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On the Decline of Competition in Congressional Elections*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

John A. Ferejohn
John A. Ferejohn*
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology
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Abstract

Several authors have observed a decline in the number of competitive congressional districts during the past two decades. Various explanations have been proposed for this change. Among these are theories attributing major causal significance to changing methods of drawing district boundaries, and increasing control of campaign resources by incumbents. These theories are examined critically and arguments are advanced for their rejection. The principal cause of the decline of competition for congressional seats appears to rest on a change in individual voting behavior.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 166 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1977

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Footnotes

*

This paper has benefited greatly from the assistance of John Land, my research assistant, and from the detailed critical comments of Morris Fiorina, Sam Kernell, Robert Erikson, John Kingdon, Ben Page, Gary Jacobson, Michael Cohen, J. Vincent Buck, Robert Bates, and Lance Davis. I could not take all their criticisms into account, but I am deeply grateful for their generous donations of time. Some of the data employed in this study were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research at the University of Michigan. I alone am responsible for the analysis and conclusions.

References

1 Mayhew, David, “Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals,” Polity, 6 (Spring 1974), 295–317 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Throughout this paper I define a competitive seat as one in which the margin of victory does not exceed 20 per cent. This definition is not only arbitrary but it also has the defect of suggesting that what might be called the vulnerability of a seat is related in some simple way to vote margin. While it is possible that the connection between vulnerability and vote margin is not only complicated but is also unstable in time, I cannot investigate this question in the present paper. The reader is therefore asked to keep in mind the provisional nature of this definition in interpreting the results reported here.

2 Erikson, Robert S., “The Advantage of Incumbency in Congressional Elections,” Polity, 3 (Spring 1971), 395–405 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Malapportionment, Gerrymandering, and Party Fortunes in Congressional Elections,” American Political Science Review, 66 (December 1972), 1234–1335 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Ibid., p. 553.

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8 Ibid.

9 Erikson, , “Malapportionment,” p. 1240 Google Scholar.

10 Mayhew, , “Congressional Elections,” p. 311 Google Scholar.

11 Tufte, Edward R., “Communications,” American Political Science Review, 68 (March 1974), 212 Google Scholar.

12 Tufte, , “Relationship Between Seats and Votes,” p. 551 Google Scholar.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., p. 553.

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16 Kostroski, “Party and Incumbency in Postwar Senate Elections.”

17 Erikson, “Malapportionment.”

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