Recent Congressional Elections Research Articles

The Selling of Experience in the 2022 Congressional Elections

Past experience in elective office has always been the best predictor of congressional candidate success in elections. These “quality” candidates come into elections with experience fundraising, name recognition, and general knowledge about how to run a successful campaign. Yet, recent congressional elections have seen an increase in the electoral success of inexperienced candidates. As past experience in office may no longer be valued as it once was, how are these experienced candidates marketing themselves to voters? Are they still leaning into their past experience in elected office or are they more likely to emphasize other occupations and experiences? We expect candidates brand themselves, emphasizing different experiences, based on the type of election they are in and who they are running against. In order to test these expectations, this paper examines all available biography pages of experienced candidates who ran in congressional primaries in 2022. We find clear partisan differences in what candidates past occupational backgrounds they highlight. We find mixed evidence that decisions about what occupations to emphasize vary based on electoral dynamics.

Does the Ideological Proximity Between Candidates and Voters Affect Voting in U.S. House Elections?

Do citizens hold congressional candidates accountable for their policy positions? Recent studies reach different conclusions on this important question. In line with the predictions of spatial voting theory, a number of recent survey-based studies have found reassuring evidence that voters choose the candidate with the most spatially proximate policy positions. In contrast, most electoral studies find that candidates’ ideological moderation has only a small association with vote margins, especially in the modern, polarized Congress. We bring clarity to these discordant findings using the largest dataset to date of voting behavior in congressional elections. We find that the ideological positions of congressional candidates have only a small association with citizens’ voting behavior. Instead, citizens cast their votes “as if” based on proximity to parties rather than individual candidates. The modest degree of candidate-centered spatial voting in recent Congressional elections may help explain the polarization and lack of responsiveness in the contemporary Congress.

Gerrymandering from the Bench? The Electoral Consequences of Judicial Redistricting

Widespread public mistrust of legislative redistricting begs the question: Can (presumably) neutral and independent courts produce more competitive districts that preserve the integrity of the democratic process? The regime politics perspective suggests not, portraying courts as partisan collaborators whose rulings help their regime allies in the other branches. Conversely, recent congressional elections research suggests that non-legislative approaches to redistricting (such as independent commissions) encourage experienced candidates to mount serious electoral challenges to incumbents. We extend this literature by focusing on the impact of judicial participation in the redistricting process. Using data for the 2000 apportionment cycle, we test whether judicial redistricting enhances the competitiveness of congressional elections, as some studies suggest, or if it instead serves to promote the interests of the party with which the judge is affiliated, as the regime politics literature would lead us to believe. Our findings suggest that judicial redistricting does enhance competition in congressional elections, but we fail to find evidence that it confers any partisan advantage.

Fair Majority Voting (or How to Eliminate Gerrymandering)

1. THE PROBLEM. Something is rotten in the electoral state of the United States. Mathematics is involved. Advances in computer technology—hardware and software— have permitted a great leap “forward” in the fine art of political gerrymandering—“the practice of dividing a geographical area into electoral districts, often of highly irregular shape, to give one political party an unfair advantage by diluting the opposition’s voting strength” (according to Black’s Law Dictionary). It is generally acknowledged that some four hundred of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are “safe,” and many claim that districting determines elections, not votes. Recent congressional elections (especially those of 2002 and 2004)— summarized in Table 1—show the shocking impact of gerrymandering. Incumbent candidates, in tailored districts, are almost certain of reelection (over 98% in 2002 and 2004, over 94% in 2006). If an election is deemed “competitive” when the spread in votes between the winner and the runner-up is 6% or less, then 5.5% of the elections were competitive in 2002, 2.3% in 2004 and 9.0% in 2006. Many candidates ran unopposed by a candidate from one of the two major parties in all three elections. In Michigan, the Democratic candidates together out-polled the Republican candidates by some 35,000 votes in 2002, yet elected only six representatives to the Republican’s nine. In the 2002 Maryland elections, Republican representatives needed an average of 376,455 votes to be elected, the Democratic representatives only 150,708. In the 2004 Connecticut elections, the Democratic candidates as a group out-polled the Republican candidates by over 156,000 votes; nevertheless, only two were elected to the Republican’s three. In all three elections Massachusetts elected only Democrats: in 2002 six of the ten were elected without Republican opposition, in 2004 five and in 2006 seven. Ohio elected eleven Republican and seven Democratic representatives in 2006, and yet the Democratic candidates received 211,347 more votes than did the

If Men Stayed Home ... The Gender Gap in Recent Congressional Elections

Inclusion of sex along with the core elements of the New Deal coalition has become more common in group-based analyses of partisan and vot ing blocs since 1980. We focus on the impact of sex on party identifica tion and congressional voting at both the individual and aggregate level; special attention is paid to the 1994 midterm. Using data from the Na tional Elections Studies (1980-1996), we show that like men, women in the total electorate were more likely to identify as Republicans in 1994 than at any other time. Although significant and stronger than in the past, the influence of sex on an individual's party loyalty still trailed that of membership in other groups. However, at the aggregate level, sex dif ferences were clearly the most powerful force in shaping the balance of partisan identification. The evidence also shows that women's alleged low turnout did not account for the 1994 outcome. Differences in congres sional voting behavior between women and men are observed most clearly in off-year, open-seat contests when the effects of incumbency and presi dential coattails are absent.

If Men Stayed Home... The Gender Gap in Recent Congressional Elections

If Men Stayed Home... The Gender Gap in Recent Congressional Elections

The Marginals Never Vanished: Incumbency and Competition in Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives, 1952-82

The average vote margin enjoyed by incumbent candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives increased sharply during the 1 960s. Despite this, and contrary to assumptions common in the literature on recent congressional elections, electoral data show that House incumbents are no safer now than they were in the 1950s, the marginals, properly defined, have not vanished; the swing ratio has diminished little, if at all; and competition for House seats held by incumbents has not declined. Vote margins increased without adding to incumbent security, diminishing competition, or dampening swings because the heterogeneity of interelection vote swings increased at the same time.

A test of the revealed-preference phenomenon in congressional elections

This study tests for the existence of a revealed-preference phenomenon in recent congressional elections. A revealed-preference analysis predicts that if candidate one defeats incumbent candidate two, then candidate one has been revealed preferred to candidate two, and can expect to secure higher pluralities in subsequent reelection contests than candidate two would have expected. I collect data on incumbents in 1946–1980 congressional elections to examine this prediction. The data provide qualified support for the presence of a revealed-preference phenomenon. The essay closes with a discussion of the possible connection between the revealed-preference phenomenon and the recent electoral experience of congressional incumbents.

Electoral equilibria with restricted strategies

We construct a spatial election model in which candidates inherit initial positions in the strategy space, presumably from previous political activity, and they are restricted to strategies close to their initial positions. We establish sufficient conditions for the existence of an equilibrium. The equilibrium need not entail an expectation of a zero plurality for each candidate. We then apply this model to a sequence of elections in which a series of opposition candidates challenge incumbents. Given certain regularity conditions, the result will be an apparent incumbency advantage, corresponding to that observed in recent congressional elections.

Will Success Spoil the Presidential Libraries?

THERE WAS a moment, say a third of century ago, when world was a great deal more simple. There were no nuclear weapons and no Vietnam War. There was not even a Pentagon, much less any Pentagon Papers. And of course federal government had no presidential libraries to occasion any concern among historians, as has recently been case. This is not to suggest that historians of a generation ago were concerned only with remote past. They worried about jobs, for 1938 was a depression year. They were exercised by delay in publishing Foreign Relations of United States, which had attained staggering lag of sixteen years. There was even some concern for archives, for American Historical Association in those days still had, happily and fittingly, a standing committee on source materials archives and historical manuscripts. When AHA held its annual meeting in 1938, its members, 1,017 strong, found time for such contemporary topics as passing of Austria and New Deal liberalism. Moreover, as anonymous rapporteur of that meeting wrote, the spacious lobbys and lounges of Chicago's and world's largest hotel gave free scope to gregarious and convivial impulses and flow of professional gossip.1 It is not possible to reconstruct gossip of that shining moment, but it may be safely assumed that along with Munich, recent congressional elections, and conviviality, Stevens Hotel Bar flowed with at least some conversation about decision of man in