Top

Political Behavior

Published in:

21-10-2022 | Original Paper

Perceptions of Party Incongruence and Nascent Political Ambition

Authors: Justin H. Kirkland, Elizabeth N. Simas, Scott Clifford

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 1/2024

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

Recent elections reveal a rise in first-time candidates. Building on prior works on nascent political ambition, we examine how ideological incongruence with one’s party relates to the initial development of interest in running for office. We advance the theory that individuals will be more motivated to run when they view their party as failing to represent their preferred position. Using two nationally representative surveys, we find support for this hypothesis, as we show that people are more likely to develop political ambition when they perceive themselves as ideologically distant from their party. Finally, using a panel study, we show that ideological distance predicts running for office for the first time. Our findings further highlight how the factors that contribute to the initial formation of ambition differ from the strategic concerns driving more advanced career decisions and illustrate another potential side-effect of ideological disagreement within parties.

previous article The Conditional Effects of Authoritarianism on COVID-19 Pandemic Health Behaviors and Policy Preferences

next article Nail in the Coffin or Lifeline? Evaluating the Electoral Impact of COVID-19 on President Trump in the 2020 Election

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Available only for authorised users

Full replication data for this project can be found at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TH6OWH. Supplemental Appendices are maintained on the contact author’s website. This initial ad can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq3QXIVR0bs.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/11/white-men-democratic-house-candidates-813717.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-more-inexperienced-candidates-are-running-and-winning/.

For example, see https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2018/9/17/17870478/two-party-system-electoral-reform. Accessed 9/25/2020..

This holds outside of the U.S. as well, as dissatisfaction has been linked to non-voting participation in a multitude of contexts (e.g. Harrebey and Ejranes 2015; Marien, Hooghe, and Quintelier 2010; Norris 2011).

Indeed, in a recent Annual Review piece, Gulzar (2021, 257) calls for scholarship on political ambition to focus more heavily on the general population for fear that a focus on “high ability candidates” means that “scholars are unable to speak to how political entry operates in the entire population.”

In addition, recent work suggests that the gaps between elites and ordinary citizens has been overstated (Kertzer, n.d.). Still, to test our hypothesis on a more focused sample, we also split our sample between those with and without college degrees. Results available in the supplemental appendix shows that we find similar results across both subsamples.

We make this claim based on Brookings data compiled from the Congressional Quarterly. These numbers show that between 2009 and 2021, there has been a decline in both the raw number and percentage of entries listed as business, banking, or law. See Chapter 1 of the Vital Statistics on Congress available here https://www.brookings.edu/multi-chapter-report/vital-statistics-on-congress/.

We report lower Ns in our analyses, as we exclude the 11% of respondents who failed an embedded attention check. To address the potential for satisficing on online surveys, we embedded an attention check in a survey grid (Berinsky et al., 2019). However, all of our key inferences reported below are unaffected by the decision to drop satisficers from the sample.

For more information about the CCES and its methodology, see https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/.

There may be some reason to worry about the inclusion of language regarding encouragement from a political organizer in our measures of political ambition. As such, we replicate our initial models of ambition using 2016 survey questions lacking this recruitment language in the supplemental appendix. Our results remain largely consistent with those we report below.

For pure independents, we measure incongruence as the absolute distance from the nearest party. Our results are robust to using the more distant party.

We also use this approach to measure respondents’ perceptions of ideological distance to the opposing party, providing us with measures of inparty incongruence and outparty incongruence.

For example, the timing of the height of the #metoo movement means that we would expect the issues related to that movement to be influential in 2018, but 2016. And even then, existing works suggest these effects would only be evident among women with a greater sense of linked fate (Jenkins, Poloni-Staudinger, and Strachan 2021).

Across the various samples examined by these authors, estimates of the percentage of conflicted liberals ranges from 1.0 to 12.9, while estimates of the percentage of conflicted conservatives ranges from 9.7 to 30.0.

See the supplemental appendix for more information.

In the supplemental appendix, we show that using responses to a battery of issues rather than self-placement on the 7-point scale to represent extremity does not change our results. We point to the similarity between these two representations of ideological extremity as additional support for our use of the 7-point ideological scale in the construction of our party distance measures.

Ideological moderates (i.e. those placing themselves at 3, 4, or 5) comprise more than 30% of those who perceive themselves as greater than 1 unit away from the party in 2016 and more than 40% in 2018.

We also consider the possibility that our two perceived distance variables might have a conditional effect on ambition. But as results in the supplemental appendix show, the interaction term is not statistically significant and its inclusion does not alter our main findings.

See the supplemental appendix for details about the construction of these variables.

In the supplemental appendix, we interact our measures of party distance with ideological extremity, and find no evidence of interactive effects of in-party distance and ideological extremity.

Those who identify as pure independents are excluded from this analysis. Partisan leaners are coded as members of the party towards which they lean.

A similar figure for the 2018 models can be provided upon request.

To test our assumption that self-placement on the 7-point ideological scale is representative of policy preferences, we again compare these placements to responses to an issue battery. More detail is available in the supplemental appendix, but as with the other samples, the correlation is relatively strong (r = 0.81).

We also estimated an alternative model in which we predict whether or not a respondent reports having run for office in 2014 and controlling for whether the respondent reported having run for office in previous waves. The results are substantively identical.

In the supplemental appendix, we provide a set of placebo regressions predicting respondents’ probability of reporting other rare events, like being the victim of a crime and visiting the ER. As we would expect, both of these dependent variables are unrelated to perceptions of in-party distance.

Moreover, the offices that individuals sought aligns with what would be expected given responses to our nascent ambition questions; individuals were more interested in and more likely to run for lower-level offices (e.g. school board, city council).

This proposition is supported by Porter and Treul (2020), who find that inexperienced candidates have become more likely to win U.S. House primaries and that inexperienced candidates who do win are not significantly more extreme than the candidates they defeat.

Abramowitz, A. I. (2011). The disappearing center: Engaged citizens, polarization, and American democracy. Yale University Press.

Albertson, B., & Gadarian, S. K. (2015). Anxious politics: Democratic citizenship in a threatening world. Cambridge University Press.CrossRef

Aldrich, J. H., & Thomsen, D. M. (2017). Party, policy, and the ambition to run for higher office. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 42(2), 321–343. https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12161CrossRef

Ansolabehere, S., Rodden, J., & Snyder, J. M. (2008). The strength of issues: Using multiple measures to gauge preference stability, ideological constraint, and issue voting. American Political Science Review, 102(2), 215–232.CrossRef

Banks, A. J., White, I. K., & Mckenzie, B. D. (2019). Black politics: How anger influences the political actions blacks pursue to reduce racial inequality. Political Behavior, 41(4), 917–943. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9477-1CrossRef

Berinsky, A. J., Margolis, M. F., Sances, M. W., & Warshaw, C. (2019). Using screeners to measure respondent attention on self-administered surveys: Which items and how many? Political Science Research and Methods., 9, 430.CrossRef

Black, G. S. (1972). A theory of political ambition: Career choices and the role of structural incentives. American Political Science Review, 66(01), 144–159. https://doi.org/10.2307/1959283CrossRef

Brader, T. (2005). Striking a responsive chord: How political ads motivate and persuade voters by appealing to emotions. American Journal of Political Science, 49(2), 388–405. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2005.00130.xCrossRef

Canon, D. T. (1993). Sacrificial lambs or strategic politicians? Political amateurs in U.S. house elections. American Journal of Political Science, 37(4), 1119. https://doi.org/10.2307/2111546CrossRef

Carroll, S. J., & Sanbonmatsu, K. (2013). More women can run: Gender and pathways to the state legislatures. Oxford University Press.

Carver, C. (2003). Pleasure as a sign you can attend to something else: Placing positive feelings within a general model of affect. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 241–261.CrossRefPubMed

Carver, C. S. (2004). Negative affects deriving from the behavioral approach system. Emotion, 4(1), 3–22.

Claassen, C. (2016). Group entitlement, anger and participation in intergroup violence. British Journal of Political Science, 46(1), 127–148. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000712341400012XCrossRef

Claassen, C., Tucker, P., & Smith, S. S. (2015). Ideological labels in America. Political Behavior, 37(2), 253–278. https://doi.org/10.1007/S11109-014-9272-6/FIGURES/3CrossRef

Conroy, M., & Green, J. (2020). It takes a motive: Communal and agentic articulated interest and candidate emergence. Political Research Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920933668CrossRef

Deckman, M. (2016). Gender differences in the decision to run for school board. American Politics Research, 35(4), 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X07299196CrossRef

Dittmar, K. (2020). Urgency and ambition: The influence of political environment and emotion in spurring US women’s candidacies in 2018. European Journal of Politics and Gender, 3(1), 143–160.CrossRef

Dynes, A. M., Hassell, H. J. G., & Miles, M. R. (2019). The personality of the politically ambitious. Political Behavior, 41(2), 309–336. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9452-xCrossRef

Ellis, C., & Stimson, J. A. (2012). Ideology in America. Cambridge University Press.CrossRef

Fishel, J. (1969). Party, ideology, and the congressional challenger*. American Political Science Review, 63(4), 1213–1232. https://doi.org/10.2307/1955081CrossRef

Fishel, J. (1971). Ambition and the political vocation: Congressional challengers in American politics. Journal of Politics, 33(1), 25–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/2128531CrossRef

Fouirnaies, A., & Hall, A. B. (2020). How divisive primaries hurt parties: Evidence from near-runoffs in US legislatures. The Journal of Politics, 82(1), 43–56. https://doi.org/10.1086/705597CrossRef

Fox, R. L., & Lawless, J. L. (2005). To run or not to run for office: Explaining nascent political ambition. American Journal of Political Science, 49(3), 642–659. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00147.xCrossRef

Fox, R. L. & Lawless, J. L. (2014). Uncovering the origins of the gender gap in political ambition. American Political Science Review, 108(3), 499–519.

Frederick, A. (2013). Bringing narrative in: Race-gender storytelling, political ambition, and women’s paths to public office. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 34(2), 113–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2013.776379CrossRef

Fulton, S. A., Maestas, C. D., Maisel, L. S., & Stone, W. J. (2006). The sense of a woman: Gender, ambition, and the decision to run for congress. Political Research Quarterly, 59(2), 235–248.

Gadarian, S. K., & Albertson, B. (2014). Anxiety, immigration, and the search for information. Political Psychology, 35(2), 133–164. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12034CrossRef

Grossman, M., & Hopkins, D. A. (2016). Asymmetric politics. Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ACPROF:OSO/9780190626594.001.0001CrossRef

Gulzar, S. (2021). Who enters politics and why? Annual Review of Political Science, 24, 253–275.CrossRef

Hall, A. B. (2015). What happens when extremists win primaries? American Political Science Review, 109(1), 18–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055414000641CrossRef

Hall, A. B., & Thompson, D. M. (2018). Who punishes extremist nominees? Candidate ideology and turning out the base in us elections. American Political Science Review, 112(3), 509–524. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055418000023CrossRef

Hare, C., & Poole, K. T. (2014). The polarization of contemporary American politics. Polity. https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.10CrossRef

Hare, C., Armstrong, D. A., Bakker, R., Carroll, R., & Poole, K. T. (2015). Using Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey scaling to study citizens’ ideological preferences and perceptions. American Journal of Political Science, 59(3), 759–774. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12151CrossRef

Hare, C., Highton, B., & Jones, B. (2021). The space of American public opinion: Ideological dimensionality in models of political behavior. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3805016CrossRef

Harrebye, S., & Ejrnæs, A. (2015). European patterns of participation: How dissatisfaction motivates extra-parliamentary activities given the right institutional conditions. Comparative European Politics, 13(2), 151–174.CrossRef

Jenkins, S., Poloni-Staudinger, L. M., & Cherie Strachan, J. (2021). Linked fate, #metoo, and political participation. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 10, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2021.1908371CrossRef

Kanthak, K., & Woon, J. (2015). Women don’t run? Election aversion and candidate entry. American Journal of Political Science, 59(3), 595–612. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12158CrossRef

Kertzer, J. D. n.d. Re-assessing elite-public gaps in political behavior. American Journal of Political Science.

Krebs, T. B. (1999). The political and demographic predictors of candidate emergence in city council elections. Urban Affairs Review 35(2), 279–300.

Lawless, J. (2012). Becoming a candidate: Political ambition and the decision to run for office. Cambridge University Press.

Lasswell, H. (1948). The analysis of political behaviour: An empirical approach. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited.

Lawless, J. L., & Fox, R. L. (2015). Running from office: Why young Americans are turned off to politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lazarus, J. 2008. Why do experienced challengers do better than amateurs? Political Behavior.

Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2000). Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. Cognition & Emotion, 14(4), 473–493. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999300402763CrossRef

Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2001). Fear, anger, and risk. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 146–159.CrossRefPubMed

Little, T. H., & Moore, M. K. (2010). Been there, done that, but did it matter? Former state legislators in congress. Congress & the Presidency, 23(2), 103–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/07343469609507832CrossRef

Maestas, C. D., Sarah Fulton, L., Maisel, S., & Stone, W. J. (2006). When to risk it? Institutions, ambitions, and the decision to run for the U.S. house. American Political Science Review, 100(02), 195–208. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055406062101CrossRef

Maisel, L. S., & Stone, W. J. (1997). Determinants of candidate emergence in U. S. house elections: An exploratory study. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 22, 79–96.

Maisel, L. S., & Stone, W. J. (2014). Candidate emergence revisited: The lingering effects of recruitment, ambition, and successful prospects among house candidates. Political Science Quarterly, 129(3), 429–447.

Marcus, G. E., Neuman, W. R., & MacKuen, M. (2000). Affective intelligence and political judgment. University of Chicago Press.

Marien, S., Hooghe, M., & Quintelier, E. (2010). Inequalities in non-institutionalised forms of political participation: A multi-level analysis of 25 countries. Political Studies, 58(1), 187–213. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1467-9248.2009.00801.XCrossRef

Meyer, C. B. (2021). Amateur hour: The impact of background on the ideology of members of congress. Journal of Legislative Studies, 27(4), 595–607. https://doi.org/10.1080/13572334.2021.1896450CrossRef

Norris, P. (2011). Democratic deficit: Critical citizens revisted. Cambridge University Press.CrossRef

Popp, E., & Rudolph, T. J. (2011). A tale of two ideologies: Explaining public support for economic interventions. Journal of Politics, 73(3), 808–820. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381611000478/SUPPL_FILE/SUP001.DOCCrossRef

Porter, R. A, & Treul, S. (2020). Reevaluating experience in congressional primary elections.

Preece, J., & Stoddard, O. (2015). Why women don’t run: Experimental evidence on gender differences in political competition aversion. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 117, 296–308. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2015.04.019CrossRef

Prewitt, K. (1970). Political ambitions, volunteerism, and electoral accountability*. American Political Science Review, 64(1), 5–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/1955609CrossRef

Redlawsk, D. P., Civettini, A. J. W., & Lau, R. R. (2007). Affective intelligence and voting: Information processing and learning in a campaign. In W. R. Neuman, G. E. Marcus, M. MacKuen, & A. N. Crigler (Eds.), The affect effect: Dynamics of emotion in political thinking and behavior (pp. 152–179). Chicago University Press.CrossRef

Rouse, S. M., Hunt, C., & Essel, K. (2021). Growing tea with subnational roots: Tea party affiliation, factionalism, and GOP politics in state legislatures. American Politics Research, 50(2), 242–254. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211041150CrossRef

Ryan, T. J. (2012). What makes us click? Demonstrating incentives for angry discourse with digital-age field experiments. The Journal of Politics, 74(04), 1138–1152. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381612000540CrossRef

Schaffner, B. F., Ansolabehere, S., & Luks, S. (2019). CCES Common Content, 2018. Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZSBZ7K

Schiffer, A. J. (2000). I’m not that liberal: Explaining conservative democratic identification. Political Behavior, 22(4), 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010626029987CrossRef

Schlesinger, J. A. (1966). Ambition and politics: Political careers in the United States. Rand MacNally.

Schneider, M. C., Holman, M. R., Diekman, A. B., & McAndrew, T. (2016). Power, conflict, and community: How gendered views of political power influence women’s political ambition. Political Psychology, 37(4), 515–531. https://doi.org/10.1111/POPS.12268CrossRef

Scott, J. S., & Collins, J. (2020). Riled up about running for office: Examining the impact of emotions on political ambition. Politics, Groups, and Identities. https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2020.1757806CrossRef

Simas, E. N., Clifford, S., & Kirkland, J. H. (2019). How empathic concern fuels political polarization. American Political Science Review, 114(1), 258–269. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000534CrossRef

Simas, E. N., & Ozer, A. L. (2021). Polarization, candidate positioning, and political participation in the U.S. Electoral Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ELECTSTUD.2021.102370CrossRef

Thomsen, D. M. (2014). Ideological moderates won’t run: How party fit matters for partisan polarization in congress. The Journal of Politics, 76(03), 786–797. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381614000243CrossRef

Thomsen, D. M. (2015). Why so few (republican) women? Explaining the partisan imbalance of women in the U.S. congress. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 40(2), 295–323. https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12075CrossRef

Thomsen, D. M., & King, A. S. (2020). Women’s representation and the gendered pipeline to power. American Political Science Review. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000404CrossRef

Valentino, N. A., Brader, T., Groenendyk, E. W., Gregorowicz, K., & Hutchings, V. L. (2011). Election night’s alright for fighting: The role of emotions in political participation. Journal of Politics, 73, 156–170.

Weber, C. (2013). Emotions, campaigns, and political participation. Political Research Quarterly, 66(2), 414–428. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912912449697CrossRef

Wilson, J. Q. (1962). The amateur democrat. University of Chicago Press.

Title: Perceptions of Party Incongruence and Nascent Political Ambition
Authors: Justin H. Kirkland
Elizabeth N. Simas
Scott Clifford
Publication date: 21-10-2022
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Political Behavior / Issue 1/2024
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09829-8

Springer Professional

Abstract

Please log in to get access to your license.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Other articles of this Issue 1/2024

Remaining Neutral?: White Americans’ Reactions to Police Violence and Policing

Correction: Nail in the Coffin or Lifeline? Evaluating the Electoral Impact of COVID-19 on President Trump in the 2020 Election

Voter Bias and the Partisan Gender-Gap in Office

‘American’ is the Eye of the Beholder: American Identity, Racial Sorting, and Affective Polarization among White Americans

Partisanship, Electoral Autocracy, and Citizen Perceptions of Party System Polarization

Can Conservatives Be Persuaded? Framing Effects on Support for Universal Basic Income in the US

Premium Partner