IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/pubcho/v161y2014i3p471-497.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Explaining variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections, 1922–2004

Author

Listed:
  • Stanley Winer
  • Lawrence Kenny

    ()

  • Bernard Grofman

Abstract

We develop and test predictions about the factors determining the competitiveness of elections to the U.S. Senate. To do so, we deliberately abstract away from candidate-specific conditions that have often been used to study political competitiveness in order to focus on basic structural features of the electoral landscape. In our framework, party-specific constraints on the ideological positioning of local candidates, linked to the national party organization and its contributors, interact with the heterogeneity of state electorates to determine the number of highly competitive Senate contests. Three hypotheses emerge from this model: (1) the greater the diversity of a party’s national legislative delegation, the more highly competitive Senate elections we will observe; (2) states in which the ideological heterogeneity of the electorate is relatively high will exhibit a greater number of highly competitive elections; and (3) highly competitive Senate contests will be more common in states with closed primaries than in states with open primaries. We provide strong evidence in support of the first two hypotheses and some evidence in support of the third. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Suggested Citation

  • Stanley Winer & Lawrence Kenny & Bernard Grofman, 2014. "Explaining variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections, 1922–2004," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 161(3), pages 471-497, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:161:y:2014:i:3:p:471-497
    DOI: 10.1007/s11127-014-0176-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11127-014-0176-0
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fernando Ferreira & Joseph Gyourko, 2009. "Do Political Parties Matter? Evidence from U.S. Cities," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 124(1), pages 399-422.
    2. Osborne Martin J., 1993. "Candidate Positioning and Entry in a Political Competition," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 133-151, January.
    3. Levitt, Steven D & Poterba, James M, 1999. "Congressional Distributive Politics and State Economic Performance," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 99(1-2), pages 185-216, April.
    4. Steven Callander, 2005. "Electoral Competition in Heterogeneous Districts," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(5), pages 1116-1145, October.
    5. Timothy Besley & Torsten Persson & Daniel M. Sturm, 2010. "Political Competition, Policy and Growth: Theory and Evidence from the United States," CEP Discussion Papers dp1009, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    6. J. Ferris & Soo-Bin Park & Stanley Winer, 2008. "Studying the role of political competition in the evolution of government size over long horizons," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 137(1), pages 369-401, October.
    7. Jac C. Heckelman, 2004. "A Spatial Model of U.S. Senate Elections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 118(1_2), pages 87-103, January.
    8. David S. Lee & Enrico Moretti & Matthew J. Butler, 2004. "Do Voters Affect or Elect Policies? Evidence from the U. S. House," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 119(3), pages 807-859.
    9. Anthony Downs, 1957. "An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 65, pages 135-135.
    10. Elisabeth R. Gerber & Jeffrey B. Lewis, 2004. "Beyond the Median: Voter Preferences, District Heterogeneity, and Political Representation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(6), pages 1364-1383, December.
    11. repec:cup:apsrev:v:81:y:1987:i:02:p:525-537_19 is not listed on IDEAS
    12. Timothy Besley & Torsten Persson & Daniel M. Sturm, 2010. "Political Competition, Policy and Growth: Theory and Evidence from the US," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 77(4), pages 1329-1352.
    13. Per Pettersson-Lidbom, 2008. "Do Parties Matter for Economic Outcomes? A Regression-Discontinuity Approach," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(5), pages 1037-1056, September.
    14. John Filer & Lawrence Kenny, 1980. "Voter turnout and the benefits of voting," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 35(5), pages 575-585, January.
    15. James Coleman, 1971. "Internal processes governing party positions in elections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 35-60, September.
    16. Stanley Winer & Michael Tofias & Bernard Grofman & John Aldrich, 2008. "Trending economic factors and the structure of Congress in the growth of government, 1930–2002," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 135(3), pages 415-448, June.
    17. Andrei Gomberg & Francisco Marhuenda & Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín, 2004. "A model of endogenous political party platforms," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 24(2), pages 373-394, August.
    18. Galasso, Vincenzo & Nannicini, Tommaso, 2011. "Competing on Good Politicians," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 105(01), pages 79-99, February.
    19. Moon, Woojin, 2004. "Party Activists, Campaign Resources and Candidate Position Taking: Theory, Tests and Applications," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 34(04), pages 611-633, October.
    20. Randall Calvert & R. Isaac, 1981. "The inherent disadvantage of the presidential party in midterm congressional elections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 36(1), pages 141-146, January.
    21. Poutvaara, Panu, 2003. "Party Platforms with Endogenous Party Membership," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 117(1-2), pages 79-98, October.
    22. Thomas R. Palfrey, 1984. "Spatial Equilibrium with Entry," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 51(1), pages 139-156.
    23. Michael Ensley, 2012. "Incumbent positioning, ideological heterogeneity and mobilization in U.S. House elections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 151(1), pages 43-61, April.
    24. Austen-Smith, David, 1984. "Two-party competition with many constituences," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 177-198, April.
    25. Goff, Brian L & Grier, Kevin B, 1993. "On the (Mis)measurement of Legislator Ideology and Shirking," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 76(1-2), pages 5-20, June.
    26. repec:cup:apsrev:v:77:y:1983:i:04:p:974-990_25 is not listed on IDEAS
    27. Jeffrey Harden & Thomas Carsey, 2012. "Balancing constituency representation and party responsiveness in the US Senate: the conditioning effect of state ideological heterogeneity," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 150(1), pages 137-154, January.
    28. Gerber, Elisabeth R & Morton, Rebecca B, 1998. "Primary Election Systems and Representation," Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 14(2), pages 304-324, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. J Stephen Ferris & Stanley L. Winer & Bernard Grofman, 2016. "The Duverger-Demsetz Perspective on Electoral Competitiveness and Fragmentation: With Application to the Canadian Parliamentary System, 1867-2011," CESifo Working Paper Series 5752, CESifo Group Munich.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Electoral competition; Political competitiveness; U.S. senate elections; Ideological heterogeneity; National party constraints; Primary elections; Spline regression; Asymmetric breakpoint; D72;

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:161:y:2014:i:3:p:471-497. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Sonal Shukla) or (Rebekah McClure). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.