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Move to the Center or Mobilize the Base? Effects of Political Competition, Voter Turnout, and Partisan Loyalties on the Ideological Convergence of Vote-Maximizing Candidates in Two-Party Competition
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Move to the Center or Mobilize the Base?
ABSTRACT
For votemaximizing candidates in twoparty contests, basic Downsian theory argues for candidate convergence away from their own party’s supporters and toward the views of the median voter in the district, and it also leads us to expect these centripetal pressures to be strongest when elections are expected to be close. Yet, the available evidence from the U.S. Congress – both the work we report here using DWNOMINATE scores over the 19522000 period and that of many other scholars using closely related methodologies – challenges these predictions. Drawing on and extending recent work of Adams, Merrill, and Grofman (2005), we propose a neoDownsian model to explain nonconvergence results. Our model allows us to understand the complex interactions of political competition, partisan loyalties, and incentives for voter turnout that can lead votemaximizing candidates, even candidates in close elections, to seek to mobilize their voter base in terms of turnout by adopting positions attractive to the party faithful, rather than courting the median voter by moving towards the center. Furthermore, in our model, the winners from the party whose supporters are more ideologically concentrated (in the U.S., the Republicans) can be expected to display even less relationship between their ideological locations and election competitiveness in their districts than is true for the representatives from the party whose voters are more ideologically dispersed.
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| | Authors: Adams, James., Brunell, Thomas., Grofman, Bernard. and Merrill, Sam. |
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Move to the Center or Mobilize the Base?
ABSTRACT
For votemaximizing candidates in twoparty contests, basic Downsian theory argues for
candidate convergence away from their own party’s supporters and toward the views of
the median voter in the district, and it also leads us to expect these centripetal pressures to
be strongest when elections are expected to be close. Yet, the available evidence from the
U.S. Congress – both the work we report here using DWNOMINATE scores over the
19522000 period and that of many other scholars using closely related methodologies –
challenges these predictions. Drawing on and extending recent work of Adams, Merrill,
and Grofman (2005), we propose a neoDownsian model to explain nonconvergence re
sults. Our model allows us to understand the complex interactions of political competi
tion, partisan loyalties, and incentives for voter turnout that can lead votemaximizing
candidates, even candidates in close elections, to seek to mobilize their voter base in
terms of turnout by adopting positions attractive to the party faithful, rather than courting
the median voter by moving towards the center. Furthermore, in our model, the winners
from the party whose supporters are more ideologically concentrated (in the U.S., the Re
publicans) can be expected to display even less relationship between their ideological lo
cations and election competitiveness in their districts than is true for the representatives
from the party whose voters are more ideologically dispersed.
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