Principled Moderation: Understanding Parties’ Support of Moderate Candidates

• Date: 01 May 2018
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12197
• Author: Hans J. G. Hassell

HANS J. G. HASSELL

Cornell College

Principled Moderation:

Understanding Parties’ Support of

Moderate Candidates

Recent scholarship has argued that parties strategically support more moderate,

and thus more electable, candidates. Using interviews with part y elites and new data on

the party support and the ideology of primary candidates for the US Senate, I show that

parties do support moderate candidates. However, using evidence from districts with

different levels of competitiveness and over time, I find that support of moderate

candidates appears not to be strategic. Rather, party support of moderate candidates

appears to be the result of the ideological preferences of party leadership rather a

strategic effort to win elections.

“[G]etting a gene ral-election cand idate who can win is the only t hing we care about.”

—Rob Collins, NRSCExecutive Director (Hunt 2013)

“I think that is a recipe for winning elections, if we find strong effective candidates

who can communicate a pro-growth conservative message—with a smile.” —TedCruz

(R-TX), NRSC Vice-Chairman in charge ofrecruitment (Goldmacher 2013)

As battles over federal campaign f‌inance have been fought over the

past two decades, they have changed the path that money follows in poli-

tics. One of the most notable changes to the campaign f‌inance system

since 2002 has been the movement of campaign dollars away from party

organizations as the result of the banning of soft money used to fund

“party-building activities.”

1

This change, coupled with a number of

Supreme Court decisions that have reduced regulations on outside

groups, has weakened party organizations relative to ideological outside

groups by limiting their ability to serve as a channel for campaign funds

(Barber 2016; La Raja and Wiltse 2011).

Although some have argued for increased campaign f‌inance regu-

lations (including further restrictions on parties) as a means to increase

democratic responsiveness and decrease political polarization (Drutman

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 43, 2, May 2018 343

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12197

V

C2017 Washington University in St. Louis

2016), others have argued that further disempowering party organiza-

tions will only increase ideological polarization. Central to this latter

argument is the assumption that party leaders and insiders are prag-

matists who are willing to sacrif‌ice ideological principles in order to

capture off‌ice and use the resources of formal party organizations

to do so (La Raja and Schaffner 2015; May 1973; McCarty 2015;

Persily 2015).

2

So far, however, the causal relationship between party strength and

ideological polarization has been derived either from examining the

downstream effects of variance in campaign f‌inance rules on state legis-

lative polarization, or from examining party support and outside group

support of incumbents in general elections. These tests present two prob-

lems. First, looking at downstream effects raises the possibility of

spurious correlation of campaign f‌inance rules with other unmeasured

factors that may also reduce polarization in the state and legislature.

There are many factors that inf‌luence the ideology of candidates who

run that may also be spuriously related to campaign f‌inance rules. For

instance, the personal and professional benef‌its to ideologically moderate

and extreme candidates decline as parties’ ideologies become more

polarized (and also change preferences for campaign f‌inance laws), and

changes in the costs of running can also change the incentives for moder-

ate candidates to run in the f‌irst place (Hall 2017; Thomsen 2014, 2017).

In short, state campaign f‌inance regulations are not exogenous, and it is

possible that the relationship between campaign f‌inance and polarization

is spurious. Moderate politics and more robust party politics may move

in tandem rather than being causally related.

Second, looking only at party donations in the general election to

incumbent politicians or at legislative behavior ignores the possibility

that this relationship might be explained by the fact that candidates fac-

ing general elections that are competitive also tend to be more moderate

because of the nature of the districts in which they are running. More-

over, because incumbents are already in off‌ice and rarely face a

challenger from within their own party (Boatright 2014), the party’s abil-

ity to make an ideological choice is available exclusively (with the

exception of a few high-prof‌ile cases) in primary elections without

incumbents.

3

Looking only at general elections ignores the important

role that parties play in primaries, which are the f‌irst step in getting

politicians into legislative off‌ice (Bawn et al. 2014; Dominguez 2011;

Hassell 2016).

Even if parties do support more moderate candidates in primary

elections, there are good reasons to believe that party preferences for

moderate candidates may be sincere rather than strategic. Recent

344 Hans J. G. Hassell