Suchergebnisse

Competition among candidates or parties is a necessary condition for democracy. But who counts as a candidate and what counts as competition? The influence of money in American elections makes fundraising an appropriate alternative to vote totals, and it provides a new vantage point to assess the quality of electoral competition. I draw on a dataset of preelection campaign receipts to measure competition in U.S. House primaries from 1980 to 2020. When competition is measured with receipts, it looks markedly worse than vote share measures suggest. Moreover, the difference between vote share and fundraising measures is largest in open-seat primaries, or the best-case scenarios of competition. The disparity between measures is driven largely by candidates who have little chance of winning. The findings shed new light on resource disparities in elections and demonstrate that our conclusions about the quality of competition are tied to our measures.

AbstractHow does the influence of party factions change over time? This article only begins to tackle this question by looking at which party caucuses newly elected members join. I focus on joining patterns in the current 115th Congress to shed light on which factions are more or less influential in Congress today. I show, first, that almost all incoming members joined an ideological faction when they entered office. Furthermore, the Republican Study Committee attracted the most incoming Republicans; the New Democratic Coalition and the Congressional Progressive Caucus attracted the most incoming Democrats. The moderate factions lagged behind the more conservative and liberal factions in the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. These joining patterns of newly elected members have important implications for the current and future influence that factions can expect to have in the party and chamber.

This article examines why the percentage of Democratic women in Congress has increased dramatically since the 1980s while the percentage of Republican women has barely grown. The central claim is that ideological conformity with the party influences the decision to run for office, and I suggest that partisan polarization has discouraged ideological moderates in the pipeline from pursuing a congressional career. The findings have gendered implications because, first, Republican women in the pipeline have historically been to the left of their male counterparts, and second, there is a dearth of conservative women in the pipeline.

The underrepresented status of women in legislative positions is an entrenched flaw in the American political system. Although past research has investigated the obvious gender gap, the spotlight has recently shifted toward the preliminary factors affecting a candidate's political ambition. It has been noted that women have little aspiration to run for office, and are unlikely to even consider themselves as viable candidates. Encouragement offered by political parties and external supporters such as family, friends, coworkers, and community organizations plays a vital role in creating a female candidate. This paper evaluates the impact of outside forces on the female candidate image and how those factors influence women's final decisions to run for office. I interview female legislators in St. Paul, Minnesota, and uncover the motivations for and obstacles to their candidacies. I analyze the themes that emerge from their narratives and share their collective stories as women legislators. With the 2006 elections, Minnesota now boasts the third highest proportion of female legislators in the nation, comprising 34.8% of the legislature. The personal experiences of these women may serve as a recipe to future gender parity in state legislatures and Congress.