Rewarding Professional Extremists?

• In Event: Parties and Leaders in US State Legislatures

Abstract

In this paper, I evaluate the intervening role legislative professionalism has on the relationship between a state legislator's ideology and electoral vote share. The literature on ideology and vote share is well established: in a variety of contexts, moderate legislators tend to do better than extremists, all else equal. But Birkhead (2015) finds that state legislative professionalism has a surprising role: rather than professionalism increasing the rewards for moderation, it actually increased the rewards for extremism, though the particular mechanism was left unspecified. In this follow-up paper, I intend to use additional data sources, over a longer time-frame to unpack the way state institutions influence the role of ideology in elections.

Author

• Nathaniel A Birkhead, Kansas State University