American Politics & Public Policy Workshop: John Zaller, “The Politics of Nominations to the U.S. House of Representatives: Evidence From Four Case Studies”

“The Politics of Nominations to the U.S. House of Representatives: Evidence from Four Case Studies”

Guest Speaker: John Zaller, Professor of Political Science, UCLA

Abstract: The polarization of voting in Congress is a defining feature of contemporary American politics.  Several scholars trace it to the ideological preferences of activists, donors, and voters in House and Senate primaries, but little pertinent evidence exists. This presentation seeks to shed light on the problem from case studies of four open seat House primaries in the 2014 cycle.  Evidence takes the form of interviews of elite participants and small exit surveys of voters in the four primaries (AR-2, IA-1, PA-13, TX-36).

Results indicate that, among elites, the dominant players were traditional interest groups – business, labor, professions, and ethnic communities; what they sought was not ideological purity, but competent representation of particular interests.  Local party leaders hovered in the background in all four races, pulling strings that, in two cases, helped a less polarizing candidate to nomination.

Among voters in the exit polls, motivation was sometimes hard to discern.  About half could not recall the name of any House candidate only minutes after casting ballots.  Each race had an ideologically diverse field, but voters took little notice.  In simple models of voting, whether the voter lived in the same county as the candidate was always a stronger predictor of support than issue positions or ideology.  Perhaps most disappointing to the view that extreme ideology drives congressional polarization is that, in both Republican primaries, stronger support for cuts in federal spending correlated with support for more moderate candidates.

Overall, this evidence resonates better with Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum that all politics is local than with an image of ideological politics. The evidence is also consistent with the group-centric model of political parties proposed in Bawn et al. (2012).

John Zaller is professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles.  He has authored or co-authored three books, American Ethos (1985, with Herbert McClosky), Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992), and The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations before and after Reform (2008, with Marty Cohen, David Karol, and Hans Noel).  His current work is on political parties.