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Do primary elections cause candidates to take extreme, polarized positions? Standard equilibrium analysis predicts full convergence to the median voter's position with complete information, but behavioral game theory predicts divergence when players are policy-motivated and have out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Theoretically, I show that primary elections can cause greater extremism or moderation, depending on the beliefs candidates and voters have about their opponents. In a controlled incentivized experiment, I find that candidates diverge substantially and that primaries have little effect on average positions. Voters employ a strategy that weeds out candidates who are either too moderate or too extreme, which enhances ideological purity without increasing divergence. The analysis highlights the importance of behavioral assumptions in understanding the effects of electoral institutions.

AbstractI investigate the extent to which reputational incentives affect policy choices in the context of a controlled laboratory experiment. In theory, asymmetric information and outcome unobservability undermine electoral delegation by creating incentives for politicians to pander. Under the right conditions, it may be preferable to remove such incentives by removing accountability altogether. The data suggest that subjects playing the role of politicians fail to take advantage of voters even though voters indeed create the predicted electoral incentives, albeit in a weaker form than predicted by the theory. When given the choice of institutions via a novel elicitation method, subjects prefer to retain electoral accountability or to make decisions themselves through direct democracy, even though both institutions yield lower expected payoffs than delegation to unaccountable agents.

Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward‐looking but uncertain about politicians' unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because selection renders sanctioning an empty threat. In contrast to rational choice predictions, the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule. Additional experiments support the interpretation that retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to cope with a cognitively difficult inference and decision problem and, in addition, suggest that voters have a preference for accountability. The results pose a challenge for theories of electoral selection and voter learning and suggest new interpretations of empirical studies of economic and retrospective voting.

This analysis of bill sponsorship across a variety of issues and Congresses shows that committee membership is the single most important factor shaping a senator's level of issue attention. Constituency demand is of secondary importance. Ideology, partisanship, and national conditions play little or no role. Consistent with a theoretical cost‐benefit framework, the results suggest that senators are motivated by the prospect of electoral and policy rewards from successful legislation rather than from mere position taking. The findings attest to the enduring importance of the committee system in a highly individualistic and increasingly partisan Senate.

Based on the results of the 2008 presidential and congressional
elections, an analysis using theories and methods of modern
political science (pivotal politics theory, ideal point estimates,
and bootstrap simulations) suggests that the conditions are ripe for
real policy change. Specifically, we should expect policies to move
significantly in a liberal direction, few or no policies should move
in a conservative direction, and many of the outcomes will be
moderate or somewhat to the left of center (rather than far left).
Furthermore, the predictions depend as much on partisan polarization
and the results of the congressional election as they do on the
outcome of presidential election itself.

If voters had the opportunity to choose the characteristics of their representative institutions directly, how would they do so? Voters in several states selected the bases of their state legislative apportionment through the initiative process prior to the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, which provides a unique opportunity to answer this question. This study examines 13 such initiatives in four states between 1924 & 1962. Four factors are hypothesized to influence vote choice on these initiatives: urban-rural conflict, partisanship, race, & economic self-interest. Through regression analysis of the county-level vote in these elections I find that economic self-interest consistently influences voter support for apportionment initiatives while these other factors influence it only occasionally. This finding suggests that distributive politics drive voters' evaluation of representative institutions & that the influence of other political factors depends on the historical & local context of an initiative. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractIf voters had the opportunity to choose the characteristics of their representative institutions directly, how would they do so? Voters in several states selected the base of their state legislative apportionment through the initiative process prior to the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, which provides a unique opportunity to answer this question. This study examines 13 such initiatives in four states between 1924 and 1962. Four factors are hypothesized to influence vote choice on these initiatives: urban-rural conflict, partisanship, race, and economic self-interest. Through regression analysis of the county-level vote in these elections I find that economic self-interest consistently influences voter support for apportionment initiatives while these other factors influence it only occasionally. This finding suggests that distributive politics drive voters' evaluation of representative institutions and that the influence of other political factors depends on the historical and local context of an initiative.

"Electability" received considerable attention during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, with some critics claiming that the term was code for sexism. From a rational choice perspective, "electability" could affect voting in multiple ways, including via expected utility; previous scholarship suggests that many voters consider it as such. Yet this scholarship ignores the role that salience plays in decision making, and is silent on which sorts of candidate might benefit from the effects of priming electability. To address these issues, we conducted a survey experiment during the 2020 primary season, measuring Democratic primary voters' preferences for candidates, electability estimates, and candidate rankings. Our experiment manipulated salience by randomizing the order in which preferences and electability were elicited. We show that electability salience caused a substantial increase in the probability that a respondent made decisions based only on electability.