Party Elite Engagement and Coordination in House Primary Elections: A Test of Theories of Parties

Abstract

The support of party elites in the primary has a strong influence on who runs in a primary and how well they do. Yet party elites do not always engage or coordinate their efforts. Moreover, theories of parties disagree about whether and where party elites should engage and coordinate in primaries, depending on their view of the relative importance of electoral and policy goals. This article examines party elites’ engagement and coordination in primary elections in the U.S. House between 2004 and 2018. Consistent with theories of parties as networks of policy demanders, party elites are engaged in primaries in both competitive and safe districts. But, while party elites coordinate their efforts in competitive districts, they are less likely to coordinate in safe districts. Their disparate coordination efforts reflect different electoral priorities in these districts.

Competition in Congressional Elections: Money versus Votes

“…In other analyses, I accounted for party and group activity in the race. I use Hassell's (2021) data to control for the number of party-connected donors and FEC data to control for party coordinated expenditures and independent expenditures before the primary (Tables A11 and A12). The insignificant relationships are unsurprising.…”

Primary Barriers to Working Class Representation

“…Second, elite support remains a viable mechanism, but difficulties in measuring it prevent us from making firm conclusions. Our closest approximation of measuring elite support comes through our analysis using Hassell’s (2021) party donor data in Table A11 in the appendix. Controlling for party donor support does not attenuate the performance gap between workers and nonworkers, though the result could be attributed to the very small number of workers who receive party donor support.…”

“…Financial support from donors who also give to the parties’ congressional campaign funds (i.e., DCCC, NRCC) provides a measure of party support and predicts a higher likelihood of winning a primary (Hassell 2016). We merge party donor data from Hassell (2021). We find that only five of the 77 workers in our data (6.5%) received at least one contribution from a party donor.…”

Shifting party goals: Party electoral support and legislative behavior in the majority and the minority

“…Members in safer districts act differently than members in more competitive districts, and we control for these differences by including the absolute value of the Partisan Voting Index (PVI) score in each member’s district as a measure of electoral competitiveness. 22 District competitiveness would be problematic for our analysis if the engagement of party elites systematically varied with electoral competitiveness, but that is not a concern because party elites are no less engaged in safe primaries (Hassell, 2021). Nevertheless, we also ran our analysis only including members of Congress who are in districts ranging from −10 to 10 on the Cook PVI scale, as such races are relatively competitive.…”

“…11The number of party-connected donors who give to a candidate’s campaign is correlated with other commonly used measures of party support such as direct party transfers (Fraga et al, 2020). However, while party elites are often involved in safe districts (Hassell, 2021), formal party organizations do not spend money in uncompetitive races (especially in the primary). Thus, using measures constructed from direct contributions would miss important party activity and the coalition that party elites are trying to build.…”