A Primary Cause of Partisanship? Nomination Systems and Legislator Ideology

McGhee, Eric; Masket, Seth E.; Shor, Boris; Rogers, Steven; McCarty, Nolan

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1674091

Cited by 28 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…For clarity, I collapse primary categories into open and closed. Main findings are not sensitive to using more refined categories, as described in McGhee et al (2014 : Table 1).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Strategic Challenger Entry in a Federal System: The Role of Economic and Political Conditions in State Legislative Competition

Rogers

2015

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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Over a third of state legislators do not face challengers when seeking reelection. Existing analyses of state legislative contestation almost exclusively focus on the stable institutional features surrounding elections and ignore conditions that change between elections. I remedy this oversight by investigating how political contexts influence challenger entry. State legislators—particularly members of the governor's party—more often face opposition during weak state economies, but the president's copartisans are even more likely to receive a challenger when the president is unpopular. My findings suggest that both national‐ and state‐level political conditions have an important impact on challengers' entry strategies.

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“…For clarity, I collapse primary categories into open and closed. Main findings are not sensitive to using more refined categories, as described in McGhee et al (2014 : Table 1).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Strategic Challenger Entry in a Federal System: The Role of Economic and Political Conditions in State Legislative Competition

Rogers

2015

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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“…and polarization(Gerber and Morton 1998;Hirano et al 2010;McGhee et al 2014;Rogowski 2013). For an overview of "getting primaried" seeBoatright (2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

What Happens When Extremists Win Primaries?

2015

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T his article studies the interplay of U.S. primary and general elections. I examine how the nomination of an extremist changes general-election outcomes and legislative behavior in the U.S. House, 1980House, -2010 a regression discontinuity design in primary elections. When an extremistas measured by primary-election campaign receipt patterns-wins a "coin-flip" election over a more moderate candidate, the party's general-election vote share decreases on average by approximately 9-13 percentage points, and the probability that the party wins the seat decreases by 35-54 percentage points. This electoral penalty is so large that nominating the more extreme primary candidate causes the district's subsequent roll-call representation to reverse, on average, becoming more liberal when an extreme Republican is nominated and more conservative when an extreme Democrat is nominated. Overall, the findings show how general-election voters act as a moderating filter in response to primary nominations.

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“…25 McGhee et al (2014) document that the link between the openness of a primary system and the ideology of state legislators elected is quite weak. Hirano et al (2010) find little evidence that primary competition is related to partisan polarization in Senate roll call voting.…”

Section: Appendix A: Data Appendixmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Advertising and Political Competition

2015

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Why is negative advertising such a prominent feature of competition in the US political market? We hypothesize that two-candidate races provide stronger incentives for going negative relative to non-duopoly contests: when the number of competitors is greater than two, airing negative ads creates positive externalities for opponents that are not the object of the attack. To investigate the empirical relevance of the fewness of competitors in explaining the volume of negative advertising, we exploit variation in the number of entrants running for US non-presidential primaries from 2000 through 2008. Duopolies are over twice as likely to air a negative ad when compared to non-duopolies, and the tendency for negative advertising decreases in the number of competitors. The estimates are robust to various specification checks and the inclusion of potential confounding factors at the race, candidate, and advertisement levels. * We thank

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A Primary Cause of Partisanship? Nomination Systems and Legislator Ideology

Cited by 28 publications

References 37 publications

Strategic Challenger Entry in a Federal System: The Role of Economic and Political Conditions in State Legislative Competition

Strategic Challenger Entry in a Federal System: The Role of Economic and Political Conditions in State Legislative Competition

What Happens When Extremists Win Primaries?

Negative Advertising and Political Competition

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