Media Markets, Primary Candidates and Polarization

• In Event: Political Parties, Primaries, and Candidate Selection

Abstract

One of the pressing puzzles in American Politics is to explain the increasing, and asymmetric, polarization of the American political parties, with less centrist preferences found among Republican than Democratic lawmakers. In response, scholars have suggested that institutional features, especially the primary system, play a causal role in polarization. However, empirical support has been lacking with insufficient explanation for why primaries have facilitated the success of polarizing challengers in some (mostly Republican) cases but not others. We argue that primaries are not sufficient to facilitate the election of challenger candidates who lack the name-recognition and volunteer assistance of the incumbent. To be effective, challengers must demonstrate that they are more closely aligned with potential primary voters than the incumbent – but must also inform voters of their own position and/or the actions of the incumbent. The problem for challengers is that mobilizing and informing voters is costly, and challengers usually cannot generally gain access to party resources. Political advertising in local media markets allows challengers to disseminate information directly to voters via paid political ads, so that private mechanisms substitute for institutional support. A political advertising campaign is infeasible, however, in congressional districts that are subsumed within large and expensive media markets or in districts that contain multiple media markets because of the rising media costs of reaching most voters. These premises support a hypothesis linking the cost of advertising, by congressional district, to polarization, number of ads, and voter information. In short, we expect that the ideological extremity of representatives will rise most in districts which allow for affordable and efficiently targeted political advertising. We test these hypotheses using data on media market alignment with congressional districts from the 1970’s to 2014, more recent data on political advertisements from the Wesleyan Media Project to capture advertising strategies, and DW-Nominate to measure our ultimate dependent variable of polarization. We conclude with a consideration of the micro-foundations of contemporary party polarization, including how the Republican Party – disproportionately concentrated in rural and exurban areas with lower advertising costs – has experienced polarizing primaries at a higher rate than the Democratic Party.

Authors

• Lucy M. Goodhart, Brandeis University

• Benjamin Beutel