Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: For vote-maximizing candidates in two-party 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 DW-NOMINATE scores over the 1952-2000 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 neo-Downsian model to explain non-convergence 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 vote-maximizing 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.