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Much of the political punditry in the United States discusses the notion that facing a primary election results in legislators voting in a more partisan fashion in the legislature. A common refrain of this analysis is that facing the primary election constituency (Fenno 1978) or even the threat of facing the primary election constituency causes the senator to vote with the ideological extremes of the party in following sessions of congress. The literature on congressional elections has examined this area of research as it applies to the U.S. House, but few studies fully examine the impact of primary elections on roll call voting in the Senate. This study examines Senate primary elections to see how facing a primary, specifically a competitive primary, influences how a senator votes in the legislature in the first term following the election. This study specifically asks if senators who face a competitive primary challenge and win reelection vote with their party more often in subsequent congresses than senators who do not face a competitive primary challenge. Using OLS regressions and a number of control variables shown in the literature to impact roll call voting patterns, I examine the percentage of the vote that a senator received in her primary election compared to her party unity score in the Senate after the election. While my models demonstrate that facing a competitive primary correlates with a senator having a higher party unity score than senators who do not face a competitive primary, in all of my models the coefficient on this variable is not statistically significant. However, serving in the majority party and being elected in certain election years did have a statistically significant impact on a senator's partisan voting behavior. When testing an interaction effect between facing a competitive primary and serving in the majority party after the election, I also did not find a significant relationship between the interaction and a senator's change in party unity score. These findings add to our understanding of congressional elections by exploring an under-studied aspect of elections in the United States, and future research that adapts and refines the methodology of this study could further develop these results.

Is there a benefit to working well with others in Congress? Many of the bills introduced are written not only by the single member listed as its sponsor, but by a coalition of representatives who have worked together to author mutually agreeable language. Similarly, members frequently collaborate with colleagues in writing policy letters, running caucuses, and hosting events. Yet there is very little understanding of the nature of these relationships, or how members of Congress benefit from them, as data availability has limited the ability of legislative politics scholars to estimate their impact. Using a unique dataset of Dear Colleague letters, which are an essential communication tool in the modern Congress, I identify the members who collaborate on policy initiatives in a substantive manner. I use these data to map the policy collaboration network of the House of Representatives to answer three key questions that will greatly improve our understanding of congressional behavior and the legislative process: 1) How do members of Congress choose their collaborative partners? 2) What are the legislative benefits of collaboration? 3) What are the electoral benefits of collaboration? The first question is addressed using a temporal exponential random graph model (TERGM) that allows me to consider the policy collaboration network for each Congress in its entirety and examine the endogenous and exogenous factors that lead members to working with each other. I find evidence of several distinctive patterns, including a strong tendency towards bipartisan collaboration in a highly polarized Congress, an overall inclination towards collaboration where there are shared constituencies, and a network where personal relationships and reputations are key. The second essay examines the legislative benefits of collaboration, specifically whether more collaborative members are more effective legislators. I create several new measures of propensity towards collaboration and use them in a series of temporal network autocorrelation models that examine whether the relationship between collaboration and legislative effectiveness is the result of members putting in effort to advance their agenda, working with other successful colleagues, or using collaboration to send informative signals. I find that members who are strategic in their collaborative decisions find the most success, particularly those who moderate their usage of collaboration. Finally, I consider the electoral benefits of collaboration, again using the temporal network autocorrelation model and my measures of propensity towards collaboration. I find that for electorally vulnerable members of Congress, there is a significant benefit to collaborating with members of the other party as it allows them to build a reputation for bipartisanship with their constituents.Taken together, these three essays provide us with a greater understanding of the role that policy collaboration plays in the modern Congress. Members use collaboration with their colleagues to find common ground in a polarized Congress, to advance their legislative agenda, and as a form of symbolic representation that allows them to distance themselves from the "dysfunctional" Congress.

Congressional candidates spend the majority of their campaign funds on television advertising to reach the highest number of voters, spending almost $300 million in 2014 alone. Yet previous research has not fully answered if advertising is associated with increased electoral success. In particular, this represents the first analysis of television advertising in elections for the United States House of Representatives. It also represents the first analysis of competitive, low information elections where voters have limited knowledge of the candidates. First, I examine U.S. House races over six electoral cycles from 2000-2012 to test how positive, negative, or contrast ads correlate with electoral success. Then, I build upon this analysis with a novel experiment that more closely models the information environment in competitive, low information campaigns by exposing respondents to one advertisement from each candidate using past television advertisements. This provides causal evidence linking the tone of an advertisement with changes in electoral support. Finally, since the 2010 Citizens United ruling interest groups are spending increasingly large amounts of money in U.S. congressional elections. Instead of advertising tone, I test whether the advertising sponsor influences how voters perceive and evaluate the candidates, comparing traditional candidate-sponsored ads with interest group-sponsored ads. The results highlight how tone and sponsor yields little effect on electoral support. The effect that does exist is not the intended effect of an ad, but rather the backlash against the candidate sponsoring a negative ad. However, candidates can avoid this issue by having interest groups air their negative ads on their behalf. I find that interest group ads are equally persuasive compared to candidate-sponsored ads and yield a smaller backlash penalty against the preferred candidate. Taken together, these findings have important consequences for the role of advertising in U.S. elections and the power interest groups are increasingly wielding to influence electoral outcomes.

Legislators have the power to make, edit, and retract laws, but what motivates the individual legislator to behave in the way they do? Why do some legislators support their party, while others chose to strike their own path? Undoubtedly, no single explanatory behavior can account for the wildly different behavior of so many individuals, but do the actions of legislators reveal the menu of preferences that determine their actions? This dissertation attempts to account for three major issues facing legislators in both the United States and in a comparative context. Chapter 2 analyzes how electoral security impacts the behavior of U.S. Representatives. Chapter 3 examines how electoral security of U.S. Representatives has changed across time. Chapter 4 analyzes the impact of legislative design using a novel sample of British MPs who have also served in the European Parliament. Finally, in Chapter 5 I summarize these findings and provide implications for U.S. Politics.

Many studies have noted that the conflict between gender and party stereotypes may disadvantage Republican female candidates among some voters. On the other hand, gender and party attachment may also prove advantageous for Republican women in competitive races where moderate and independent voters play an important role. In this paper, the author examines how partisanship and race competitiveness impact how, and if, female candidates choose to emphasize their gendered identity, highlight women’s interests, and pursue a feminine trait strategy on their campaign websites. The author gives special attention to Republican female candidates running in competitive races, and argues that these candidates may have an extra incentive and ability to connect with voters by emphasizing gender. This study uses data collected through a content analysis of the campaign websites of 162 female candidates in the 2014 Congressional midterm election.

The following study is comprised of three essays, each examining a different manner by which race and party impact political participation. Through the analysis of both intra-party primary and inter-party general elections, I find that candidates are more likely to run, and voters are more likely to turn out, when the social groups they belong to comprise a larger portion of the electorate. While race often serves as the key social identity in determining rates of participation, these effects are contingent on partisan forces governing the broader electoral process.

A prominent avenue of the political campaign's influence on voters is through the nature of its issue content. Political science research has shown that the issues discussed by the candidates and the news media are more likely to become voter priorities, have a greater influence on voting behavior, and also shape what issues candidates address after they are elected. As such, scholars now argue campaigns are less a debate over issues than a fight over what issues to debate. However, despite their prominent influence, theoretical attempts to explain how campaign agendas develop are few, and those that do exist lack firm empirical support. I seek to clarify how campaign agendas develop by examining how the agendas of candidates, the news media, and voters interact during campaigns. I offer a new perspective of campaign agenda formation that focuses on two attributes of these interactions. First, I suggest that the news media's greater credibility and pervasiveness give them a greater ability to influence voter agendas. Additionally, I argue that news media issue coverage, combined with persuasive candidate rhetoric, can also shape voter evaluations on such issues, especially among swing voters. I consequently argue that candidate needs to persuade voters are an under-emphasized component of campaign strategy and that an agenda-setting strategy also has costly consequences for candidate efforts at persuasion. Instead of agenda-setting, candidates form their agendas in response to the news media's issue attention in order to shape news coverage and prevent harmful persuasive environments. By making their case on those issues featured within news media coverage, candidates attempt to win over swing voters on such highly salient issues. I test the theory in three parts of this dissertation. I provide the first known test of reciprocal agenda dynamics and show how the national news media drove candidates and the voters to focus on a select group of issues during the 2000 presidential campaign. I then demonstrate that Bush and Gore's rhetorical responses to the news media's agenda were influential in shaping voter opinions. Finally, I expand the analysis to Senate campaigns of 2000 and 2004 and demonstrate how candidates increasingly focus on issues as they gain coverage within the news media. Both of the theory's expectations are supported, as the news media show a prominent influence on candidate and voter agendas. On the whole, this persuasion-based theory of campaign agenda formation provides a new and much needed perspective on how the goals and abilities of the news media and candidates interact to create the rhetorical dynamics we observe within political campaigns. The theory applies the known moderators of agenda setting and persuasion within the political behavior literature to derive a better understanding of the influence, incentives, and behavior of candidates and the news media.

Political polling is now an integral part of congressional election campaigns. Polling is widely considered an accurate measure of public opinion and thus serves to reduce the uncertainty associated with running for Congress. It does so by supplying strategic information that enables campaigns to operate more efficiently and effectively, targeting campaign messages to voters who are most likely to be receptive. Poll use by congressional campaigns varies considerably but is predicted by campaign characteristics such as the competitiveness of the race, the resources available to pay for the polling, and the amount the campaign is spending on advertising. More polling is also done by incumbents and open-seat candidates compared to challengers, by candidates with prior political experience in elected office, and by Democrats. Finally, mid-decade redistricting has a negative effect on polling while a close underlying partisan division is positively related to poll use. Polling is used by campaigns to help the candidate more effectively communicate with voters on issue. Candidates rarely use polls to take issue positions, and pollsters rarely make these kinds of recommendations. However, polling is commonly used to help campaigns to choose which issues positions to address and how best to do so. Candidate recruitment and emergence studies have given little attention to polling’s impact on how candidates and parties assess the probability of victory in a given district. Except for those who can afford to pay for it and existing office holders who are risk averse, most potential candidates do not routinely conduct exploratory polling. However, in the small number of very competitive U.S. House districts, the party campaign committees use polling extensively to help convince attractive candidates to enter open seat contests favorable to the party or especially to identify vulnerable incumbents of the opposite party and find out if a reasonable chance of victory exists.

The turnout decision of citizens has traditionally been analyzed separately from the two-party vote decision of citizens. The presumption has been that citizens decide if they are going to vote, and then decide for which candidate to vote. In the present research, the two decisions are placed into a simultaneous choice framework, which presumes that the decisions of turnout and candidate choice are made jointly, implying that abstention is a vote for none-of-the-above. This research shows the effects of the simultaneous choice model with regard to understudied U.S. Senate elections using data gathered thru the Senate Election Studies from 1988-1992. The research shows that levels of turnout in Senate elections are not equally distributed across the various demographic sectors of society. Efforts by campaigns to target particular constituencies should result in a higher probability of citizens casting a vote for the candidate. With respect to evaluations of the economy and personal finances the research clearly shows support for the angry voter hypothesis. Citizens who are dissatisfied with the state of the national economy, angry voters, are more likely to turnout than those who are satisfied. Their dissatisfaction is expressed toward incumbents because they become more likely to vote for the challenging party. Personal financial evaluations are also shown to have a limited impact on electoral behavior. Contrary to some previous research, substantive policy preferences are shown to affect electoral behavior in Senate elections. The findings clearly suggest the campaigns that understand short-term forces can utilize them to produce mobilization. The research shows that use of self-reported media exposure variables can allow for a better understanding of electoral behavior. Citizens who are exposed to candidates via radio or magazines are more likely to vote for the candidate they had read or heard about. The greater their interest and exposure, the more likely it is that a citizen will vote. Overall, the research provides political scientists with an alternative understanding of how electoral decisions are made. Readers will develop an understanding of the factors that influence turnout and mobilization for specific candidates.