Presidential Coattails Revisited: Partisanship and Incumbency Effects

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.