Winning the House: Re-election strategies, challenger campaigns, and mobilization against incumbents.
Item
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Title
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Winning the House: Re-election strategies, challenger campaigns, and mobilization against incumbents.
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Identifier
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AAI9917671
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identifier
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9917671
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Creator
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Lefkowitz, Joel Kenneth.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Frances Fox Piven
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Date
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1999
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Political Science, General | American Studies
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Abstract
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In this dissertation, I provide a theoretical account of the importance of mobilization against incumbents, and empirical estimates of its impact in the congressional elections of 1994 and 1996.;Through multivariate probit analysis of individual vote decisions reported in the National Election Studies, I find that in 1994 mobilization by the Republican Party mattered more than it had previously and more than other variables. Republican mobilization efforts increased the probability of voting Republican for Congress by 28 percentage points.;Mobilization is one element of a model that I derive from the work of Gary Jacobson and David Mayhew. The model also includes the quality of challengers and their campaigns as well as incumbent efforts to secure pork barrel projects for their districts, the positions they take, and the resources they use to win re-election.;Through multiple regression analysis on district level data for the 200 Republican incumbents running for re-election against Democratic opponents in 1996, I estimate that at their most extensive AFL-CIO mobilization efforts cost Republicans about 7 percentage points. I also find that moderation contributed modestly to Republican re-election efforts: for each 25 partisan votes on which they defected from the Republican Party position, these candidates gained about 1 additional percentage point of the district's vote.;I examine in detail the districts of Republican freshmen running for re-election through a content analysis of 2,294 articles in newspapers circulating in their districts. I confirm a modest increase in the vote for Republican incumbents as a result of policy moderation. I find that Republican incumbents increased their vote share by about .8 percentage points for each of their pork projects reported in the local press. I develop a new measure of challenger campaign quality, which I find reduced the incumbents' share of the vote by as much as 3 percentage points. With such campaign effects taken into account, I estimate that the separate impact of the mobilization efforts by the AFL-CIO and environmental groups reduced the share of Republican votes by about 4 percentage points.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
