Candidate Positioning in U.S. House Elections

Abstract

siveness waned in the 1980s and 1990s. n an extended republic, the desires of citizens are translated into law through the election of representatives. Candidates present themselves to voters, who decide to support some candidates and not others. Having won election, officials enact policies and then return to the electorate, seeking their just desserts. This cycle is surely a crude way of expressing the public's preferences, but it is said to work over time through an electoral version of natural selection. What sort of representation does this dynamic produce? What sort of choices do voters get? In many modern democracies, voters choose among national parties, each with a distinctive ideology. Individual politicians seem to have little ability or incentive to differentiate themselves from the rest of their party. The United States appears to be the exception to all of this. Over the past three decades, the main thrust of scholarship on the behavior of members of Congress has emphasized the ability of individual politicians to position themselves so that they can appeal most strongly to their own districts' interests. The most important works on congressional elections and representation describe the willingness of politicians to abandon their party in order to compete for the votes back home (Mayhew 1974a, 19-28; Fenno 1978, 113). Indeed, American politicians are reputedly so responsive to their districts' interests that they are often driven to make irresponsible public policy (Fiorina 1974; King 1997). We argue that this view overstates the differences between elections held in America and in the rest of the democratic world. Even in the U.S., when candidates-incumbents, challengers, and open-seat contestants alike-balance the broad policy views of the local district and the national party, the national party dominates. It does so today, as it has for over 100 years. District-by-district competition exerts some pressure on candidates to fit with their constituents, and there have been times in American history when this pressure has been more acute than others. Overall, however, the amount of ideological choice that voters get as a result of such posi-