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Title: Primary Turnout and Partisan Polarization in the U.S. House

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between primary turnout and candidate ideology with a dataset of U.S. House candidates from 1980 to 2014. The findings are not fully consistent with either previous research or the conventional wisdom. I find that increased primary turnout is associated with the election of less extreme legislators on the Democratic side, but a similar relationship does not emerge for Republicans. In addition, the negative relationship between turnout and legislator extremism among Democrats is mainly apparent in closed primaries, where reformers would least expect this pattern to emerge. The results suggest that reformers should consider differences in the coalitions of political parties when adopting policies that are intended to mitigate legislative polarization.

Url: http://www.democratic-anxieties.eu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Thomsen_primaryturnout.pdf

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Authors: Thomsen, Danielle

Conference Name: Democratic Anxieties Workshop

Publisher Location: Berlin, Germany

Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Other

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