Minority Party Status and the Decision to Run for Congress

• In Event: Campaigns, Elections, and Ideology in Legislative Politics

Abstract

This paper examines how a party’s prospects for winning the House majority in the next election affects prospective high-quality candidates’ decisions on whether to run for the U.S. House since World War II. Due to the unpleasantness of serving in the minority under conditional party government (e.g., see Rohde 1991), I theorize that a race is less likely to feature a high-quality candidate (using the definition constructed by Jacobson 1989) when a party is unlikely to win the majority in the next election. Politicians whose party will be in the majority have a clear incentive to run for Congress because their preferred policies have a credible chance of passing if they are in the majority. In contrast, it is generally difficult for minority party lawmakers to get a hearing on—much less advance—their preferred policies, particularly when the rules favor the majority party. Instead, minority party lawmakers spend most of their time fighting losing battles against policy proposals from the majority party. Being left out can take a psychological toll on politicians as individuals, causing them to seek to avoid situations in which they are likely to continue to lose (Robertson 2012). Put in terms of ambition theory (Schlesinger 1965), a static ambition can become discrete as a politician withdraws from political life after their term, or a nascent progressive ambition can be kindled as a politician seeks a higher office in which they are likely to be more able to realize their policy goals.

To test this theory, I develop a new measure for the probability that a party will be in the minority in the next session of Congress based on both the current number of seats for the party and national trends. This measure builds on existing measures that tend to rely upon only seat margins (e.g. Lee 2016). For an election such as 2002, where Republicans held a majority of fewer than ten seats, looking only at seat level exaggerates the prospects of a flip in majority control since President George W. Bush’s residually high approval after 9/11 mitigated the usual seat loss for the president’s party in midterm elections. In contrast, two of the three most recent majority flips—in 2006 and 2010—happened when Republicans and Democrats respectively controlled their largest number of seats since regaining majority control. Using this measure, I then test my theory using data on candidate quality in congressional elections since World War II.

This paper has important implication for the privileges enjoyed by the prospective majority party in Congress as the likely minority party may faces an even more difficult task in winning a majority than is commonly thought as a result of being able to recruit fewer high-quality candidates. For a minority party already facing long odds, the decision of high-quality candidates not to run makes winning the majority even tougher since the party may be forced to field inexperienced candidates instead of established political leaders in even in some of the most conceivably winnable seats held by the other party. If prospective high-quality candidates are unwilling to run for office, even for potentially competitive seats, then voters in such seats may be faced with a choice between a more experienced candidate from the other party and a less experienced candidate from their own party. Given the electoral advantages that experienced candidates have had historically, the majority party then has the potential to win a disproportionate number of competitive seats. As electoral outcomes have direct policy consequences, the findings presented in this paper suggest that the advantages majority parties enjoy have the potential to be magnified under conditions of hardship for the minority party. Already at a disadvantage inherent to their status as a minority, the struggle to recruit high-quality candidates and the increased retirement rate of their members has the potential to magnify this disadvantage, skewing policy outcomes further toward the party in power.

Author

• Jacob Forrest Harrison Smith, Duke University