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When parties make endorsements in primary elections, does the favored candidate receive a real boost in his or her vote share, or do parties simply pick the favorites who are already destined to win? To answer this question, we draw on two research designs aimed at isolating the causal effect of Democratic Party endorsements in California’s 2012 primary election. First, we conduct a survey experiment in which we randomly assign a party endorsement, holding all other aspects of a candidate’s background and policy positions constant. Second, we use a unique dataset to implement a regression discontinuity analysis of electoral trends by comparing the vote shares captured by candidates who barely won or barely lost the internal party endorsement contest. We find a constellation of evidence suggesting that endorsements do indeed matter, although this effect appears to be contingent upon the type of candidate and voter: endorsements matter most for candidates in their party’s mainstream, and for voters who identify with that party and for independents. The magnitude of their impact is dramatically smaller than might be estimated from research designs less attuned to recent advances in causal inference.

Do legislators and potential legislative candidates respond to the signals that executive election results send out about constituent preferences? This paper takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by California's 2003 recall election -- held at the midpoint of the state's legislative session -- to test theories about the strategic entry of candidates and the ideological mobility of legislators. First, we show that a surge in support for one party in an executive election can help that party recruit more experienced legislative candidates than usual, while qualified leaders in the other party are discouraged from running in districts where the surge is particularly strong. Second, we show that legislators in the weakening party, particularly those in the most competitive districts, will moderate their behavior after the executive election results signal their electoral vulnerability.

This paper is a preliminary consideration of slate mail. We provide some basic information about the nature and use of slate mail in California and about the policy debates that have surrounded it in the last decade or two.4 We then briefly describe a program of experimental research into the effects of slate mail and report and analyze in detail the results of one such experiment.