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On the Representativeness of Primary Electorates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2018

John Sides ,
Chris Tausanovitch ,
Lynn Vavreck  and
Christopher Warshaw
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Abstract

Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for party polarization in government. This study uses a combination of administrative records on primary turnout and five recent surveys from 2008–14 to show that primary voters have similar demographic attributes and policy attitudes as rank-and-file voters in their party. These similarities do not vary according to the openness of the primary. These results suggest that the composition of primary electorates does not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole.

Keywords

primary electionspublic opinionrepresentationpolarization
Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 677 - 685
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, George Washington University (email: jsides@gwu.edu); Department of Political Science, University of California Los Angeles (email: ctausanovitch@ucla.edu); Departments of Political Science and Communication, University of California Los Angeles (email: lvavreck@ucla.edu); Department of Political Science, George Washington University (email: warshaw@gwu.edu). A previous version of this article was presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL. We thank Larry Bartels and Chris Achen for inviting us to present work at a 2013 conference on representation at Vanderbilt University. At that time we had two separate articles on nominations, and the decision to collaborate directly resulted from conversations at this meeting. Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at https://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OQ64S8 and online appendices at https://doi.org/10.1017/S000712341700062X.

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Supplementary material: Link

Sides et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OQ64S8
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Sides et al. supplementary material

Appendix

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