State Legislative Elections Research Articles

The Role of Ideology in State Legislative Elections

In this article, I examine the effect of incumbent ideology on elections in 45 state legislatures, showing that ideological extremists are more likely to be opposed in the general election than are moderates and that extremists tend to do worse in challenged elections than moderates do. I also explore the intervening role of legislative professionalism, finding that in the majority of state legislatures moderation is rewarded, though in the most professionalized legislatures, incumbents are actually rewarded for extremism. These results show that despite the informational disadvantage of the electorate, the ideology of state legislators is an important factor in elections.

The Redistricting Cycle, Partisan Tides, and Party Strategy in State Legislative Elections

AbstractState legislative elections are increasingly shaped by two factors that influence the prospects of winning a majority: the redistricting cycle and partisan tide elections. Winning control of the redistricting process offers the prospect of shaping elections for the next decade, making majority status significantly more valuable than it otherwise might be. Partisan tides, on the contrary, can dramatically alter perceptions of which seats are safe or vulnerable and of whether majority status is obtainable or not. In this article, I examine how the proximity of redistricting and the presence of partisan tides are reflected in the strategies of the party organizations that contest state legislative elections. Using party finance data from 29 states during the period from 1996 to 2010, I find that parties' majority-seeking behavior is more intense in states with legislative redistricting, when redistricting is imminent, and when partisan tides favor the minority party.

Not Simply Black and White: The Relationship between Race/Ethnicity and Campaign Finance in State Legislative Elections

In spite of the increasing campaign finance legislation aimed at equalizing barriers in political campaigns, a fundraising gap persists across racial/ethnic lines. In the era of modern campaigning, with the expenses of advertising and polling, among others, ample funds are necessary but not universally accessible to all candidates. This study addresses the relationship between candidate race/ethnicity and campaign fundraising, and the possible moderating impact of three dimensions of the state political context – state legislative professionalism, state Republican party strength, and state culture (South vs. Nonsouth). I evaluate fundraising totals across 15 states for over 3,000 candidates in the 2006 state legislative elections. Ultimately, the findings suggest that after controlling for other candidate characteristics, as well as district and state context, there is a negative, statistically significant relationship between candidate race/ethnicity and fundraising. In addition, the effect of race/ethnicity is moderated by two features of the state context - legislative professionalization and the state culture. This study finds that non-white candidates continue to fundraise less than their white counterparts and state context is important in understanding the race/ethnicity gap in campaign finance.

Battle for the U.S. Senate

The battle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives was over before it even started, but the fight for control of the U.S. Senate is proving to be a knock-down, drag-out affair that could easily go either way. Control of the U.S. House is pretty much a settled affair. Republicans occupy 93 percent of the congressional districts that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney carried in 2012, and Democrats hold 96 percent of the districts that Obama won. As a result, there are very few “fish out of water,” or Republicans sitting in Democratic-leaning districts or Democrats in GOP-tilting districts. Yes, there are a large number of open House seats this cycle, but most are in districts which safely belong to one side or the other. It would seem that the next realistic shot Democrats have at winning control of the House would come in 2022, after the next round of redistricting takes place in 2021. The 2018 and 2020 gubernatorial and state legislative elections will determine which party in each state has the dominant hand in the redistricting process. Republicans had it in most states in 2011, and Democrats want it badly in 2021. The U.S. Senate is currently split between 55 Democrats and 45 Republicans, meaning that the GOP needs a net gain of six seats to take the majority. Today, the party’s effort to win those seats is getting some help from an almost perfect storm of factors that are battering Democrats. First, the Senate map and numbers of seats on the ballot both point to an enormously disproportionate exposure to losses for Democrats. Second, this is a mid-term election, making the timing less than ideal for the Democratic Party. In presidential election years, the general election electorate is highly diverse, and largely resembles the make-up of the country as a whole. In mid-term general elections, however, voter turnout is generally older, whiter, more conservative, and more

Do female politicians empower women to vote or run for office? A regression discontinuity approach

Persistent gender gaps in political officeholding and mass political participation jeopardize women's equal representation in government. This paper brings new evidence to the longstanding hypotheses that the presence of additional female candidates and officeholders helps address these gaps by empowering other women to vote or run for office themselves. With a regression discontinuity approach and data on 3813 US state legislative elections where a woman opposed a man, I find that the election of additional women in competitive US state legislative elections has no discernible causal effects on other women's political participation at the mass or elite levels. These estimates are precise enough to rule out even substantively small effects. These results stand in stark contrast to a number of findings from India, suggesting that although electing the first women in a society can have these empowering effects, remaining barriers to women's inclusion in American democracy go beyond what further increases in female officeholding can themselves erode.

The Impact of District Magnitude on Campaign Fundraising

The number of legislators elected in a single district influences many aspects of state legislative elections. However, there is a dearth of research on how district magnitude influences campaign fundraising. We theorize that the greater competition for funds in multimember districts results in candidates raising less money and encourages them to be more entrepreneurial in their fundraising efforts. Specifically, we expect multimember district candidates to raise contributions from more diverse sets of interests than candidates in single‐member districts, raise more funds out of state, and create more unique financial constituencies. Using data on candidates for Maryland's House of Delegates in 2006 and 2010, we find support for our hypotheses.

Using Generic Ballots to Predict State Legislative Elections

The Gallup Poll has used a generic ballot question since the 1950s to predict the national vote in Congressional elections. and a six decade record of mostly accurate projections makes this a useful measure for political scientists in understanding national elections. This paper examines how well a generic ballot question predicts the outcome of state legislative elections.

State politics, tuition, and the dynamics of a political budget cycle

This paper attempts to improve the understanding of political budget cycles by first identifying a previously undocumented cycle in tuition and required fees at public four-year institutions of higher education in the United States. I find that tuition and fees are 1.5 % lower during gubernatorial election years than in non-election years. No similar cycle is found in private tuition and fees. Using a newly constructed dataset, I then explore the variation in electoral competition in gubernatorial and state legislative elections within states over time to uncover the underlying electoral incentives creating the cycle. The results suggest that the tuition cycle is not designed to increase the reelection prospects of governors as standard theories would predict. I find that tuition decreases during gubernatorial election years as the reelection prospects of the incumbent governor increases. Instead, the evidence suggests that popular governors use lower tuition as political pork to expand party power in the state by capturing swing districts in concurrent state legislative elections. I find that the magnitude of the cycle increases with the level of competition in state house elections and that the effect is concentrated among those districts held by the opposition party, particularly if those opposition districts are populated with voters likely to be responsive to tuition as a policy lever. These results reveal important dynamics about party competition within states in the United States and suggest that the electoral incentives driving political budget cycles can be complex.

Hegemonic Duopoly at the Grass Roots: Why Progressive Third Parties Rarely Win State House Elections

This article addresses why US progressive third parties today seldom win state legislative elections, despite apparent opportunities to the contrary. It analyzes seventeen illustrative races for state representative in New England. It finds that seemingly viable progressive third-party candidates often lose because they are not sufficiently connected to their districts socially. Due to this deficit, they are unable to appeal to as many voters as typically better connected major party opponents. This is interpreted as indicative both of major parties' hegemonic ability to dominate local elections through sheer social influence and of the corresponding need for progressive third parties to develop more such influence.

The Seventeenth Amendment and Federalism in an Age of National Political Parties

Despite it being the constitutional amendment that most altered the design of the federal government, and despite recent efforts by many prominent figures to repeal it, little is known about why the Seventeenth Amendment passed in 1913. Existing histories of why the Constitution was amended to require direct elections for U.S. Senators, rather than having them appointed by state legislatures, cannot account for two major historical puzzles. Why were state legislatures eager to give away the power to choose Senators? And why was there virtually no discussion of federalism during debates over removing a key constitutional protection for states?Using both positive political theory and historical evidence, this Article offers a theory that can provide an answer to these questions. Support for direct elections was, at least in part, a result of the rise of ideologically coherent, national political parties. The development of national parties meant that state legislative elections increasingly turned on national issues, from war to currency policy to international trade, as voters used these elections as means to select Senators. State politicians and interest groups supported direct elections as a way of separating national and state politics. Federalism was not invoked against the Seventeenth Amendment because state legislative appointment was frustrating a precondition for the variety of benefits that come from republican federalism, the ability of state majorities to choose state policies. Modern advocates of repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, from Justice Scalia to Gov. Rick Perry, claim the mantle of federalism, but they have the case almost entirely backwards. Repealing the Seventeenth Amendment would reduce the benefits of federalism, as it would turn state legislatures into electoral colleges for U.S. Senators.While important in its own right, the history of the Seventeenth Amendment can also teach us a great deal about how federalism functions in the real world of politics more generally. First, contrary to the claims of scholars like Larry Kramer, national political parties do not necessarily serve as “political safeguards of federalism,” but instead can make state politics turn on national issues, reducing the influence of the preferences of state citizens on state policy. Second, certain state governmental powers – from the power to gerrymander to control over issues normally associated with the federal government – reduce the democratic accountability of state officials that undergirds most normative theories of federalism. Finally, despite the Seventeenth Amendment, state elections today still largely turn on national politics. Although state issues are sometimes important, the most important factor in state legislative elections is the popularity of the President. If the benefits for state democracy sought by supporters of the Seventeenth Amendment are to be achieved, electoral reform is a more promising avenue than structural constitutional change.

Optimal districting with endogenous party platforms

Representation is one of the most important criteria by which to judge electoral systems. In this paper, I focus on one aspect of representative democracy: the formation of electoral district boundaries. It is well known that majoritarian systems give rise to highly biased seat–vote curves, causing representation to be less than ideal. What should, therefore, be the optimal constituency design when the objective is to maximize voters' welfare? I show that when parties take account of districting while setting platforms, then the district design problem reduces to a very simple rule: do nothing when voters are risk neutral, and — when voters are risk averse — choose a bias that is against the largest partisan group. Calibrating the model on data of the U.S. State legislative elections during the 1990s, I show that the welfare gain due to optimal districting is very small.

What’s a losing party to do? The calculus of contesting state legislative elections

Existing theories of contesting elections typically treat all potential challengers as identical while under-playing the importance of political parties and primary contests. We offer a theory addressing these issues based on how the various actors in the process define and evaluate the probability of winning an election and the value of the office being contested. We test our theory by estimating a model predicting which of three responses a party that loses a legislative race makes in the next cycle: nominating the same candidate, nominating a new candidate, or nominating no one. We find substantial empirical support for our theory.

The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr and the Union in the Balance (review)

The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr and the in the Balance. By James Roger Sharp. (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2010. Pp. 256; 8 ill. Cloth, $34.95.)Reviewed by Andrew W. RobertsonThe hundredth anniversary of the election of 1800 launched a veritable cottage industry of books on the subject.1 Nothing concentrates the mind on past events better than their re-enactment, and in many of these works, the election of 2000 looms as an all-encompassing comparison. For James Roger Sharp, however, the informative parallel to the election of 1800 is not Bush v. Gore but the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Sharp calls these the two most critical elections in American history, because each the potential for destroying the Union (169).Sharp shows us that, if the election of 1860 brought on civil war, the election of 1800 could easily have had a similarly ominous result for the survival of the Union: an extra-constitutional solution to a manufactured crisis. Only a dozen years into the second U.S. constitutional regime, the survival of the was nearly as imperiled by boardinghouse intrigues in the new capital as it was by armed rebellion sixty years later.Sharp comes to this project very well qualified to write about the political background of this critical election. Sharp's earlier work, American Politics in the Early Republic, is an erudite, eminently readable narrative history on the politics of the 1790s.2 Because Sharp is so well versed in the political context, he brings this era to life. Refreshingly, he shies away from easy parallels to present-day politics. From Sharp we learn that late eighteenth-century politics was about both personality and principle. He reveals to us the rivalries and insecurities of brilliant, ambitious men like Jefferson and Hamilton without neglecting their ideological differences or their roles as creators and managers of mass-based movements, the forerunners of political parties. Sharp also describes what he sees as the countervailing, competing and antithetical political philosophies of the federal era: the democratic and egalitarian popular spirit of the American Revolution versus the longstanding belief in classical republicanism that assumed a disinterested elite, who would serve a unified public interest (17).Sharp explains in vivid detail the dramatic oscillations in public support between the Federalists and Republicans in the late 1 790s. Here the author shows himself to be the master of the telling details of both state and national politics. In congressional elections and many contests for governor, the Republicans and Federalists were already engaged in a full-scale effort to mobilize as many of their voters as possible and get them to the polls. Sharp writes quite compellingly about the details of these increasingly democratic elections. He is very well informed about congressional and local elections, frequently citing the voting data collected by Philip Lampi at the American Antiquarian Society. On the other hand, as Sharp makes quite apparent, both parties increasingly attempted to restrict choice in presidential elections. In 1796, eight of the fifteen states provided for election of presidential electors. By 1800 only five of fifteen states had contests for electors. Among the states that decided to change the rules were Massachusetts, which feared losing electoral votes to Jefferson in Maine, and Virginia, which expected to maximize the vote for Jefferson by providing a winner-take-all contest for electors. In New York, the Federalists thought they had locked up the state's electoral vote for Adams by having the legislature select electors; instead, Aaron Burr waged a successful campaign to win the state legislative elections for the Republicans and wrest control of both houses of the legislature out of Federalist hands. Alexander Hamilton wrote to Governor John Jay suggesting that the lame-duck legislature revert to a system of selecting presidential electors in district elections. …

Can Policy Changes be Treated as Natural Experiments? Evidence from Cigarette Excise Taxes

An important issue in public policy analysis is the potential endogeneity of the policies under study. If policy changes constitute responses on the part of political decision-makers to changes in a variable of interest, then standard analyses that treat policy changes as natural experiments may yield biased estimates of the impact of the policy (Besley and Case 2000). We examine the extent to which such political endogeneity biases conventional fixed effects estimates of behavioral parameters by identifying the elasticities of demand for cigarettes and beer using the timing of state legislative elections as an instrument for changes in state excise taxes. In both cases, we find sizable differences between these estimated demand elasticities and the fixed effect estimates cited in Evans, Ringel, and Stech (1999). We conclude that the use of fixed effects estimators in environments where policy interventions are endogeneously determined may lead to large biases in the estimated effects of the policies. This paper was revised July 2002.

A preferential attachment model of campaign contributions in state legislative elections

In state legislative elections some candidates attract contributions from many donors whereas other candidates have much smaller donor pools. Why? What are the origins of these disparities? This paper conceptualizes contributions as a type of attachment between the donor and the state legislative candidate. To model the formation of these attachments, this paper proposes a variant of the Barabasi-Albert preferential attachment model. The theoretical model is tested with data on over one million contributions to state legislative candidates in 2008. The paper also derives implications for macro-level inequities across candidates which are tested by comparing the observed inequities to simulations of the preferential attachment model. The results provide strong support for the hypotheses and show that the preferential attachment model provides a parsimonious representation of contributions to state legislative candidates.

Fusion ballots as a candidate-centered reform: Evidence from Oregon

This article argues that fusion balloting, or the ability of multiple parties to nominate a single candidate for office, can be viewed as a candidate-centered and incumbent-oriented reform. Using the recent passage of fusion legislation in Oregon in 2009 and its subsequent use in 2010 state legislative elections as a test case, I study the factors behind supporting fusion legislation in both chambers of the state legislature and how these same factors affected, or did not affect, the incumbents that received cross-nominations in the 2010 elections. Overall, I find that party did not play a direct role in determining which legislators supported fusion, though female legislators were less supportive. When it came to obtaining nominations, the main finding is that incumbent candidates who voted yes to fusion were generally more likely to receive nominations. Still, legislators from the group that most opposed fusion, Democratic women, attempted to win cross-nominations once the 2010 elections approached. These findings suggest that candidate factors, more than party dictates, affected support for fusion and the ability of incumbents to receive cross-endorsements. Thus, the willingness of major-party candidates to adopt fusion can be understood through theories of candidate-centered elections and political parties.

Correlations in Party Performance in State Legislative Assembly and Subsequent National Parliamentary Elections in India, 1980–2009

Using a panel data estimation technique, this article examines correlations in party performance in India for political parties that contested legislative assembly and federal parliamentary elections held within the following eighteen months during the period between 1980 and 2009. The results are analysed according to a range of variables, including type of party and voter turnout. The study's finding that, across party types, there is a strong and statistically significant correlation in party performance between the two elections provides empirical corroboration of prior studies that have suggested the existence of enduring linkages between politics at the state and federal levels. It also offers some validation for the popular media's and others' preoccupations with the outcome of legislative assembly elections as indicators of subsequent parliamentary polls.

Two Distinct Concepts: Party Competition in Government and Electoral Competition in the American States

AbstractAmerican state politics scholars have generally relied on Ranney's measure of the partisan composition of state legislatures and governors' offices to evaluate competition between parties for control of state government, and Holbrook and Van Dunk's measure of the competitiveness of individual state legislative elections to evaluate the degree of electoral competition in a state. Both measure “competition” and were previously correlated with one another, so researchers might be tempted to consider them two measures of the same concept. This would be mistaken, however, because they are measuring two distinct concepts. We use new data on state legislative partisan balance and election returns to compute (and make publicly available) the two measures of competition from 1970 to 2003, a time span that is significantly longer than any previous study. We show that the relationship between the two measures has drastically changed over the last 30 years. Although the two measures were positively correlated in the 1970s and 1980s, they are now (as we might expect, given they are different concepts) negatively correlated. We investigate one possible explanation for this change and conclude by discussing a set of practical recommendations for scholars who plan to incorporate a measure of competition in future studies.

Campaign Spending and Voter Participation in State Legislative Elections

ObjectivePrevious studies demonstrate that campaigns play an important role in mobilizing citizen participation in elections. The present analysis examines the effects of campaign spending on voter turnout in the state legislative setting where our knowledge of campaign effects is quite limited.MethodIn an examination of state legislative elections across 20 states over two election cycles, the analysis considers the influence of candidate spending on voter turnout.ResultsThe findings demonstrate that campaign spending has a strong influence on voter participation; however, this effect is mitigated by contextual features. Legislative professionalism reduces the influence of spending, while the presence of a high‐stimulus statewide election enhances it. In addition, challenger spending is more effective at stimulating participation than incumbent spending.ConclusionsHigher levels of campaign spending increase voter participation in state legislative elections; however, these effects vary according to context. These findings have important implications for theories of participation in American democracy as well for normative issues concerning the role of money in elections.

Examining Inequities in Campaign Money in State Legislative Elections

There is a striking level of inequality in campaign money in state legislative elections as many candidates have relatively little campaign money while a few candidates raise much more. This paper examines the origins of these inequalities. The paper conceptualizes contributions as a type of attachment between donors and candidates, and analyzes how these attachments are formed over the course of a campaign. The study considers a preferential attachment process in which donors are likely to contribute to candidates that already have many previous donors. This model not only has implications for donor-level decision-making but also implies a rich-get-richer effect which could account for candidate-level inequalities. The research design analyzes data on nearly 900,000 contributions in the 2010 state legislative elections and finds strong empirical support for the preferential attachment process.