Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time

Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time

Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time

Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time

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Overview

In Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform, Jamie L. Carson and Jason M. Roberts present an original study of U.S. congressional elections and electoral institutions for 1872-1944 from a contemporary political science perspective. Using data on late nineteenth and early twentieth century congressional elections, the authors test the applicability in a historical context of modern political science theories, assess the effects of institutional reforms, and identify the factors that shape the competitiveness of elections. They present several key findings: the strategic politicians theory is applicable in an era without candidate-centered campaigns; there was an incumbency advantage prior to the full development of candidate-centered campaigns; institutional reforms have had a significant effect on elections; and the degree of electoral competition frequently correlates with elected officials' responsiveness to citizens.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780472118649
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Publication date: 01/18/2013
Series: Legislative Politics And Policy Making
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 192
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jamie L. Carson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia.

Jason M. Roberts is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Read an Excerpt

Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform

The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time


By Jamie L. Carson, Jason M. Roberts

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2013 the University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11864-9



CHAPTER 1

Introduction


1.1 A Tale of Two Elections: 1874 and 1974

By almost any measure, the congressional elections of 1874 were disastrous for the Republican Party. While incumbent legislators of the president's party are often evaluated unfavorably during midterm elections, 1874 was a particularly devastating year for Republicans. The party lost 96 seats and majority status in the House of Representatives for the first time since the end of the Civil War. After opening the 43rd (1873–1875) Congress with a healthy 203 to 88 seat margin over the Democrats, House Republicans in the 44th Congress (1875–1877) found themselves outnumbered 107 to 181 by Democrats. The Republican losses were not confined to one state or specific region of the country, rather it was a nationwide route. In the Eastern states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, for instance, Republicans lost 31 seats. In Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri, Republicans lost an additional 27 seats. Democrats completed the sweep in the former Confederate states, adding 27 seats in that region of the country as well.

The scale and dispersion of the Republican losses in 1874 have led many historians and observers to focus on the national determinants for the loss. The Panic of 1873 hit the United States in 1873, beginning a 5 year recession that produced bank failures, closure of the stock market for 10 days, wage depression, and an unemployment rate as high as 14 percent. As the recession set in, President Ulysses S. Grant and the Republican Congress received considerable blame for failing to enact policies that would ease the panic. Rather than support policies that would ease the recession, President Grant instead vetoed a bill that would have inflated the currency and he, along with congressional Republicans, continued to adhere to protectionists' tariff policies that inflated the price of goods in the United States. As a result of the serious economic downturn in the United States, one historian, Edward Stanwood (1903(II),186), labeled the 1874 election a "political revolution" against the Republican party and its policies. In addition, the Grant administration was saddled with numerous scandals surrounding the unethical activities of appointed officials (Stanwood 1903).

In many ways, the 1874 election was eerily similar to one that would occur 100 years later in 1974. Once again, Republicans were weighed down in a midterm election by a scandal-plagued president and poor economic conditions. The combination of the Watergate scandal and President Nixon's subsequent resignation in August of that year turned the public against the Republican party. Things only got worse as newly inaugurated President Ford decided to pardon former President Nixon, a decision which was met with derision throughout the country. At the same time, President Ford was presiding over an economy that was losing jobs and facing heightened inflation. Though there was no congressional majority for the Republicans to lose in 1974, they ended up losing 43 seats in the House of Representatives, four seats in the Senate, and numerous state legislative seats and governorships across the country. All told, it was a devastating loss for the Republicans that set back their chances of winning majority control of the chamber for another two decades and set the stage for them to ultimately lose the presidency in 1976.

Despite the poor electoral showing for Republicans in 1974, scholars to date have found virtually no evidence to suggest that voters directly punished Republican congressional candidates for the state of affairs in the country. In fact, Jacobson and Kernell (1983) argue that the 1974 midterm elections were not a referendum on Ford, Nixon, or Watergate at all, but rather reflected the differences in candidate quality in each House seat. In congressional districts throughout the country, quality Democratic candidates — defined as candidates who previously held elective office — defeated Republican incumbents and challengers who ran, but lacked the requisite electoral experience.

The adverse electoral environment did hurt Republicans and help Democrats in candidate recruitment, but the electoral effects were filtered through candidate quality. In other words, incumbent legislators were much more vulnerable in races where a quality challenger emerged to run against them. Democrats had an easier time recruiting quality candidates to run in 1974 as a result of the national mood, while Republicans struggled to both recruit quality candidates and stem the flow of incumbent retirements. As a result of the political circumstances, the Democrats captured 75 seats in the midterm elections and this large group of Democratic freshmen eventually came to be known as the "Watergate babies" given the unique circumstances surrounding their arrival on Capitol Hill.

The 1974 election highlights many aspects of what Jacobson and Kernell refer to as the Strategic Politicians Theory. They argue (1983, 16–17)

The point ... for any theory of national conditions and electoral change is plain. The dominant components of the individual voting decision are the voter's opinions about the candidates running in the district. ... The voters focus[ed] upon the choices in front of them rather than upon broad national issues.


Strategic politicians assessing the political circumstances in 1974 carefully considered local and national conditions when deciding whether or not it would be a good year to run for a House seat. The combination of the large number of Republican incumbent retirements and the negative backlash against the Nixon and Ford administrations made it a particularly good year for Democratic candidates with previous electoral experience to emerge. In fact, 41 percent of Republican incumbents who sought reelection faced a quality Democratic challenger, while only 10 percent of Democratic incumbents faced a quality Republican. Thus, when voters went to the polls on election day in 1974, it should come as no surprise that they selected a larger than average class of freshmen Democratic representatives given the imbalance in candidate quality across the two parties.

In light of the preceding discussion, what can Jacobson and Kernell's argument about strategic politicians tell us about the Republicans' electoral debacle in 1874? Most historians and political scientists would say, nothing. The Strategic Politicians Theory, as well as most other contemporary theories of congressional elections, was constructed and designed specifically to explain modern-day elections (i.e. post World War II) within a largely candidate-centered era of politics. Indeed, this theoretical framework reflects a phenomenon which arose during the mid-twentieth century, in which congressional candidates came to be viewed as electoral entrepreneurs working toward their own election or reelection rather than through the party apparatus. As we detail more fully in Chapter 2, party organizations recruited candidates and shouldered much of the responsibility for conducting elections in the United States during the nineteenth century. Prior to the adoption of the Australian or secret ballot at the end of the nineteenth century, it was substantially more difficult for individual candidates to develop personal loyalty as voters were essentially voting for a party slate and not making office-by-office choices. In fact, Jacobson (1989, 787) argues that in this party-centered era of politics, "the quality of individual candidates would be of small electoral consequence."

Nevertheless, if we look more closely at individual elections across the country, the 1874 election outcomes have more in common with modern-day House elections than the portrait typically painted by historians writing about these elections would suggest. Indeed, the "political revolution" that Stanwood wrote about was limited to Republicans facing a high quality challenger. Only 15 percent of Republican incumbents facing a quality challenger won in 1874 compared with 81 percent for those facing a non-quality challenger (i.e. those who had held previous elective office). This disparity in outcomes across candidate quality is not consistent with the notion that national tides alone swept Republicans out of office — as a matter of fact, it sounds more like the type of electoral result we would find during the contemporary era as noted above in reference to 1974. As the The New York Times noted in describing the loss of six Republican seats in Indiana:

There were several really bad nominations. The candidacy of Benjamin F. Claypool, in the Sixth District, against William S. Helman, was especially unfortunate. Had the district been raked, a more unpopular man than Mr. Claypool could not easily have been found. His own county, Fayette, went against him. (The New York Times, October 24, 1874, 3)


Our data suggest the Indiana 6th was no aberration as only 14 percent of Democratic incumbents faced a quality challenger in 1874, compared to 47 percent of Republican incumbents.

Most accounts of elections during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have focused almost exclusively on presidential contests at the top of the ticket. In fact, there is surprisingly little work that has focused more generally on congressional elections during this era. When congressional elections have received limited attention by historians writing about this era, the scholarly emphasis has largely been on aggregate party outcomes in Congress or dramatic swings in party control in election years such as 1864, 1882 or 1894 (Martis 1989). Unfortunately, little systematic attention has been given to explaining why such changes occurred from one election to the next or how strategic politicians may have been a factor in determining the outcome in individual elections. In this book, we focus specifically on the important role played by candidates, parties, and institutional development on changes in electoral competition since the 1870s. In doing so, we correct misperceptions in how early congressional elections have been portrayed by scholars.

In structuring our discussion throughout the book, we think it is important to first provide a solid foundation of existing research on the subject of elections. As noted above, very little work has focused specifically on congressional elections during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — what little research we did uncover is discussed in greater depth in Chapter 2. Following this discussion, we lay out our primary theoretical argument regarding strategic politicians and how we expect them to impact elections from this era. Even with strong parties regulating elections in this period, we maintain that both parties sought to recruit the most experienced candidates possible, which led to more competitive and closely fought races in many election years for our study. After presenting our theoretical framework in Chapter 3, we offer a voluminous amount of descriptive evidence in Chapter 4 before turning to more systematic analyses in the next two chapters. These three chapters are the heart of our empirical analysis and provide an extensive amount of previously unavailable evidence to draw upon in supporting our theoretical framework. We conclude with a summary of our findings and a broader discussion of the implications of our research with respect to accountability and representation in the electoral arena.

One of the central and underlying themes that runs throughout the ensuing chapters is that decisions among candidates and the party elite regarding the composition of the ballot (i.e. who was running and when) were a major determinant of election outcomes in the era between Reconstruction and the close of World War II. This runs contrary to the perception in the literature that individual candidates had little impact on election outcomes during this era. Through a comprehensive analysis of our newly collected elections data, we present evidence of how parties recruited strong candidates to run for office during the late nineteenth century and how this changed dramatically with the adoption of new institutions such as the Australian ballot and the direct primary in the early twentieth century. In this respect, we think that our findings will offer new insights about congressional elections and lead scholars to reevaluate the fit between existing theories and historical data. In short, we believe our findings demonstrate that the strategic choices by individual politicians have always played a large role in determining election outcomes.


1.2 Analyzing Congressional Elections

We believe the study of congressional elections is important for a number of different reasons. As the architect of the U.S. Constitution — James Madison — firmly believed, elections are the central mechanism that ensure popular sovereignty over the government. As the people's branch, members of Congress are supposed to listen to and be responsive to the interests of their constituents. If an incumbent legislator is doing a good job of representing her constituents and desires to be reelected, then there is a strong likelihood that she will continue to serve in Congress. If the incumbent fails to adequately represent her constituents, however, then regularly occurring elections provide voters with a chance to replace the "out-of-touch" legislator with someone else who promises to do a better job. Over time, and assuming the electoral machinery continues to work effectively, the cycle repeats itself and a new group of legislators continues to get elected by the voters.

Given the paramount importance of congressional elections in American democracy, we think it important that scholars have as complete an understanding of the changing nature of elections as is practicable. Historical studies are important in this regard, as Swift and Brady (1994, 95) note, "the breadth and depth of an historical perspective suggest a host of causal factors often too subtle or inchoate for contemporary observers to adequately grasp." Elections from an earlier era may be interesting in and of themselves, but we believe that studying them has even more to offer than simply uncovering a unique series of electoral events that occurred more than 100 years ago. In addition to providing a more complete account of American electoral development, we think an historical perspective provides us with a certain amount of analytical leverage.

Most importantly, the discussion in the subsequent chapters sheds light on how a central democratic mechanism (i.e., congressional elections) has evolved over time and both how and why this mechanism works the way that it does in the political system. In particular, the introduction of the Australian ballot at the end of the nineteenth century and the widespread adoption of the direct primary during the early part of the twentieth century are two of the most fundamental changes in American electoral institutions since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789. Both of these institutional changes had the effect of transferring control of the machinery of elections away from the party organizations and toward the states and voters. To date, we lack a systematic analysis that evaluates the effects of these institutional changes on congressional elections over time. Studying elections before, during, and after these fundamental changes allows us to examine their effects on candidates, parties, and electoral outcomes. Moreover, it provides an opportunity to systematically evaluate the role that strategic politicians played in influencing congressional elections across time.

As we noted above, modern theories of congressional elections have not been tested with pre-World War II data to determine if they are equally relevant across a longer time span. In doing this, we are the first to test these theories with out-of-sample data. This allows us to assess the applicability of these theories in this historical context and to test the central assumptions made with modern data. For instance, many theories of candidate entry decisions assume that candidate-centered elections are a necessary condition for evidence of strategic behavior and a "personal vote" connection with voters. We show in Chapter 5 that many elements of the strategic politicians theory proposed by Jacobson and Kernell (1983) are applicable in a party-centered era. Likewise, we demonstrate that an incumbency advantage has existed since Reconstruction and that our time series gives us leverage in assessing the applicability of a variety of potential explanations for this trend. Moreover, it is the variability in electoral competition and institutions that offers us considerable leverage in understanding how electoral outcomes have changed over time.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform by Jamie L. Carson, Jason M. Roberts. Copyright © 2013 the University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

List of Tables ix

List of Figures x

Acknowledgments xiii

1 Introduction 1

2 History of U.S. House Elections 13

3 Institutional Change and Candidate Behavior 27

4 Exploring Historic and Modern Election Trends 56

5 The Politics of Candidate Emergence 82

6 The Incumbency Advantage in House Elections 116

7 Conclusions 139

Notes 149

References 157

Index 167

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