Parties, Factions, and Incumbency in State and Federal Elections, 1870 to 2000

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Extensive study of U.S. federal elections has deepened understanding of the politics of representation. Empirical analysis of presidential and congressional elections has aided in the development of theories of party voting and party alignments, economic voting, personalistic politics, and the responsiveness of public policy to election outcomes. Publicly available data on federal elections has greatly facilitated the research programs surrounding the study of representation. This project is to assemble data on election returns for state legislatures and state executives for the period 1870 to present. General election data for gubernatorial elections are available in existing data sets. However, publicly available data on state legislative elections are only available for the period 1968-1988 and 1993-1994, and no comprehensive database on statewide elective officers other than governor exists. A publicly available state elections data base will be broadly useful to scholars of American politics and representation. These data will allow scholars to consider how voting patterns differ across varying economic, social, and legal contexts and to measure how short-run fluctuations in the economy, long-run shifts in demographics, and changing election laws affect election outcomes. These data will also allow researchers to relate election results to policy outcomes. The researchers' interests in collecting these data are to better understand party voting and state party cleavages, incumbency advantages, and electoral accountability. Comprehensive state election data will allow for improved measures of party competition at the state and county level. Specifically, with many offices observed at a give election within a county or state it is possible to estimate the normal party division within a county or state. Measures of the normal vote at the state level are used for many purposes-e.g., to study the changing party alignments, to examine the connection between electoral competition and participation, and to test conjectures about the electoral responsiveness of public policy, such as Key's (1949) hypothesis that less electoral competition leads to policies that benefit wealthier voters and interests. The researchers focus on comparing national and state party cleavages, testing hypotheses about when and why these cleavages differ, and relating these differences to the strength of party vs. personal voting. State election data also provide unique opportunities for determining the sources of incumbency advantages These data will be of value to numerous other scholars interested in the topic.