We interrupt our regularly scheduled statistical programming for some political science

Matthew Yglesias writes that, setting aside the merits of the issues, Republicans should not worry about potential electoral losses arising from a move to the right:

It’s not at all clear to [Yglesias] that the heart of [David Frum’s] criticism–that Republicans need to moderate in order to become electorally viable–is really true. The empirical evidence to me [Yglesias] suggests that our default view about the relationship between ideology and electability ought to be one of nihilism–any challenger can win provided the economy is doing poorly, and any incumbent can get re-elected provided things are going allright.

Yes, but not completely.

There is definitely some evidence that moderate candidates do better.

Steven Rosenstone discussed this in his classic 1984 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections, and others have looked into this as well. For example, my 2008 paper, “Should the Democrats move to the left on economic policy?.”

We also have some graphs in chapter 9 of Red State, Blue State, one showing the (estimated) benefits of moderation in congressional elections, and another graph for presidential elections. The short story is that moderation can get you something like 2 percentage points of the vote (or, if you want to look at it another way, extremism can lose you something like 2 percentage points).

This is all short-term analysis; it neither captures the long-term gains from being able to implement desired policy (if you happen to push extremist candidates and win the election) or long-term loss of credibility from being outside the mainstream. Nor does it consider asymmetries such as the potential appeal to rich donors of right-wing low-tax policies, or potential feedback effects such as left-wing policies that could lock in political advantages for unions. (I’m using “right-wing” and “left-wing” to place positions in the U.S. political context, not as value judgments.)

All that is worth studying. My point here is that, even within the political science world in which “the fundamentals” are what win elections, there still is room for ideology to make a difference. Not enough to turn around a landslide election, but enough to swing a close one or to make a potential landslide closer than it could’ve been.

P.S. I sent the above to Yglesias, who wrote:

But even here, right, you’re talking about correlations between outcomes and voters’ reporters of the perceived ideological fit between the candidates and their own views. It seems to me that the relationship between that and actually changing policy positions is likely to be pretty attenuated if it exists at all.

To which I replied:

Yes, but that works both ways.

On one hand, sure, it’s not so easy for a candidate or a party to shift its perceptions. Al Gore can talk about “the people vs. the powerful” (or whatever his slogan was) till he’s blue in the face, but people aren’t really gonna think he’s on the left until he does something real, like propose a trade war. Similarly, John McCain or Sarah Palin’s mavericky credentials aren’t gonna be enough for people to somehow think that they’re really on the side of the working class on economics. Or, to go back historically, Dwight Eisenhower had some pretty strong keep-the-government-off-your-backs free-enterprise rhetoric in the 1950s, but he was fundamentally an economic moderate and what evidence I’ve seen appears to show that, in the aggregate, voters realized this.

But now consider the other side of the coin. If the parties really do move, not just in rhetoric but in policy–for example, the Republicans trying to actually take health insurance away from people or cut their social security benefits or whatever–then, yes, I’d think that the voters’ perceptions of them would shift, and not in a good way at all. I agree that my survey analysis does not directly address the consequences of actual policy shifts but it’s my best guess.

And the congressional analysis that we report is based on policy–or, at least, on votes in Congress–and we do find that, on average, moderates do slightly better than extremists after controlling for partisanship of districts.

2 thoughts on “We interrupt our regularly scheduled statistical programming for some political science

  1. You're really blurring two different things. One is what can a candidate do in an election to shift the outcome and you are right on that one. But for a political party there are different factors at play in the long run which I think is what Frum is getting at. Unfortunately, you can't look at these on a simple left-right scale. The issues that can doom a party in the long run are issues that are not ideological. For example, the real problem that the Republican party faces is being trapped by its own success in becoming the party of resentful aging white males. It won't do the Republicans any good to work on immigration reform if they continue to act like they did during the Sotomayor confirmation. But they have pull stunts like that to keep their base riled up. They will soon be in a situation where they won't be able to win national elections, no matter what happens in the economy because they've managed to convince a whole bunch of people that they can't be Republicans.

  2. "We also have some graphs in chapter 9 of Red State, Blue State, one showing the (estimated) benefits of moderation in congressional elections, and another graph for presidential elections. The short story is that moderation can get you something like 2 percentage points of the vote (or, if you want to look at it another way, extremism can lose you something like 2 percentage points)."

    I wonder if, for congressional elections at least, there might be an inverse relationship between quality of candidates and extremism. I would assume these candidates are more likely to be nominated based multiple litmus tests (I don't think moderate positions would elicit equally strong responses). Without this kind of strong issue identification, moderates would need better political skills to get the nomination, skills that could easily buy them an extra couple of percentage points in the general election.

    I excluded presidential candidates because I don't think issue identification alone could get a low-wattage candidate a major party nomination (of course, the GOP might force me to revise that in 2012)

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