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Party Activists, Campaign Resources and Candidate Position Taking: Theory, Tests and Applications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2004

WOOJIN MOON
WOOJIN MOON
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California at San Diego
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Abstract

Electoral competition is here specified as revolving around both candidate policy positions and non-policy issues.Two candidates spend their resources on non-policy issues to sway citizens' ideological voting decisions but they are constrained by their party activists who provide them with electoral resources. In this setting, a candidate with a resource advantage converges more towards the centre, but a candidate with a resource disadvantage diverges more from the centre. This asymmetry in two candidates' incentives to converge generates the result that the two candidates do not converge towards each other. To test these theoretical results, two-stage estimation is used in this article to solve the reciprocal relationship between policy moderation and campaign resources. This analysis produces strong empirical support for the model in the context of US Senate elections between 1974 and 2000.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 611 - 633
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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