Congressional Behavior and Electoral Marginality

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The "marginality" hypothesis maintains that members of Congress from marginal districts will display more moderation in their voting behavior than will those from safe districts. We give two alternative interpretations to the hypothesis: Candidates from more marginal districts will: (1) tend to converge to the positions of their constituents; and (2) tend to converge to the positions of their opponents. Employing policy opinion data on both party candidates for 299 districts for which valid competition figures could be obtained, and simulated constituency opinions for the same districts, we find a general tendency for candidates to diverge from each other in marginal districts. However, we find that in the more marginal districts, candidates closest to the constituency opinion are considerably more likely to win than their opponent--although quite the contrary is the case for the noncompetitive districts. Incumbents are found to have greater probability of winning reelection than their challengers even when the latter are closer to constituency opinion.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: