Assessing the “Experience Bonus” Through Examining Strategic Entry, Candidate Quality, and Campaign Receipts in U.S. House Elections

Maestas, Cherie D.; Rugeley, Cynthia R.

doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2008.00327.x

Cited by 40 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Green and Krasno (1988) and Canon (1990) employed ordinal scales to measure candidate experience, arguing that low-level elected experience should not be equated with statewide positions and that certain non-elected positions provide relevant political experiences. Berkman and eisenstein (1999) and Maestas and rugeley (2008) argued that members of less-professionalized state legislatures more closely resemble political amateurs in terms of their campaign behavior. all my results here are robust to these alternative operationalizations.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections

Feinstein

2010

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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Political dynasties, families in which multiple members have held elected office, commonly feature in the U.S. Congress. I explored the electoral origins of this phenomenon and determined that members of political dynasties have a significant advantage over first‐generation politicians in open‐seat House elections. Using an original dataset containing candidate‐ and district‐level covariates for all candidates in open‐seat House contests between 1994 and 2006, I found that dynastic politicians enjoy “brand name advantages,” giving them a significant edge over comparable nondynastic opponents. In contrast, hypotheses concerning potential advantages stemming from past political experience and fundraising ability yield null results.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections

Feinstein

2010

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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“…Scholars of U.S. Congressional elections have examined from many angles how candidate quality affects the cost-benefit analysis that someone considering a candidacy will make, including the incumbency advantage, 164,165,166 party support of a candidacy, 167 and fundraising capacity. 168,169,170,171 This categorization of risk types is not, by any means, a comprehensive description of every potential risk consideration that an individual evaluates whether or not to seek political office. The crucial point is that electoral risk offers distinct risk-based considerations for someone considering running.…”

Section: Sweet-cushmanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender, risk assessment, and political ambition

Sweet-Cushman

2016

Polit. life sci.

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ABSTRACT. In the United States, women have long held the right to vote and can participate fully in the political process, and yet they are underrepresented at all levels of elected office. Worldwide, men's dominance in the realm of politics has also been the norm. To date, scholars have focused on supply-side and demand-side explanations of women's underrepresentation but differences in how men and women assess electoral risk (the risk involved in seeking political office) are not fully explained. To fill this gap, I explore how evolutionary theory offers insights into gendered differences in political ambition and the evaluation of electoral risk. Using the framework of life-history theory, I hypothesize that both cognitive and environmental factors in human evolution, particularly as they relate to sexual selection and social roles, have shaped the psychology of ambition in gendered ways affecting contemporary politics. Cognitive risk-assessment mechanisms evolving in the hominid line came to be expressed differently in females and males, in women and men. These gendered expressions plausibly reflect differentiable environmental pressures in the past and may help explain behaviors in and barriers to women's electoral political activity in the present. If so, then the success of efforts to increase such activity -or, regressively, to suppress it -may be better understood.Key words: Political ambition, gender differences, evolutionary theory, electoral risk assessment M ale officeholders are the norm in political representation both worldwide and in the United States in particular. Across the globe, gender parity in political representation is unusual, and instances of women's overrepresentation are extremely rare. 1 In the United States, women make up slightly more than half of the population and earned the right to vote and participate fully in the political process many decades ago. Nevertheless, in recent U.S. history, less than a quarter of state legislators have been women; women have held few state executive offices; and women have comprised less than 20 percent of the membership of the U.S. Congress. 2 Proponents of greater gender equality in U.S. political representation continue to wonder why more women do not run for or hold political office when so many of the societal and structural barriers to their participation have diminished. The leading explanations tend to focus on candidate emergence and cultural doi: 10.1017/pls.2016.13Correspondence: Jennie Sweet-Cushman, Department of History, Political Science, and International Studies, Chatham University, 0 Woodland Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15232. Email: jsweetcushman@chatham.edu and psychological factors that contribute to men and women having different levels of political ambition. 3,4 However, these theories do not address what I consider to be critical questions: What role does electoral risk play in political ambition, and can evolutionary theory provide insight into gendered differences in risk assessment and political ambition? I argue that the ...

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“…Half of the experienced candidates in the sample competed in open seat races. These candidates have previous experience in elected office and for this reason know how to organize a professional campaign and often already have an established fundraising base (Herrnson, 2012;Maestas & Rugeley, 2008). Subsequently, they rely less upon the parties' expertise and monetary support.…”

Section: Party Contributions Are Worth More Than Cash-valuementioning

confidence: 97%

Does party support help candidates win?

Baker

2015

The Social Science Journal

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a b s t r a c tThe parties' congressional campaign committees have made it their business to strategically provide contributions to candidate campaigns in order to help their candidates win. However, the effectiveness of these contributions in terms of increasing the competitiveness of party-sponsored candidates remains untested. Using contribution data from the U.S. Federal Election Commission in a series of mixed effects models as well as a matching analysis, the receipt of direct party contributions and coordinated support is shown to significantly improve the competitive position of challengers but not open seat candidates in races for the House. Further, independent expenditures by the parties do not significantly increase candidates' competitiveness. The implications of these results for future party strategies are explored.

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Assessing the “Experience Bonus” Through Examining Strategic Entry, Candidate Quality, and Campaign Receipts in U.S. House Elections

Cited by 40 publications

References 29 publications

The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections

The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections

Gender, risk assessment, and political ambition

Does party support help candidates win?

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