editor's introduction

Editor's IntroductionAuthor(s): Malcolm E. JewellSource: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 2 (May, 1981), pp. 177-182Published by: Comparative Legislative Research CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/439643 .

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Editor's Introduction

One of the major advances in American legislative research in recent years has been the development of the National Election Studies as a vehicle for studying congressional elections and representation. As part of the plan to transform the biennial election studies conducted by the University of Michigan into a national resource facility, a conference on congressional elections research was held in Rochester, New York in October, 1977. The congressional scholars who attended agreed on priorities for the congressional elections section of the 1978 election study, and a committee was established to plan research priorities, draft questions, and assess the results in this field.

The 1978 study provided a rich body of data for scholars interested in various aspects of congressional elections and respresentation. In addition to survey data, contextual data were collected from the 108 House districts included in the survey, providing extensive details on the campaigns. The analyses of the 1978 data have been reported at several professional confer- ences, including one focusing on this topic in Houston, Texas in January, 1980; articles have also appeared in several professional journals. Some of the questions pertaining to Congress that were used in 1978 were replicated in the 1980 election study, and reports on these findings can be anticipated soon.

The first five articles in this issue of the Quarterly deal with various aspects of the 1978 congressional election studies. There are several reasons for our giving priority to this topic. Those readers who are not specialists in the American Congress may not be familiar with the major substantive findings from the 1978 surveys. These studies have implications for the study of American state legislatures and legislatures in other countries, where the same questions might be asked and the same techniques employed. These studies illustrate the potential for using the survey technique to study various aspects of representation and not just voting behavior in legislative elections.

Legislative Studies Quarterly, VI, 2, May, 1981 Copyright 1981 by the Comparative Legislative Research Center 0362-9805/81/0602-0177$00.30 177



Legislative Studies Quarterly

Another reason for publishing these articles is to focus attention on methodological aspects of the congressional elections studies. As further research is done on the 1978 and 1980 data, and as plans are being made for expanded surveys in the years ahead, it is time to take a careful look at questions of methods and measurement, and the adequacy of both our concepts and our techniques. Several of these articles pay particular attention to such topics.

Articles on the 1978 U.S. Congressional Elections Study

The first question that congressional scholars hoped to answer from the 1978 election survey was: Why are incumbents in the U.S. House so successful in winning reelection, often with very comfortable margins? Is it because they are much better known than their incumbents? Do voters have a great deal of contact with them, in person or through the media? Do they win a high approval rating from voters, and if so, is it because of services to the district or their stand on issues? In the first article in this issue, Gary Jacobson summarizes what we have learned about the advantage of House incumbents, and finds that all of the things that members of Congress do contribute to their electoral advantage. Members of the House are quite well known to constituents (at least in the sense that most can recognize their name) and are much better known than challengers. Most respondents have had contact through the media or the mail with incumbents, and a substantial minority have had personal contact; challengers lag way behind in both respects. Constituent evaluation of incumbents' performance is generally favorable; they are more likely to respond favorably to district services than to policy matters; and those who react favorably to either are most likely to vote for the incumbent. Constituents are much more likely to be able to evaluate the incumbent than the challenger, and the balance of evaluations is much more favorable in the case of the incumbent.

As scholars have started examining the findings from the 1978 survey, they have begun to realize that the success of incumbents can be explained not only by several components of incumbent strength but also by the weakness and invisibility of challengers. To explain election outcomes, we must examine voters' awareness of and attitudes toward incumbents and challengers simultaneously. This is the purpose of Lyn Ragsdale's article, which concerns the possibility that the voter's evaluation of one candidate affects the evaluation of the other. To test that possibility, she uses a non- recursive structural equation model. She finds that in the House the evaluation of the incumbent does not affect that of the challenger, but a favorable evaluation of the challenger does moderately reduce the positive evaluation of

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the incumbent. The importance of this is limited by the fact that in most cases voters had little awareness and an indifferent attitude toward the challenger, because of the ineffectiveness of the challenger's campaign. For most voters in House races, their information-evaluation-decision process is almost entirely incumbent oriented. An effective campaign by challengers can erode the favorable image enjoyed by the incumbents, but such campaigns are infrequent.

The Ragsdale article sheds some light on another question that concerns those who study congressional elections: why do Senate incumbents seem to lack the electoral advantages enjoyed by House incumbents? (The results of the 1980 congressional elections made this contrast particularly dramatic.) She finds that in the Senate there is a simultaneity effect between evaluations of incumbents and challengers, as voters balance their attitudes toward the two candidates; the more favorably they evaluate one, the less favorably they evaluate the other. Because voters have much more information about challengers for the Senate than is true in the House, there is a stronger information-evaluation link that leads to more favorable attitudes toward Senate challengers.

Glenn Parker's article provides additional evidence about the differences between Senate and House elections. His goal is to determine the extent to which candidate awareness in the two types of elections reflects contact with the candidates or the effects of individual voter attributes. His starting point is a methodological one: to construct a better measure of candidate awareness. Prior to the 1978 survey, most voting studies asked respondents if they could recall the names of candidates, and the results consistently showed low levels of recall. In 1978 respondents were tested to see if they could recognize the names of candidates, and the results were much more positive. (This helped to explain why incumbents were more likely to be preferred even by voters who could not recall their name.) In this article Parker uses both the recall and recognition questions for both candidates to produce a four-item scale for respondents. (The assumption of the scale is that recognition is more common than recall and both items are higher for incumbents than for challengers.)

Parker distinguishes between two causes of higher candidate awareness: personal characteristics of voters (such as education and political inter- est) and the campaign efforts of candidates. He also distinguishes between personal and media contact with the candidates. As expected, candidate awareness is much higher for the Senate than for the House. Is this because voters have more contact (in person and through the media) with Senate than with House candidates, or because it is easier to obtain information about Senate candidates? Parker concludes that the latter is true. He develops

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regression equations using only the personal characteristics of voters, and then adds measures of contact with candidates. He finds that voter characteristics explain candidate awareness better in the Senate; adding candidate contact measures increases the explanation of awareness more in the House. In others words, information about both candidates is relatively easy to obtain in most Senate races; but in the House, where so little is often known about challengers, the effectiveness of campaign effort-particularly by challengers- makes more difference.

Although both the Ragsdale and the Parker articles shed some light on the differences between House and Senate elections, we should be cautious about interpreting data on the Senate from the 1978 study. As Mann and Wolfinger (1980, p. 618) point out, the sample for that study, which is based on House districts, does not provide an adequate sample of Senate races; in fact, less than 600 respondents voted in Senate races, and a large proportion of them were just in three states with particularly expensive Senate races. Obviously more definitive answers to the differences between House and Senate races must await a study designed specifically for Senate elections.

The sample used in 1978 is much more adequate for analyzing House races, but it has some limitations that should be kept in mind. Mann and Wolfinger (1980, pp. 618-619) note that only 1027 of the 2304 respondents voted in House races, and only 766 voted in the 77 districts (out of 108) where there was a contest between an incumbent and a challenger. If we are interested in closely contested races, it is disappointing to find that only about one-fourth of these races involving incumbents were won by less than 60 percent, and in only one was the incumbent beaten. In fact the level of competition and the challenger's campaign effort was minimal in a majority of the races between incumbent and challenger in the 1978 survey. There were 45 districts (out of 77) in which the challenger did very little campaigning; the maximum spent by challengers irt these districts was $35,000 and the median was $9,000.

The reason why voters who were surveyed had so little awareness of and contact with challengers is that challengers in a majority of the districts conducted minimal campaigns. Respondents in these 45 minimal-effort districts reported levels of challenger awareness and contact that were less than half of the levels reported in districts where challengers made a major campaign effort. This illustrates a point that must be made about interpreting the congressional election data: it is based on national averages, but there is tremendous district-to-district variation because there is so much variation in the visibility of challengers and the intensity of their campaigns. If we think in terms of "typical" House elections, we may misinterpret the data on voting behavior.

Robert Erikson's article deals with another aspect of the House

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district sample: the potential research advantages gained from using the congressional district as the primary sampling unit, which was done for the first time in 1978. He suggests that the advantages lie in using the district (not the respondent) as the unit of analysis, such as is done in studies of representation. In 1978 there was an average of 21 respondents (and fewer than 10 voters) in each district, and there was no effort to guarantee a representative sample within districts. Consequently, as Erikson points out, one must be cautious about estimating the reliability of the sample in a district. With these caveats in mind, Erikson suggests how correlations-between constituency opinion and roll-call behavior, for example-can be corrected for the reliability of the sampled constituency characteristic.

One of the advantages of using the congressional district as the primary sampling unit is that contextual data on the district can be collected and integrated with survey data. This has been done in the 1978 study. The article by Goldenberg and Traugott demonstrates the effects of the campaign on election outcomes, using information from campaign managers on candidate name recognition and several measures of media coverage and endorsement. The best way of assessing the impact of the campaign is to compare the outcome with the normal vote in the district. The authors describe how the normal vote can be estimated by using measures of party identification, following a method developed in national surveys. Although this system relies on data from the small sample of respondents in each district, the authors present evidence that such a sample is adequate for these purposes.

Goldenberg and Traugott conclude that, as might be expected, incumbency has the major effect on candidate recognition, and that recognition and the relative spending on media advertising by the two candidates were the best predictors of deviation from the normal vote. The extensive body of contextual data needs to be utilized much more fully by researchers if we are to get a more complete picture of how campaigns affect electoral outcomes. As we have suggested earlier, the more we understand congressional voting, the more we recognize how much voting patterns vary with the character and intensity of the campaign-particularly that conducted by the challenger.

Other Articles in this Issue

John Sprague's study deals with a problem that is timely at the start of the Reagan administration: Why has the House of Representatives remained under Democratic control, despite alternation in the control of the American Presidency? More broadly, he seeks to show how a political party such as the Democrats can maintain long-term legislative control through its ability to hold safe seats. The argument is presented in formal terms. It leads to the

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conclusion that small differences in the proportion of safe seats held by the two parties produce one-party dominance of a legislative body under conditions of highly stable voting behavior. The concept of safe seats is fundamental to Sprague's argument, and his article reemphasizes the importance of under- standing why so many congressional seats remain safe.

The last two articles in this issue analyze U. S. legislative institutions which are quite different from Congress. Grofman and Scarrow examine voting in county boards of supervisors in New York state, and Carroll and English describe the norms used in constitutional conventions of American states. In each case the articles are interesting not so much because of the particular legislative body studied but because of processes that are pertinent to other institutions.

The courts of New York have approved a weighted voting system for governing bodies of New York counties, each of which consists of representatives from towns, cities, or other local units. During the American reapportion- ment revolution of the 1960s, weighted voting was discussed and proposed in a number of states, but it has been implemented only in these New York counties. Grofman and Scarrow discuss some of the problems and consequences of giving some members of a local legislative body more votes than others. Among the pertinent issues are the concepts of representation implied in weighted voting and the implications of coalition formation, particularly when more than one individual represents a particular governmental unit. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this story is that the court requires that the weighted voting scheme be based on a mathematical formula devised by an academic witness who explained to the court that a simple proportion scheme would be unfair, based on game-theoretic notions.

The purpose of the article by Carroll and English is to shed light on the formation of legislative norms. The authors demonstrate that many norms commonly found in state legislatures, and often described as uniquely legislative in character, were found to be present in state constitutional conventions, which are by definition ephemeral institutions. This suggests that many of the norms found in legislatures may be common in the American political culture. The finding further suggests the need for a clearer definition of norms that may be unique to legislatures and more attention to the process by which norms actually develop and become accepted in a legislative institution.

-Malcolm E. Jewell

REFERENCES

Mann, Thomas E., and Raymond E. Wolfinger. 1980. "Candidates and Parties in Con- gressional Elections," American Political Science Review 74: 617-632.

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editor's introduction

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