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Elections are designed to give voters the ability to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. For this to work, voters must be presented with credible alternatives from which to choose. In the United States, as in other weak‐party systems, the decision to challenge an incumbent representative rests with individual, strategic‐minded politicians who carefully weigh the available information. We investigate the role that one source of information—partisan media—plays in shaping electoral competition. We hypothesize that the haphazard expansion of the conservative Fox News Channel in the decade after its 1996 launch influenced congressional elections by affecting the decision calculus of high‐quality potential candidates. Using congressional district‐level data on the local availability of Fox News, we find that Fox News altered Republican potential candidates' perceptions about the vulnerability of Democratic incumbents, thereby changing their entry patterns.

Extended party network (EPN) theory characterizes political parties in the United States as dynamic networks of interest groups that collaboratively support favored candidates for office. Electoral predictions derived from EPN theory have yet to be tested on a large sample of races. We operationalize EPNs in the context of organized interest contributions to U.S. House campaigns. We deduce that support by a partisan community of interests signals the ideological credibility and appeal of a candidate. EPN integration overcomes voter ambiguity surrounding challengers� ideological preferences, and resources provided by these coordinating interest groups promote a consistent message about the candidate. Using data from the 1994�2010 cycles, we apply network analysis to detect EPN support of challengers and find that EPN integration substantially improves the electoral prospects of challengers. The effect of EPN integration is distinct from that of campaign resources. The findings provide support for EPN theory, as applied to congressional elections.

Considerable debate exists over the impact of electoral institutions on turnout in U.S. national elections. To address this debate, I exploit the rich variation in electoral rules present throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using a newly constructed dataset of district-level turnout results for the U.S. House from 1840 to 1940, I find that electoral institutions and political competition jointly provided incentives, and by the turn-of-the-century disincentives, for political leaders to mobilize the electorate. The results demonstrate that changes in electoral institutions and varying levels of political competition help explain congressional turnout across districts and over time.

Scholars of congressional elections have argued that an increase in constituent diversity increases the level of electoral competition. Following models of boundedly rational candidates, we argue that there is strong reason to believe that the opposite is true. As the complexity of the electoral landscape increases, challengers will have a more difficult time locating an optimal platform when facing an experienced incumbent. Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Study, we construct a novel measure of district complexity for U.S. House districts and test whether the entry of quality challengers and the incumbent's share of the two-party vote are affected by the complexity of the electoral landscape. We find strong support for the hypothesis that complexity benefits incumbents for both indicators of electoral competition, which stands in contrast to most of the existing literature on diversity and incumbent performance.

Both pundits and scholars have blamed increasing levels of partisan conflict and polarization in Congress on the effects of partisan gerrymandering. We assess whether there is a strong causal relationship between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences. Second, we conduct simulations to gauge the level of polarization under various “neutral” districting procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much higher than those produced by the simulations. We do find that gerrymandering has increased the Republican seat share in the House; however, this increase is not an important source of polarization. C ontemporary politics in the United States is historically distinctive in at least two respects. The first is the ever-increasing polarization of political elites. As McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal (2006) have documented, partisan differences in congressional voting behavior have grown dramatically to levels not seen since the early twentieth century. The second distinction is the historically low levels of competition in congressional elections. This is especially true of the House of Representatives, where 99% of incumbents standing for reelection were successful in the 2002 and 2004 elections. In the swing to the Democrats in 2006, no individual Democrats were defeated and even 89% of standing Republicans were reelected. Given the conjunction of these two patterns, it seems natural to draw a link; namely, the increased polarization of Congress is a direct result of the increasing ease of reelection. Presumably in an era of declining competition politicians no longer feel the need to reach out to moderate and independent voters. Instead politicians are free to pander to their base. Politicians who do not pander may face primary challenges by ideologically purer candidates. Istherealinkbetweenincreasedpolarizationanddecliningcompetition?Scholarshaveyettoestablishacom

This article analyzes the financial ties between congressional candidates and individual donors residing outside those candidates' districts. Congressional campaigns today rely more heavily on nonresidents than in the past, with contests in the typical district drawing more than two-thirds of individual donations from nonresidents. Empirical results reveal that nonresident contributions are primarily partisan and strategic in nature, rather than access-oriented or expressive/identity-based. Funds are efficiently redistributed from a small number of highly educated, wealthy congressional districts to competitive districts anywhere in the country. Big donors direct funds where they can make a difference for party control of seats, even if those investments are hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away.

We examine the U.S. Congressional elections of 1862-63, which resulted in a stunning setback for President Abraham Lincoln and the incumbent Republican Party. After the electoral "dust" had cleared, the Republicans lost control of the House, as their share of seats declined from 59 percent to just over 46 percent. While historians contend that the national electorate's general unhappiness with the war effort produced a largely systematic backlash against all Republican candidates, we explore the impact of both national tides and district-level effects on electoral outcomes. Specifically, we hypothesize that the emergence of quality challengers, district-specific war casualties, and the timing of the midterm elections in conjunction with changing national conditions influenced individual electoral fortunes. Our empirical analysis confirms each of these expectations. More generally, our results provide support for modern theories of electoral outcomes in a previously unexplored historical context and suggest several potential avenues for further research. W hile the economic, social, and military aspects of the American Civil War have been the focus of intensive research by historians and social scientists, the political aspects have not received the same careful attention. In particular, aside from some studies of the U.S. Presidential Election of 1864,1 little is known about general electoral politics during the war, both North and South. This article takes a small step toward filling that void by examining one particularly important political event, the U.S. Congressional elections of 1862-63, which would dramatically shape the political conduct of the war effort in the United States until the conclusion of hostilities.2 The midterm House elections were a disaster for President Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans, as the party lost twenty-three seats and saw its majority status disappear: while the Republicans made up 59 percent of the 37th House, they would only comprise 46.2 percent of the 38th House

Competing logit models of the link between the racial composition of districts and party are estimated and then analyzed for all state legislative elections held in the South from 1990 to 1998. Using these models and a decomposition model developed by Grofman and Handley (1998), we decompose changes in seats won by the Democrats since 1990 into redistricting, realignment, and interaction effects. Racial redistricting harmed the Democrats in all states and cost the Democrats control of at least two state Houses. However, the ongoing realignment toward the Republicans played a much greater role in Democratic losses. We find little evidence to support the white-backlash theory, but conclude that Democratic candidates fare better in highland districts compared to other heavily white regions of the South. acial redistricting emerged as one of the most fiercely debated policy questions among scholars, judges, and politicians during the 1990s. While the battle has raged along multiple fronts-normative, constitutional, methodological-the central empirical contention revolves around the policy's partisan impact. Critics of racial redistricting claim, and Republicans hope, that packing black voters into majority-minority districts cripples the Democratic party outside of the safe seats it creates for black representatives (e.g., Bullock 1995; Lublin 1997; Lublin and Voss 1998; Swain 1995a, 1995b; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997). Friendlier analysts, by contrast, downplay the damage nearby Democrats typically will suffer (e.g., Engstrom 1995; Grofman and Handley 1998; LDF 1994; McDonald and Lucas 1998; Petrocik and Desposato 1998). The true electoral effect of racial redistricting remains unclear.' Virtually all studies of racial redistricting's partisan impact have focused solely on one or two congressional elections.2 Whatever their practical significance, these high-profile contests provide few actual cases to test how electoral borders shape Democratic fortunes, especially in the critical range where African Americans fall just short of a majority. Restricting attention to congressional elections unnecessarily limits the scope of analysis, since the hypothesized behavioral regularities that undergird this empirical debate are not unique to national politics.

We develop a formal model of the redistricting process that highlights the importance of two factors: first, partisan or bipartisan control of the redistricting process; second, the nature of the reversionary outcome, should the state legislature and governor fail to agree on a new districting plan. Using this model, we predict the levels of partisan bias and responsiveness that should be observed under districting plans adopted under various constellations of partisan control of state government and reversionary outcomes, testing our predictions on postwar (1946-70) U.S. House electoral data. We find strong evidence that both partisan control and reversionary outcomes systematically affect the nature of a re- districting plan and the subsequent elections held under it. Further, we show that the well-known disappearance circa 1966 of what had been a long-time pro-Republican bias of about 6 percent in nonsouthern congressional elections can be explained largely by the changing composition of northern districting plans.

Theory: Conventional wisdom holds that legislators win votes by acquiring federal spending for constituents. Scholars have struggled, however, to support this belief empirically. This paper links federal district spending and pork with an explanation based on consistency: electoral performance hinges on legislators' fiscal consistency, i.e., whether their votes on federal spending are consistent with their credit claiming for pork flowing to their districts. Hypotheses: In districts receiving substantial pork, fiscally liberal incumbents perform better electorally than fiscal conservatives. In low-pork districts fiscal conservatives perform better. Methods: These hypotheses are tested using aggregate-level data from the 198490 United States House elections and individual-level data from the 1988 Senate Election Study. Results: The hypotheses are supported on the aggregate and individual levels. Fiscally consistent legislators receive more votes than fiscally inconsistent legislators.

Theory: Recently, Leighley and Nagler (1992) presented evidence indicating that class biases in voter turnout remained relatively stable across presidential elections from 1960 through 1988. Nevertheless, few investigations test for class biases (or the stability of class biases) in midterm congressional elections. Given that presidential elections are such high-intensity affairs (Campbell 1993) some lower-class citizens likely participate in presidential elections as a result of the sheer salience of the campaign but may be less likely to be mobilized in the lower intensity midterm elections. Consequently, we might expect to find evidence of an increase in class bias in the shrinking congressional electorate rather than in the shrinking presidential electorate. Hypothesis: Class biases in voter turnout have not substantially increased since the 1960s. Methods: A demographic model of voter turnout is used in order to isolate the marginal impact of income on voter turnout across election years using the American National Election Studies 1958-94 and the Current Population Surveys 1974-94. Results: While class biases in any specific election are great (higher socioeconomic groups comprise the majority of voters) such biases appear to have remained relatively stable over time. The declining rates of turnout since the early 1960s have occurred among all segments of society, not just among the lower classes.

Theory: We argue that voters, as principals, evaluate congressional candidates in terms of whether those candidates will act as effective agents. Hypotheses: U.S. House incumbents' levels of competence and integrity influence both the individual-level vote choice and voters' evaluations of their representatives. Methods: Indicators of competence and integrity for representatives who entered the House between 1969 and 1981 are merged with the NES cumulative file, with data for the 1976-92 elections. The relationship between incumbent quality and electoral choice is explored in a series of OLS regression and logistic regression models. Results: Incumbents' levels of integrity bring direct influence on both feeling thermometer scores and the vote choice. Competence exerts an indirect effect on the vote by influencing the behavior of prospective challengers.

Political scientists have long been interested in the occupational decisions of politicians. Two events prior to the 1992 congressional elections brought journalists and the broader public into emotion-rich but data-poor discussions of how and why to achieve greater turnover in Congress. The House banking scandal gave rise to standard arguments that voters should "throw the bums out." An initially obscure provision in the Federal Election Campaign Act, which allowed certain grandfathered members personally to pocket their campaign war chests, gave rise to somewhat more sophisticated assertions about "buying the bums out." Using preelection data on incumbents' decisions to retire or seek reelection, we estimate the effects of these special features of the 1992 election while improving upon prior estimates of strategic retirements more generally. By embedding an explicit occupational choice model into a maximum-likelihood equation, we find strong evidence of strategic retirements, and we quantify precisely the turnover that can be attributed to rubber checks and golden parachutes.

In this paper we prove theoretically and demonstrate empirically that all existing measures of incumbency advantage in the congressional elections literature are biased or inconsistent. We then provide an unbiased estimator based on a very simple linear regression model. We apply this new method to congressional elections since 1900, providing the first evidence of a positive incumbency advantage in the first half of the century. Incumbency advantage is the most frequently studied factor in the last 15 years of congressional elections research. Discovery of the increase in incum- bency advantage has sparked controversy over its origins, historical pattern, cur- rent magnitude, and electoral, democratic, and policy consequences.' Even the most basic descriptive information about incumbency advantage is flawed be- cause every previous measure based on aggregate data in this literature is plagued by selection bias, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies. We prove this result and also propose a new unbiased and statistically efficient measure that is very easy to calculate. Congressional elections from 1900 to the present fit our theoretical model. Our empirical reanalyses do not challenge the existing scholarly consen- sus that incumbency advantage is much larger than it once was. However, we do challenge the prevailing belief that incumbency advantage was nonexistent, and the evidence that it was negative, in House elections during the first half of this century (Alford and Brady 1988). We show instead that the average advantage of incumbency in these elections was about two percentage points. In section 1 of this paper, we define incumbency advantage, and section 2 gives an intuitive sense of the problems identifying it even in ideal electoral sys- tems. Section 3 formally proves that sophomore surge and retirement slump are biased estimates of incumbency advantage, and section 4 briefly reveals the flaws

Models of aggregate vote change in midterm congressional elections have largely ignored the role of short-term party evaluations. This paper argues in favor of including such evaluations in the analysis of midterm voting change. We find that short-term party evaluations link both presidential popularity and economic conditions with election results and help to account for the gap between the outcomes of first and subsequent midterm elections: since 1945 the president's party has done considerably worse in subsequent midterm elections than in first midterm elections after taking control of the White House. Analysis of survey data from the 1974, 1978, and 1982 midterm elections corroborates the influential role of short-term party evaluations.

Most recent studies of congressional elections have depicted Senate elections as hardfought contests in which both candidates are familiar to voters. Evidence from state-level surveys indicates, however, that although some Senate elections are hard-fought, a substantial proportion are low-key races in which one candidate is unable to garner the resources necessary to mount a real challenge. In low-key elections, voters are much less familiar with the challenger than with the incumbent, and defections favor the incumbent. In hardfought races, both candidates are well-known, and the incumbent has no advantage in defections. Constituency-based explanations for why some Senate races are more competitive than others are questioned; an explanation focusing on decisions of the candidates is suggested. Until recently, research on voting behavior in congressional elections focused almost exclusively on House races. Occasionally, Senate elections have been mentioned as points of contrast; more often they have not been considered. Within the last several years, attention to Senate elections has increased. The 1978 Center for Political Studies National Election Study contained for the first time a battery of questions on voting for Senate candidates, leading to a number of articles comparing voting patterns in House and Senate contests. The tendency in this new literature is to portray Senate elections as hard-fought, highly publicized races, which, unlike House races, are highly salient to the electorate. This new literature also claims that the vast majority of voters acquire some information about both candidates in Senate elections and that this leads to voting patterns quite unlike those in House elections. This article disputes this newly emergent wisdom about Senate elec

The low probability of defeating incumbent members of Congress deters potentially strong rivals from challenging them. Yet almost all incumbents are challenged, usually by opponents who lack previous experience in office and run underfinanced, ineffectual campaigns. But if strong challengers are deterred from challenging incumbents, why are not weak challengers, who have even less chance of unseating an incumbent? The model developed in this paper indicates that there is a simple reason why weak candidates choose to run against incumbents: they do so in order to maximize their probability of getting elected to Congress. Together with the findings of previous researchers, the results of our analyses of congressional primary data from 1980 through 1984 provide strong support for the major hypotheses derived from our model.

The growing careerism of congressmen at the turn of the century has been widely viewed as a chief cause for the modernization of the House of Representatives. Thus, a prominent concern of recent research in congressional development has been the reasons for career development at that time. In this paper I attempt to distinguish the effects of three contributors to the nineteenth century turnover: competition, rotation, and ambition. After analyzing six decades of nineteenth-century congressional elections, I found that all three variables served to reduce turnover toward the end of the century, but that the decline in voluntary retirement, reflecting political ambition, was the primary contributor to increased membership stability.

Using returns from the 1978 congressional elections, we estimate the effects of three strategies that incumbents may use to increase their vote totals and improve their reelection prospects: (1) the provision of particularized service to constituents-the casework hypothesis, (2) ideological positioning to represent the policy preferences of the district, and (3) legislative activism, defined as appearing on the floor and introducing bills. Using multiple regression to control for the effects of district partisan composition, district socioeconomic status (SES), the member's seniority, and national partisan swings, we find that casework has no statistically significant effect and further find that a substantively important effect is unlikely, given our estimates. Ideological positioning shows effects that are statistically significant and large enough to substantially affect a member's reelection prospects. Finally, some aspects of legislative activism seem to pay off for incumbents. Analysis of the Center for Political Studies (CPS) 1978 National Election Study data confirms the aggregate results, shows small but statistically significant effects from pork barreling, and distinguishes two types of issue-oriented voting.

The spectacular growth in the number and spending of political action committees has made this new breed of political organization an increasingly important actor in congressional elections. Indeed, the strategic use of PAC resources is an important element in the developing theory of how rational political expectations affect congressional elections. The evidence about PACs adduced in support of this theory has thus far emphasized changes in aggregate spending. Using a merged data set of Federal Election Commission records from both the 1980 and 1982 elections, the authors are able for the first time to trace the tactical shifts of individual PACs between years. The analysis provides strong support for the theory of political expectations. Predictable strategic behavior is found for PACs with different contributor motivations. The different motives, furthermore, appear to be quite durable, despite generally convergent behavior by many PACs in 1982. Yet the data also suggest that intraorganizational considerations constrain the strategic choice for some PACs, especially labor committees. Thus, the analysis reveals large disparities in the malleability of pro-Republican and pro-Democratic resources.

Previous research has demonstrated that the electoral advantage of incumbency in House elections increased during the mid-1960s. This paper examines two major hypotheses offered to explain this increase. One hypothesis holds that incumbents used their control over redistricting to create safe seats for themselves. Specific examples of this can be found, but no evidence suggests that incumbents generally took advantage of redistricting to boost themselves out of the marginal range. An alternative hypothesis attributes the increased incumbency advantage to changes in mass electoral behavior. In particular, some authors have speculated that the decline of partisanship may have benefited incumbents. With data drawn from Survey Research Center election studies this paper shows that the decline of partisanship has in fact created new patterns of electoral behavior favoring incumbents. The paper concludes by presenting some data on politically exploitable resources available to incumbents. Although the expanding perquisite base has obviously been used for political purposes, this activity has left no clear traces. Incumbents are not more widely recognized now than they were decades ago. They may be more popular now, but we have no data to settle this question one way or the other. For Republican strategists surveying the carnage that littered the 1974 congressional battlefield, there was perhaps one note of solace. Seventy-five first-term Democrats had been swept into the House. The vast majority would presumably choose to run again two years later, many of them from districts traditionally considered Republican. Only the most ardent Republican boosters thought that their party could make good on its bicentennial pledge to gain "76 in '76" and thus control the House for the first time in twenty years, but many thought the GOP could make substantial inroads into the Democratic majority. With this goal in mind the Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee sought out good challengers and helped these candidates raise substantial campaign war chests. The result of all this effort was naturally rather disappointing. Few of the

A variety of recent research has dealt with the impact of economic conditions on congressional elections. The underlying assumption of this research has been that the effects of economic fluctuations are distributed evenly across members of the president's party. By focusing on subgroups of congressional candidates, we demonstrate that the importance of economic conditions varies widely. Specifically, we show that the aggregate electoral margins of incumbents are far more responsive to economic conditions than are those for nonincumbents, and that among in-party incumbents, the relationship is stronger among those with higher levels of tenure. Further, we demonstrate that the previous lack of individual-level confirmation of the aggregate relationship has been due to a failure to control for the contextual effects implied by our conditional aggregate analysis. With controls for district incumbency, we find a relationship between retrospective personal financial condition and vote choice that mirrors the aggregate relationship between retrospective performance of the national economy and congressional vote totals.

One question raised by recent presidential elections is the failure of the winner to carry into office any sizable number of congressional candidates. This paper suggests that explanations based upon previous theories are inadequate and describes and tests an alternate explanation using SRC-CPS data for five elections. The results show that the proposed alternative fails to account for the results of the elections examined. This failure seems to result from the inability of the Republican Party to capture or hold a large number of voters at the congressional level. Additional analyses indicate that much, though not all, of this apparent asymmetry is a result of incumbency effects in congressional elections.

This study demonstrates that there is a pronounced proincumbent response bias to the reported House vote in the 1978 and 1980 National Election Studies. The magnitude of the bias ranges from approximately 7 percentage points in 1980 to 14 percentage points in 1978. Only a small portion of the bias, less than 3 points, is attributable to the particular sample of congressional districts. We show that the major source of bias is the survey instrument itself. In the survey a number of questions before the vote question focus the attention of the respondent on the name and activities of the incumbent. Consequently, the survey instrument influences respondents who have little information and who are susceptible to prompting effects to identify the incumbent as the person for whom they voted. This means that studies using the 1978 or 1980 surveys run the risk of incorporating the bias into their findings. The nonrandom nature of the bias suggests that the impact of incumbency in determining the outcome of congressional elections has been overestimated.

It is often assumed that changes in federal spending in a congressional district affect the incumbent's prospect of reelection. This study tests that assumption, using cross-section data to analyze voting for candidates for election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, and 1980. While variables reflecting party affiliation, the incumbent's vote in the last election, and scandal associated with incumbents are important determinants of the vote, changes in both local federal spending on construction and federal civilian employment in the incumbent's district are shown to have no effect on the share of the vote going to incumbents. They also have no effect on campaign expenditures by either challengers or incumbents.

Previous studies have explored the longitudinal effect of changes in national income, inflation, and employment on the national congressional vote. While findings vary, on the whole the evidence appears to support the proposition that voters withhold support from congressional candidates of the presidential party during periods of economic decline and reward them with votes in good times. Here the problem is approached from a different perspective. Disaggregated data are used to build models that permit a reasonably straightforward test of the effect of local economic variation on the congressional district vote. Contrary to prevailing observations, our findings show no linear relationship between changes in the vote for individual congressional candidates and changes in real income and inflation in the 1972, 1974, and 1976 congressional elections.

TWo recent trends in American politics-a decline in the number of competitive congressional seats and an increase in the partisan independence of the electorate-originated in the mid-1960s and progressed at similar rates for the next decade. We tested the possibility of a causal relationship between these two phenomena and found, contrary to previous speculation and research, that partisan dealignment accounts for little of the increase in incumbency voting. Consequently, we suggest that the change in electoral fortunes of incumbent congressmen has been brought about mainly by congressmen themselves and not by exogenous changes in the electoral environment.

After the appearance of scores of scholarly works attempting to explain why incumbent members of the House of Representatives became safer in the mid-1960s, Gary Jacobson, in a recent (February 1987) article in this journal, claims that "competition for House seats held by incumbents has not, in fact, declined." The crux of Jacobson's case rests on an alleged increase in the chances of an incumbent winning by a large margin in one election and then losing the seat two years later. Thus, Jacobson believes, "marginality" needs to be redefined rather than memorialized. In this response we raise some additional issues relevant to the matter of incumbent safety. Our analysis of the evidence suggests there may have been a slight, temporary increase in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the chances of big winners losing their next race, but clearly indicates that in the six elections since 1974 the proportion of big winners who lose the next election is virtually identical to the proportion in the 1950s and early 1960s. What is more, those who do lose almost always do so because of an adverse redistricting or a major, personal scandal. Thus, unlike Jacobson, we conclude that (1) there has been no meaningful increase in the chances of big winners subsequently losing and (2) in recent elections the chances of a scandal-free, unredistricted, previously safe incumbent losing are practically nil. The level of competition in congressional elections has declined and should be a source of concern to those who value electoral accountability.