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Long-Term Consequences of Election Results

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2015

Anthony Fowler  and
Andrew B. Hall
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Abstract

Voters in US elections receive markedly different representation depending on which candidate they elect, and because of incumbent advantages, the effects of this choice persist for many years. What are the long-term consequences of these two phenomena? Combining electoral and legislative roll-call data in a dynamic regression discontinuity design, this study assesses the long-term consequences of election results for representation. Across the US House, the US Senate and state legislatures, the effects of ‘coin-flip’ elections persist for at least a decade in all settings, and for as long as three decades in some. Further results suggest that elected officials do not adapt their roll-call voting to their districts’ preferences over time, and that voters do not systematically respond by replacing incumbents.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 351 - 372
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago (email: [email protected]); Department of Political Science, Stanford University (email: [email protected]). We thank Steve Ansolabehere, David Broockman, Devin Caughey, Ryan Enos, Andrew Gelman, Gabe Lenz, Michele Margolis, Max Palmer, Jim Snyder, and seminar participants at Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Ohio State and Pittsburgh for helpful feedback. Data replication sets are available at http://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS and online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123415000241.

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Supplementary material: Link

Fowler and Hall Dataset

Dataset

http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/29498
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Fowler and Hall supplementary material S1

Appendix

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