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Ideological Moderates Won't Run: How Party Fit Matters for Partisan Polarization in Congress

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Date
2014-06
Author
Thomsen, DM
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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 article
Subject
Partisan Polarization
U.S. Congress
Party Fit
Candidate Emergence
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8931
Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1017/S0022381614000243
Publication 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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Scholars@Duke

Danielle Marie Thomsen

Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science
This author no longer has a Scholars@Duke profile, so the information shown here reflects their Duke status at the time this item was deposited.
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