The Role of Candidate ‘Fields’ in Presidential Nominations

• In Event: Primary Elections

Abstract

Career pathways to presidential nominations are a long-time focus in the study of the politics of presidential selection, though the product is all too often anecdotal and atheoretical. So this paper begins by reversing the direction of the analysis, attempting to use the prior political careers of candidates to tease out and confirm the larger structure of American politics.

Yet the more explicitly political aspect of routes to the presidency—and the far more theoretically challenging one—concerns not the presence of individual candidates but the influence of collective ‘fields’ for a presidential nomination. The basic questions thus become whether, to what extent, and how these collections of contenders shape the fortunes of individual nominees. To wit: does the whole influence the parts that comprise it?

More pointedly, does the raw number of initial challengers matter (or is it instead the character of those challengers, however that is defined)? Does the mix of ideological and constituency differences (or similarities) that they bring to the contest matter? Does the simple absence of one or more expected contenders matter? Or do nominating institutions and a recurrent nominating dynamic reduce all such field influences to a footnote?

Authors

• Elizabeth Sawyer, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin