This paper replicates the findings that appeared in the article “Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress,” published in the American Journal of Political Science (44:316–325), in which Lawrence Rothenberg and Mitchell Sanders incorporated a new research design and, contrary to all previous studies, found evidence of ideological shirking in the U.S. House of Representatives. We investigate the robustness of their results by reestimating their model with Congress-specific fixed effects and find that their results no longer hold.

In recent work, Signorino (American Political Science Review 93:279–297, 1999; International Interactions 28:93–115, 2002) has sought to test statistical models derived from extensive-form games in the context of international relations research focusing on conflict and interstate bargaining. When two or more actors interact with one another under conditions of uncertainty, Signorino demonstrates that it is necessary to incorporate such strategic interaction into the underlying model to avoid potential threats to statistical inference. Outside the realm of international relations research, however, there have been limited applications of Signorino's strategic probit model in understanding strategic interaction. In this article, I present an empirical comparison of probit and strategic probit models in the context of candidate competition in House elections during the 1990s. I show that incumbent spending deters challenger entry and factors such as minority party affiliation and redistricting significantly affect incumbent career decisions, findings that run counter to those reported in the nonstrategic model. Overall, the results illustrate that failing to account for strategic interaction can lead to biased and inaccurate estimates related to challenger and incumbent entry decisions.

In this note, we revisit the work of Carson and Crespinto examine the effect of different redistricting plans on competitiveness in U.S. House elections. Similar to the previous results, our probit estimates on an expanded dataset that includes redistricting cycles from 1972 to 2012 reveal that commission and court-drawn districts experience more competition on average than those drawn by legislatures. These results provide additional support for the hypothesis that one way to increase the competitiveness of congressional elections is to allow extra-legislative bodies to draw congressional district boundaries.

Most political observers agree that incumbent legislators have a considerable advantage over nonincumbents in modern congressional elections. Yet there is still disagreement over the exact source of this advantage and the explanation for its growth over time. To address this debate we utilize a unique set of historical elections data to test for the presence of an incumbency advantage in late-nineteenth-century House elections (1872–1900). We find a modest direct effect of incumbency and a substantial candidate quality effect. Moreover, the cartel-like control of ballot access by nineteenth century political parties created competition in races that the modern market-like system simply does not sustain. Our results suggest that candidate quality is a fundamental piece of the puzzle in understanding the historical development of the incumbency advantage in American politics.

One of the most fundamental changes in post-World War II congressional elections has been the rise of candidate-centered campaigns. This phenomenon has given rise to considerable theoretical and empirical literature demonstrating the strategic behavior of congressional candidates. Yet very few scholars have assessed the effect or existence of strategic candidate behavior for the pre-World War II era. We seek to fill part of this void by exploring the extent to which experienced or quality candidates played a role in influencing the electoral fortunes of incumbent House members in elections spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our findings suggest that in terms of strategic emergence and electoral performance, congressional candidates exhibited patterns of behavior which are strikingly similar to those seen in modern-day campaigns, suggesting that individual ambition is the best explanation for candidate behavior in both eras.

In the context of congressional elections research on candidate competition, two lines of inquiry have received a considerable amount of scholarly attention. The first deals with the issue of strategic candidate emergence in seeking to identify the conditions under which experienced candidates will challenge incumbents. The second focuses on the question of incumbents' career choices, particularly in terms of their decisions to seek reelection or retire. While past research has treated these questions as mutually exclusive, I argue in this article that such explanations are incomplete due to the complementary nature of the approaches. To unify these related research agendas, I develop a theoretical model of strategic interaction between congressional challengers and incumbents and test the model with House and Senate elections data from 1976 to 2000 using a strategic probit technique. The results both confirm and challenge a number of findings in the literature on candidate competition.

Legislative redistricting in the states is highly contentious due, at least in part, to its partisan implications. But does the method by which states draw legislative districts affect partisan competition in the elections that are held in these districts? We examine the effects of three methods used by states to draw district boundaries on competition in congressional elections. Specifically, we evaluate the effects on competition of legislative, judicial, and commission redistricting plans enacted prior to the 1992 and 2002 congressional elections. We find that more competitive elections occur when courts and commissions are directly involved in the redistricting process, as opposed to when redistricting is handled only in the state legislative process.

We analyze the constituency bases of the congressional parties from 1857 through 1913 by focusing on two key concepts: party homogeneity and party polarization. With a few notable exceptions, prior efforts to assess these concepts have relied upon measures based on members’ roll call votes. This is potentially problematic, as such measures are likely endogenous: They reflect the party’s actual level of success as much as the party’s underlying homogeneity. To address this problem, we construct measures for party homogeneity and polarization that are based on constituency characteristics, using economic-based census data and presidential voting data as proxies. We then examine how these “exogenous” measures compare to roll call-based measures. We find that changes in party unity on roll call votes track shifts in constituency characteristics fairly closely. Substantively, we find that the congressional parties went through three distinct phases during these 56 years: first, a period of extremely high overlap and low party homogeneity during the Civil War and Reconstruction, followed by a period of moderate polarization and homogeneity from the mid-1870s through the early 1890s, and concluding with a period of sharp polarization and high homogeneity, which coincided with the realignment of 1894–96. While the status of the 1894–96 elections as a critical turning point remains controversial in the historical and political science literatures, our results suggest that these elections did lead to a substantial change in the underlying characteristics of the congressional parties.