Ideological Moderates Won't Run: How Party Fit Matters for Partisan Polarization in Congress
Abstract
Scholars have focused on elite-level and mass-level changes to explain partisan polarization
in Congress. This article offers a candidate entry explanation for the persistence
of polarization and the rise in asymmetric polarization. The central claim is that
ideological conformity with the party—what I call party fit—influences the decision
to run for office, and I suggest that partisan polarization in Congress has discouraged
ideological moderates in the pipeline from pursuing a congressional career. I test
this hypothesis with a survey of state legislators and with ideology estimates of
state legislators who did and did not run for Congress from 2000 to 2010. I find that
liberal Republican and conservative Democratic state legislators are less likely to
run for Congress than those at the ideological poles, though this disparity is especially
pronounced among Republicans. The findings provide an additional explanation for recent
patterns of polarization in Congress.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8931Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1017/S0022381614000243Publication Info
Thomsen, DM (2014). Ideological Moderates Won't Run: How Party Fit Matters for Partisan Polarization in
Congress. The Journal of Politics, 76(3). pp. 786-797. 10.1017/S0022381614000243. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8931.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Danielle Marie Thomsen
Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science
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