능성은 상존하고 있다고 볼 수 있다.

Which women win? Partisan changes in victory patterns in US House Elections

ABSTRACT A long line of research has shown that “when women run, they win,” but we know little about which women win. Based on a new dataset of US House candidates, this article examines partisan victory patterns among female candidates from 1980 to 2012. The relationship between party and election outcomes changes over time, yet Republican women face a much more difficult electoral environment than Democratic women. In addition, the electoral situation of Republican women has worsened in recent years, whereas that of Democratic women has improved. Democratic women candidates now dramatically outnumber Republican women candidates, and prospects for gender parity are further hindered by the dearth of Republican women who run. The partisan gap in women’s representation is likely to persist in light of the multiple ways in which Republican women are disadvantaged compared to Democratic women.

The Partisan and Policy Motivations of Political Donors Seeking Surrogate Representation in House Elections

Non-constituent donors constitute an increasingly important fundraising base for members of the U.S. House. These donors are theorized to be seeking “surrogate representation” by buying additional representation rather than relying solely upon representation provided by their own House members. However, precisely why they contribute in this way remains unclear. Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) 2008–2014 in a series of logistic models, I investigate whether self-reported donors make contributions to House races outside of their home states for policy or partisan reasons. I uncover evidence that surrogate seekers make their out-of-state contributions to recover partisan representation and to gain additional partisan and policy representation. Further, conservative issue stances significantly increase the likelihood of out-of-state giving more so than liberal stances suggesting conservative donors have less difficulty identifying surrogate representatives. Taken together, the results suggest surrogate seekers are strategic and politically sophisticated with respect to their giving choices and motivations.

Race and Representation in Campaign Finance

Racial inequality in voter turnout is well-documented, but we know less about racial inequality in campaign contributions. Using new data on the racial identities of over 27 million donors, we find an unrepresentative contributor class. Black and Latino shares of contributions are smaller than their share of the population, electorate, and elected offices. However, we argue that the presence of ethnoracial minority candidates mobilizes coethnic donors. Results from regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference designs suggest that the presence of ethnoracial minority candidates increases the share of minority contributions in U.S. House elections. We find little evidence of a donor backlash to minority candidates. Although we cannot definitively rule out alternative mechanisms that covary with shared ethnorace, the results suggest that the nomination of minority candidates can increase the ethnoracial representativeness of campaign finance without costs to fundraising.

Isotonic Regression Discontinuity Designs

This paper studies the estimation and inference for the isotonic regression at the boundary point, an object that is particularly interesting and required in the analysis of monotone regression discontinuity designs. We show that the isotonic regression is inconsistent in this setting and derive the asymptotic distributions of boundary corrected estimators. Interestingly, the boundary corrected estimators can be bootstrapped without subsampling or additional nonparametric smoothing which is not the case for the interior point. The Monte Carlo experiments indicate that shape restrictions can improve dramatically the finite-sample performance of unrestricted estimators. Lastly, we apply the isotonic regression discontinuity designs to estimate the causal effect of incumbency in the U.S. House elections.

Entries and Withdrawals: Electoral Coordination across Different Offices and the Brazilian Party Systems

In this article, we present new data on electoral alliances (coligacoes) that were formed to contest Brazilian general elections between 1986 and 2014. We present evidence to show that alliances formed for gubernatorial and lower house elections are connected to one another. These joint alliances are part of complex coordination strategies for managing the entry and withdrawal of candidates for concomitant elections regulated by different rules. As we shall show, these joint strategies result in: 01. interlinked processes of party concentration in subnational executive elections, and party fragmentation in national lower-house elections; which is the result of 02. the emergence of political parties that specialize in contesting elections for different political offices.

Electoral rules and free trade agreements as a campaign issue: The case of political disputes over the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Japan

This study empirically examines what drives candidates to oppose a free trade agreement (FTA), focusing on the difference in electoral rules and progress of FTA negotiations. We use as case studies Japan's 2013 and 2016 Upper House elections, a main issue of which was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Candidates’ promises about the TPP are unrelated to whether they run for one-seat, multi-seat, or proportional representation constituencies. Candidates who have more rival candidates belonging to the same party are less supportive of the TPP, whereas candidates who face fiercer competition with rival candidates of other parties are more supportive. This result, however, is not observed after the conclusion of the TPP negotiations. The presence of agriculture in local economies relates to candidates’ opposition of the TPP before the conclusion of negotiations, but not thereafter. Conversely, candidates’ stances on the TPP are affected by their parties’ policies and own ideologies regardless of the different stages of promoting the TPP. These results indicate that the major determinants of candidates’ positions toward an FTA vary according to the changes in circumstances surrounding the FTA.

Advertising Ideology: Using Crowd-Sourced Measurement to Understand Campaigns

We develop a subjective measure of candidate ideology in political communication, based on human coders evaluations of ideological position-taking in campaign advertisements. Our dynamic measure allows researchers to track campaign strategies within an election cycle and across ideologically distinct groups of voters. As an application of our approach, we analyze candidates ideological brand building in US House and Senate elections in 2010 and find evidence that structural features of US elections constrain the ideological brands of congressional candidates. We show that Democratic Senate candidates represented themselves as ideologically liberal in areas that strongly supported President Obama in 2008, but moderated their ideological message in more competitive areas. By contrast, we find no evidence of strategic branding among Republicans. Our results reveal one way in which fine-grained observational measures of political communications illustrate strategic ideological posturing that existing measures based on campaign donations or roll call votes cannot identify.

The optimal allocation of campaign funds in U.S. House elections

How should political parties allocate resources in U.S. House elections? Are actual spending strategies optimal? This paper answers these questions by using Bayesian election forecasts to estimate a probabilistic voting model. The model provides real-time estimates of the marginal value of additional resources in a district during a campaign and can be used to compare actual spending patterns to the amount that should have been spent according to the model. The correlation between observed and optimal spending is over 0.5 in each non-redistricting year from 2000 to 2010 and observed spending patterns respond to new polls during a campaign. The correlations are consistent across different types of campaign donors including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, various political action committees, and individuals. There is also evidence that spending is based on maximizing total seats rather than the probability of winning a majority of seats.

Will Democrats Catch a Wave? The Generic Ballot Model and the 2018 US House Elections

Will Democrats Catch a Wave? The Generic Ballot Model and the 2018 US House Elections

Ideology and Gender in U.S. House Elections

Studies of gender-ideology stereotypes suggest that voters evaluate male and female candidates in different ways, yet data limitations have hindered an analysis of candidate ideology, sex, and actual election outcomes. This article draws on a new dataset of male and female primary and general election candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1980 to 2012. I find little evidence that the relationship between ideology and victory patterns differs for male and female candidates. Neither Republican nor Democratic women experience distinct electoral fates than ideologically similar men. Candidate sex and ideology do interact in other ways, however; Democratic women are more liberal than their male counterparts, and they are advantaged in primaries over Republican women as well as Democratic men. The findings have important implications for contemporary patterns of women’s representation, and they extend our understanding of gender bias and neutrality in American elections.

Economic Evaluations and House Election Results

It is widely accepted that the economy is a determinant of congressional election results at the national level. However, there has been considerable variance in opinion on the salience of the economy as a factor. In this study, we suggest that there is a fairly strong inverse relationship between the unemployment rate and House election results, but only in the absence of a robust economy. We also find that unemployment rate is a better indicator than disposable income as a determinant for election results.

Help or Hindrance? Outside Group Advertising Expenditures in House Races

Abstract Super PACs, 501(c)4 social welfare organizations, and 501(c)6 professional associations are now major spenders in House elections. What remains unclear is how the strategic expenditure choices of these respective outside interest groups impact the competitive position of non-incumbent candidates running for the House – specifically do their advertising expenditures undermine or augment the expenditures made by the campaign. Using the Wesleyan Media Project datasets of 2012 and 2014 in combination with campaign finance data in a series of models, I find early television advertising expenditures by the aforementioned 501(c) dark money organizations diminish the effectiveness of non-incumbents’ campaign expenditures – both on television advertising and in general – whereas super PACs’ early television advertising expenditures have no significant impact on campaign spending. A comparison of 501(c) dark money organizations’ and super PACs’ advertising choices in 2012 and 2014 reveals these differential effects likely relate to legal constraints leading 501(c)s, and not super PACs, to devote more resources toward policy advertisements early in the general election cycle. I argue this choice by 501(c) s makes it difficult for non-incumbents’ campaigns to shape the policy agenda early in the race leading the campaign’s expenditures on television advertising and the campaign’s total disbursements to be less effective in terms of improving the candidate’s competitiveness.

Study on the Eighteen suffrage and Election Education in Japan

본 논문은 일본의 18세 선거연령 도입과정, 교육주체들의 정책적 대응, 선거교육의 내용, 선거교육의 효과 그리고 한국에 주는 시사점에 주목하여 분석한다. 일본은 18세 선거 권에 대한 대응방안의 하나로 부교재를 제작하고 학교에서 본격적으로 선거수업을 실시하였 다. 부교재 개발과정에는 전문가들로 구성된 부교재 편찬위원회를 구성하였다. 그리고 고교 생의 정치적 관심이나 주권의식 제고를 위하여 학교 수업에서는 지식 학습뿐만 아니라 토론 을 통해 정치학습이 이루어지도록 수업을 진행하였다. 더구나 지역사회와 관련된 현안들을 현실 속에서 체계적으로 학습하는 선거수업을 진행하였다. 학생들이 생활 속에서 정치를 학 습하고 경험하는 것은 정치적 관심제고에도 유용하기 때문이다. 일본의 학교에서 선거교육, 주권교육은 투표참여에 긍정적인 기여를 하는 것으로 나타났다. 2016년 참의원선거에서 18세 와 19세의 투표율을 보면, 18세가 10%P이상 높았다. 18세 투표율이 높은 이유는 18세 대부분 이 고교생으로 학교에서 진행하는 주권 교육을 받았기 때문으로 보고 있다. 이러한 결과는 학교에서 적극적인 주권교육의 필요성을 제기하고 있다. 일본에서도 학교에서 주권교육을 전 개하는 과정에서 기존의 수업방법이 아니라 액티브러닝(active learning) 교육방법을 강조하고 있다. 이러한 수업진행방식의 패러다임 전환은 한국에도 매우 시사적이다.We analyze the contents of election education and the introduce process of eighteen suffrage in Japan. That suggests that a research also in Korea. In japan eighteen suffrage after the production was newly introduced election textbooks. In high school, classes are held for civic education. These classes are for a political participation and political interesting of students. The lessons are mainly discussion and participation. the election education is a discussion of the community issues. Students study politics and experience politics in the daily life. In japan, the election education of the school will be added to the participation of the vote. The voting rate of the upper House election is higher than nineteen years old at age of eighteen. The reason is that eighteen years old is a high school student. Such a result suggests the need of positive election education at school. They emphasize active learning by election education in Japan. Lessons that use active learning are also required in korea. The eighteen year-old vote rate is higher than nineteen years old. The reason is the influence of civil education at high schools. In high schools, mock voting and discussion classes are actively conducted. Politics and social participation in young people are increasing. Some schools run the prevoting polling place, and students are participating directly in the polling place management. The case of Japan implicate the necessity of civil education at high school.

Getting Electoral Systems to Count: Does Candidate's Smile Matter in Japan?

Previous studies examining whether introducing the Mixed-Member-Majoritarian (MMM) electoral system to Japan’s lower house in 1994 makes a difference in Japanese politics have stimulated a number of researchers on comparative politics. By introducing the MMM electoral system, especially its single member district plurality (SMDP) tier, researchers have expected to see policy-oriented electoral campaign. Employing the latest cutting-edge face-recognition technology on candidates, we provide new evidences suggesting that the SMDP system encourages party- oriented elections compared to the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) electoral system which was used prior to 1994 for Japan’s lower house elections. The results of regression analyses using the six lower house election (1980, 1983, 1986, 2000, 2014 and 2017) data show that, compared to the elections under the SNTV, the impact of candidate’s smile on the vote share of candidates under the SMDP has been diminished even after controlling for other covariates.

Body height, social dominance and the political climate - a comment.

Background: The association between stature and social dominance is known. Dominance within social groups and current politics are related issues. We therefore aimed to compare estimates of the opinion of a population about their current political issues, with physical growth. Material and methods: We used data on the 2012 and the 2014 elections for the Japanese House of Representatives and the percent proportion of votes of the 47 prefectures of Japan, and regional data on body height of 17.5 year old men and women. Information on capita income, possession of mobile phones, urban/rural population ratio, and age distribution were added to capture socioeconomic factors. Four political parties were present in most of the 47 prefectures: the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the New Komeito Party (Kom) that is known for their social network community, and the Japanese Communist Party (JCP). Results: A dense network of associations exists between height, age distribution, per capita income, number of smartphones, and voting results. Male and female body height was inversely related with the proportion of votes for New Komeito Party. Average stature decreases by one mm per percent votes for this political party. Medium strong positive associations were found for male body height and voting results of the DPJ and for female body height with the JCP election results. Conclusion: In modern Japan, popular preferences for conservative political structures coincide with shorter stature.

The Effects of the Early Trump Presidency on Public Attitudes Toward the Republican Party

Presidents from Truman through Obama have influenced their party's popularity, reputation for competence, presumed policy commitments, appeal as an object of identification, and electoral performance. Despite Donald Trump's singularly unorthodox campaign and early presidency, survey data available for his first 15 months in office suggest that opinions of his performance are having at least as large an impact as that of his predecessors' on affect toward his party generally and its congressional wing in particular, as well as on its reputation for handling at least one policy domain (health care). Trump also appears to be widening the demographic and cultural differences between ordinary Republicans and Democrats, exacerbating the gender, age, and racial gaps between the party coalitions in a way that threatens the long‐term vitality of his party. Generic House election polls pointing to 2018 suggest that if his approval ratings remain at or below 40 percent, as they have through the first quarter of 2018, Democrats have excellent prospects for winning control of the House.

Small Donors in Congressional Elections

Candidates raise substantial sums of money to compete in federal elections. Scholars and election observers are concerned by potential corruption related to the reliance on donors who make significant contributions. One reform effort to counterbalance large donors is encouraging small donor participation. Still, some worry that ideologically extreme candidates are best able to raise small donations. We analyze internal U.S. Federal Elections Commission data to examine small donor giving in the 2006 through 2010 U.S. House elections. We find small donors may expand the scope of participation, in that the supply of small donors is unrelated to income and that all types of candidates—incumbents, their challengers, and open seat candidates—are equally adept at attracting small donors. Candidates in the most competitive races raise the most in small contributions. We temper reformers’ enthusiasm, finding that ideologically extreme incumbents tend to raise more money from small donors.