Strategic Candidates Research Articles

Testing the Basis of Incumbency Advantage: Strategic Candidates and Term Limits in the California Legislature

AbstractConventional wisdom suggests that incumbent politicians use the resources of office to create an electoral advantage. But Cox and Katz (2002) argue that at least part of this incumbency advantage in the United States House of Representatives can be attributed to the strategic entry and exit decisions of incumbents. We test this claim by taking advantage of the natural experiment provided by state legislative term limits in California. By comparing different types of open seats, we identify the strategic component of the incumbency advantage that exists above and beyond the resource-based advantage. The vote loss suffered by the incumbent party is smaller in term-limited seats than in voluntary open seats, indicating that incumbents do sometimes leave when their electoral prospects look dim. Further evidence of this strategic component is that quality challengers run more often in voluntary open seats, while quality incumbent-party replacements run disproportionately in term-limited seats.

The Personal and the Political in Repeat Congressional Candidacies

Analyses of the decision to run for the U.S. House are generally based on the self-reported motivations of a sample of candidates or potential candidates. In this article we take a different approach. We use a quasi-experimental design to model the decision of a losing candidate to initiate or reject an immediate repeat match-up against the person to whom they lost in the general election of the previous cycle. Of these potential repeaters we look at “strong” challengers—those who lost but secured more than 40 percent of the vote. We find the decision to repeat to be shaped at least somewhat by evaluations of the candidate’s chances of winning the party’s nomination and her personal desires and abilities. However, when we examine only “strategic” potential repeaters—those who lost in an open seat contest the first time around—we find the decision to repeat to be driven largely by broader political or partisan trends that affect the candidate’s evaluation of her chances of winning the general election. This finding confirms analyses of strategic candidates using other data.

Party Formation and Policy Outcomes under Different Electoral Systems

I introduce a model of representative democracy that allows for strategic parties, strategic candidates, strategic voters, and multiple districts. If the distribution of policy preferences is sufficiently similar across districts and sufficiently close to uniform within districts, then the number of effective parties is larger under Proportional Representation than under Plurality Voting (extending the Duvergerian predictions), and both electoral systems determine the median voter’s preferred policy outcome. However, for more asymmetric distributions of preferences the Duvergerian predictions can be reversed ,a nd the policy outcome with Proportional Representation is always (weakly) more moderate than the one produced through Plurality Voting. Welfare analysis can be done, and the results do not depend on whether voters are sincere or strategic. Sincere voting induces more party formation, and strategic voting should be observed more often under Proportional Representation.

The Redistricting Cycle and Strategic Candidate Decisions in U.S. House Races

We examine the impact of the ten-year redistricting cycle on strategic candidate behavior. First, we provide evidence that strategic candidate behavior is a function of an election's temporal proximity to a redistricting year, finding that quality challengers are less likely to emerge as the redistricting cycle progresses. Next, we show that strategic candidates interpret national and local political conditions through the lens of time. Specifically, national political conditions greatly encourage quality challengers early in the redistricting cycle but play a much reduced role later. In addition, incumbents who demonstrate moderate electoral vulnerability in the prior election are more likely to face quality challengers toward the beginning of the redistricting cycle than the end.

Pareto optimality in spatial voting models

This paper studies the Pareto optimality properties of policy proposals that are made byk(k≧2) strategic candidates that face uncertainty about the choices that the voters will make. Our first theorem shows that, under very general conditions, any proposal that is a best reply for a candidate is necessarily Pareto optimal. This theorem, in turn, implies that, under slightly stronger conditions, all candidate proposals that are made in a Nash equilibrium or sequentially are necessarily Pareto optimal. Our second theorem shows that, when these conditions are themselves slightly strengthened, any proposal outside of the Pareto set is strictly dominated by at least one proposal inside the Pareto set.