New Directions in Congressional Politics

Jamie L. Carson, Michael S. Lynch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000048797
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

As the U.S. Congress has steadily evolved since the Founding of our nation, so too has our understanding of the institution. The second edition of New Directions in Congressional Politics offers an accessible overview of the current developments in our understanding of America's legislative branch. Jamie L. Carson and Michael S. Lynch help students bridge the gap between roles, rules, and outcomes by focusing on a variety of thematic issues: the importance of electoral considerations, legislators' strategic behavior to accomplish objectives, the unique challenges of Congress as a bicameral institution in a polarized environment, and the often-overlooked policy outputs of the institution.

This book brings together leading scholars of Congress to provide a general overview of the entire field. Each chapter covers the cutting-edge developments on its respective topic. As the political institution responsible for enacting laws, the American public regularly looks to the U.S. Congress to address the important issues of the day. The contributors in this volume help explain why staying atop the research trends helps us better understand these issues in the ever-changing field of American politics.

New to the Second Edition

• 
  
  

• New and updated chapters highlighting party recruitment, redistricting, women in Congress, the nationalization of Congressional elections, and the reassertion of Congressional oversight.

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• A first look at Congressional-executive relations in the Trump era.

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• Updated data through the 2018 Midterm elections.

Part I

Politics and Elections

Chapter 1

Congressional Elections

Electoral Structure and Political Representation

Erik J. Engstrom

Congressional elections are inherently important. They determine who holds power in Congress, and as a consequence determine who holds power in the entire government. For this reason alone they would be worth studying. But congressional elections also present a godsend for researchers interested in the study of campaigns and elections. By providing 435 House races every two years with varying political and economic conditions – constituencies, partisan bases, media markets, demographics, economic interests, etc. – congressional elections provide researchers with a rich variation to study voters, candidates, and campaigns. The presidency, by contrast, offers only one electoral contest every four years, and a unique one at that. Thus, it is unsurprising that congressional elections have attracted substantial scholarly attention during the past few decades. And, as a result, students of congressional elections have produced a rich, and well-respected, body of knowledge. The purpose of this essay is to survey recent developments in the study of congressional elections and to suggest potential new frontiers of exploration.

Parties and Candidates in Congressional Elections

One simple, yet powerful, way to classify the world’s legislatures is to place them along a spectrum. At one end are strong-party systems. At the other end are candidate-centered systems. In a strong-party system, voters select candidates based on their party label and the individual attributes of candidates tend to matter less. A parliamentary system, like Great Britain, serves as one clear example (Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1987; Cox 1987). Voters cast votes largely based on their opinions towards the Labour or Conservative party, and less on the personal characteristics of the particular candidates running in their constituency. At the other end are candidate-centered systems. In these systems voters care more about the personal characteristics and the issue positions of individual candidates. Here we might place United States congressional elections in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is not to say that party labels are unimportant in candidate-centered elections, or that the personal characteristics of candidates are unimportant in party-centered elections, but that the relative emphasis placed on candidates and party labels differ across the two regime types.

In the context of congressional elections, scholars have found that the importance attached to partisanship, relative to individual candidate attributes, has varied over time. For much of the twentieth century, most scholars would have characterized congressional elections as decidedly candidate-centered. The advantages of incumbency and candidate qualities reached their apex in the latter decades of the twentieth century. More recently, however, it appears that congressional elections have entered a new phase. This is a phase marked by a high degree of partisan and nationalized voting among the electorate. At the same time, the apparent advantages of individual candidate qualities appear to have taken a backseat to partisanship. These trends have produced an emerging body of scholarship examining the causes and consequences of nationalized voting in congressional elections.

Party-Centered versus Candidate-Centered Elections

This section examines the major institutional changes that led, in large part, to the candidate-centered congressional elections of the twentieth century. The first step in winning a congressional seat is to gain the nomination of one of the major political parties. Nowadays, we take it for granted that voters get to choose their party’s nominee in primary elections. But choosing nominees in direct primaries was not the norm throughout the nineteenth century. Instead, congressional nominees were typically chosen in closed party nominating conventions. These conventions were comprised of local party elites who met every two years to select congressional nominees (along with other local offices and delegates to state and national conventions). These conventions were often run by party bosses, particularly in cities, who held considerable influence over the nomination process (e.g., Reynolds 2006; Yearley 1970).

The image of candidates being selected in smoke-filled backrooms may be exaggerated, but it contains more than a kernel of truth. Nominations were very much an insiders’ game. Party, or factional, loyalty was critical. Running as a maverick, who bucked the local party organization, was a risky way to build a political career. Rather the system rewarded loyalty. The nomination system meant that candidates were dependent on local party managers, or party bosses, for their nomination. Even if an incumbent wanted to continue serving in Congress there was no guarantee that he would be re-nominated. Abraham Lincoln, for instance, was one of the casualties of the practice known as “rotation” – where different factions of a party would take turns holding a congressional seat. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1846 as member of the Whig Party, Lincoln served a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives. Although he expressed interest in running for re-election, the Whig organization in his district chose someone else to be the Whig nominee.

Reforms at the state-level during the early twentieth century replaced the convention nomination system with direct primaries. Still used to this day in almost every state, direct primaries handed the choice of nominees directly to voters. By forcing candidates to make appeals to voters for nomination, the direct primary accelerated the tilt towards a candidate-centered system (Ware 2002). Candidates have to win votes directly from citizens. Primaries have gradually tilted the competitive advantage to politicians who could develop a personal reputation with voters and away from those whose skills lay in navigating the back-room politics of party conventions (Adams and Merrill 2008; Reynolds 2006). A candidate who wants to buck the party organization can still be re-nominated, as long as they win votes in a primary.

Although primaries reduced the influence of party machines, another, perhaps unintended, consequence was to reduce competition for party nominations. Since the initial adoption of direct primaries there was a steady historical decline in competition within primaries. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, incumbents faced few serious challengers in primaries and often run uncontested. In a comprehensive study of competition in twentieth century primaries, Ansolabehere, Hansen, Hirano, and Snyder (2006, 78) found that the number of competitive House primaries – where the winner receives 60% or less of the vote – was 29% between 1910 and 1938. From 1960 to 2000, the number of competitive primaries plummeted to 11%.

A second major feature of the electoral system concerns the physical conduct of casting a ballot. Although we may think of the mechanics of casting ballots as a rather mundane aspect of elections, it turns out that the order in which candidate names are arranged on a ballot and how ballots are physically cast can have a huge influence on electoral outcomes. One need only look to the 2000 presidential election to see the potential impact of ballot layouts (e.g., Wand, Shotts, Sekhon, Mebane, Herron, and Brady 2001). Today when we vote, we go to a polling station where we receive a ballot containing candidates for every office. These ballots have been compiled and printed out by the state or local government. We then fill out our ballot in secret. Voters are free, if they so choose, to vote for the Democratic nominee for president and a Republican for the House (or vice versa). The ballot is then given to a non-partisan poll worker (or as is becoming more common, mailed in or recorded on a computer).

Contrast that with voting in the nineteenth century. For most of the nineteenth century, elections were conducted using what is known as the “party strip” ballot. This type of ballot had two distinguishing features. First, the ballot featured the party’s nominee for the most important office at the top of the ticket – such as president or governor – and candidates for subordinate offices listed below it. It did not list candidates for other parties. So, for example, the Democratic ballot would contain only Democratic candidates from president to governor to House candidate and so on. Second, ballots were printed and handed out by the parties (today they are printed by the government). Voters would receive these ballots either in their newspapers or they would get them from party “hawkers” standing outside the polling stations. This turned many polling stations into rough-and-tumble arenas as competing party hawkers tried to force their ballots on prospective voters (Bensel 2004; Summers 2004).

During presidential election years the party’s nominees for president and vice-president, and frequently their images, headed the ticket, usually followed by the names of the electors, and then candidates to lower offices in descending order. Thus, candidates for Congress would find their names listed below candidates for more prominent offices (i.e., president, governor). Because the ballot only contained candidates of a single-party, voters were faced with a simple choice: vote for all of the Democratic candidates or all of the Republican candidates. The physical format radically curbed split-ticket voting; voting for a Republican nominee for president and a Democrat for Congress was not easy. Although there were some workarounds – such as writing in an alternate name over the name of a listed candidate – these practices were cumbersome. Moreover, voting was public. Voters cast their tickets in full view of anyone who wanted to watch. All of these features reinforced straight-ticket voting (Engstrom and Kernell 2014; Rusk 1970).

Thus, the fates of same-party candidates were therefore thoroughly intertwined. Congressional candidates were dependent on the efforts of local parties to work together to pull them into office (Carson, Engstrom, and Roberts 2007). Congressional candidates were also subject to the popularity of the candidate that headed the ticket. A congressional candidate saddled with an unpopular presidential nominee at the top of the ticket could find the campaign rough-going.

This system fundamentally changed, starting in the late 1880s when Massachusetts first adopted what was known as the Australian, or secret, ballot.¹ The reform efforts were pushed by good-government reformers, sometimes in conjunction with politicians, who were fed up with the perceived (and real) corruption of party m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Table
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• PART I: Politics and Elections
• PART II: Institutions
• PART III: Policy Process
• Index