1. Causes of Challenger Quality in U.S. House Elections, 1946-2002.
- Author
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Arseneau, Robert B.
- Subjects
- *
ELECTIONS , *VOTING , *POLITICAL science - Abstract
This paper re-examines the empirical support for Jacobson and Kernell's strategic politicians theory of seat change in U.S. House elections. The theory contends, in short, that a substantial part of the impact of national electoral forces on seat change acts indirectly through the intervening variable of challenger quality. District and aggregate level models of challenger quality are estimated using a new database of House challengers. Jacobson's district level model is estimated using pooled data from the 1946-2002 elections. Krasno and Green's district level model and a revised version of their model are estimated for each of the 1946-2002 elections. Jacobson's aggregate level models of relative challenger quality are estimated using data from the 1946-2002 elections. A new aggregate level model of challenger quality is developed in this paper. The overall performance of the new model as measured by explained variance is comparatively greater than for earlier models. The impact of national forces on challenger quality is moderate at best. A new seat change model including challenger quality as a causal variable is introduced and estimated for the 1954-2002 elections. Estimates of this model demonstrate that challenger quality is an important cause of seat change. In addition, the impact of both national and district electoral forces on seat change, acting through the intervening variable of challenger quality, is estimated using data from the 1954-2002 elections. The indirect impact of national forces on seat change is moderate. Finally, an alternative measure of challenger quality constructed from data originally gathered in order to construct Krasno and Green's measure of challenger quality is substituted for Jacobson's traditional measure. The substitution improves the overall performance of the new aggregate level model of challenger quality presented here, but the additional gain in the performance is small. In conclusion, the analysis presented here provides empirical support for Jacobson and Kernell's strategic politicians theory. However, the theory has limited explanatory power. The impact of national forces on seat change acting through challenger quality is not large enough to account for much of the observed seat change that occurs from one election to the next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2005