c american political science association 2015 what ...rogowski, kay schlozman, ken shepsle, and jim...

American Political Science Review Vol. 109, No. 1 February 2015

doi:10.1017/S0003055414000641 c© American Political Science Association 2015

What Happens When Extremists Win Primaries?ANDREW B. HALL Harvard University

This article studies the interplay of U.S. primary and general elections. I examine how the nominationof an extremist changes general-election outcomes and legislative behavior in the U.S. House,1980–2010, using a regression discontinuity design in primary elections. When an extremist—as measured by primary-election campaign receipt patterns—wins a “coin-flip” election over a moremoderate candidate, the party’s general-election vote share decreases on average by approximately 9–13 percentage points, and the probability that the party wins the seat decreases by 35–54 percentagepoints. This electoral penalty is so large that nominating the more extreme primary candidate causesthe district’s subsequent roll-call representation to reverse, on average, becoming more liberal when anextreme Republican is nominated and more conservative when an extreme Democrat is nominated.Overall, the findings show how general-election voters act as a moderating filter in response to primarynominations.

...getting a general-election candidate who can win is theonly thing we care about.1

—Rob Collins, National RepublicanSenatorial Committee

The road to hell is paved with electable candidates.2

—Joseph Ashby, conservative blogger

INTRODUCTION

W ith the rise of the Tea Party and the phe-nomenon of moderate incumbents “gettingprimaried,” political scientists and journalistsalike have placed added scrutiny on the role of pri-mary elections in our system of representation.3 Asthe first stage of candidate selection, primaries playan important role in choosing the people who will

Andrew Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Harvard UniversityDepartment of Government and an affiliate of the Institutefor Quantitative Social Science ([email protected], http://www.andrewbenjaminhall.com).

For comments and suggestions the author thanks David Broock-man, Dan Carpenter, Lee Drutman, Ryan Enos, James Feigen-baum, Jon Fiva, Alexander Fouirnaies, Anthony Fowler, Alisa Hall,Dana Higgins, Gary King, John Marshall, Stephen Pettigrew, JonRogowski, Kay Schlozman, Ken Shepsle, and Jim Snyder as well asparticipants of the Harvard American Politics Research Workshop,the MIT Political Economy Breakfast Workshop, and the HarrisSchool of Public Policy summer reading group. The author alsothanks participants of seminars at the following institutions: Califor-nia Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Emory Uni-versity, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Univer-sity, New York University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, theUniversity of Rochester, London School of Economics, DartmouthCollege, Princeton University, and the University of California, SanDiego. For data the author also thanks Jim Snyder. All remainingerrors are the sole responsibility of the author.1 http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/05/21321519-in-shift-gop-vows-to-fight-for-more-electable-candidates-in-senate-primaries?lite2 http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/the road to hell ispaved with electable candidates.html3 For example, a growing literature studies the link (or nonlink)between primary-election type (open vs. closed, etc.) and polariza-tion (Gerber and Morton 1998; Hirano et al. 2010; McGhee et al.2014; Rogowski 2013). For an overview of “getting primaried” seeBoatright (2013).

go on to represent voters in Congress. Primary vot-ers exhibit a marked preference for more ideologicallyextreme candidates (Brady, Han, and Pope 2007; Halland Snyder 2013), but general-election voters appear toprefer moderates (Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart2001; Burden 2004; Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan2002; Erikson and Wright 2000). As a stylized fact,primary voters who prefer extreme candidates are thusthought to face a tradeoff between voting for a candi-date closer to their views, but less likely to win office,and a candidate farther from their views but perhapsmore “electable.” In this article, I study this tradeoffand its consequences for elections and representationin Congress.

How much does the party’s electoral outlook suf-fer in a district where its primary voters nominate amore extreme candidate, relative to the counterfactualin which the same district nominates a more moder-ate candidate? If a district nominates a more extremecandidate, how much does the district’s roll-call vot-ing in the next Congress change relative to this samecounterfactual—taking into account both the mannerin which the extremist would vote and the probabil-ity that the extremist wins office? To answer thesequestions, I combine a scaling technique for estimatingcandidate positions based on campaign contributionswith a regression discontinuity design in U.S. Houseprimary elections, 1980–2010. This strategy allows meto obtain direct counterfactual comparisons betweendistricts with an extreme or more moderate nomineewithout using assumptions to place districts and candi-dates on a single ideological scale and without assertingthe exogeneity of differences in candidate positions.

I find that the “as-if” random nomination of theextremist candidate causes a substantial decrease inthe party’s vote share and probability of victory in thegeneral election. These decreases are large enough tooffset the more extreme roll-call voting that extremistcandidates offer to primary voters, on average. Theyare also large enough to offset any other roll-call ef-fects nominating extremists might have, e.g., inducingincumbents to strategically adopt positions like thoseof extremists. Indeed, the nomination of the more ex-treme candidate to the general election produces a re-versal in observed roll-call voting for the district in the

18

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003055414000641mailto:[email protected]://www.andrewbenjaminhall.comhttp://www.andrewbenjaminhall.comhttp://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/05/21321519-in-shift-gop-vows-to-fight-for-more-electable-candidates-in-senate-primaries{?}litehttp://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/05/21321519-in-shift-gop-vows-to-fight-for-more-electable-candidates-in-senate-primaries{?}litehttp://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/05/21321519-in-shift-gop-vows-to-fight-for-more-electable-candidates-in-senate-primaries{?}litehttp://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/the_road_to_hell_is_paved_with_electable_candidates.htmlhttp://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/the_road_to_hell_is_paved_with_electable_candidates.html

American Political Science Review Vol. 109, No. 1

next Congress, on average; that is to say, when a moreextreme Democrat is nominated, the district’s roll-callvoting in the next Congress becomes more conserva-tive, and vice versa when a more extreme Republican isnominated. In districts that are safe for the party, thisreversal disappears. Because even extreme nomineesare more likely to win office anyway in safe districts,the effect on downstream roll-call behavior washesout. The tradeoff voters face is therefore variable: incompetitive districts they ought to support more mod-erate primary candidates if they care about winningthe office, but in safer districts they have more slack tosupport extremists.4

Overall, however, the nomination of more extremecandidates causes severe damage to the party’s elec-toral prospects. The nomination of an extremist todaymakes the party much more likely to lose the generalelection today, and because of the incumbency advan-tage, the opposing party is much more likely to winthe election again two years later, and four years later,and on. As I show, the nomination of the extremistcontinues to cause an equally large electoral penalty asfar as eight years down the line—the farthest increasesin voter information because of redistricting. The deci-sions that primary voters make in the current electioncycle echo many years later.

The article is organized as follows. In the next sec-tion, I discuss the theoretical perspectives and expec-tations motivating the research. Following that, in thethird section I provide an overview of the data andempirical strategy used to analyze primary and gen-eral elections in the U.S. House, 1980–2010. In thefourth section, I analyze general-election outcomes. Inthe fifth section, I examine the effect as I sharpen thecontrast between extreme and more moderate primarycandidates. In the sixth section, I analyze the overalleffects on legislative behavior and explore the varyingtradeoff that primary voters face between “electabil-ity” and ideology. In the seventh section, I study thelong-term effects of extreme nominees, showing howthe electoral penalty (and its accompanying roll-calleffect) persists even four terms—eight years—later. Inthe eighth section, I briefly consider possible causalmechanisms. Finally, I conclude by discussing the im-plications of the findings.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

Primaries are a key part of the American electoral sys-tem. By selecting especially partisan candidates, pri-maries may contribute to the large and growing po-

4 There may be many other reasons why voters choose to nominateextremists or moderates. For example, if they prefer extremists andthey only care about electing a moderate if their representative isgoing to be pivotal in the legislature (e.g., Krehbiel 1998), then itcould be rational for primary voters to nominate extremists almostall of the time since only one legislator, the median, will be pivotal.While interesting, understanding the precise motivations of primaryvoters is beyond the scope of the present study.

larization of U.S. legislatures.5 This growth has beenespecially marked in recent elections, including inthose studied in this article, namely, U.S. House elec-tions, 1980–2010. In primaries like these, as the epi-graph hinted, parties and their voters must weigh is-sues of party brand and ideological “purity” against“electability”—the likelihood of a potential nomineewinning the general election.6 To understand the possi-ble consequences of primary-election results, we mustfirst understand the electoral costs or gains of nomi-nating more or less ideologically extreme candidates.Only then can we assess the potential tradeoffs at playduring the primary election.

While primary candidates may be more or less ex-treme, we have reasons to believe that the candidatesthat enter primaries are already polarized. Within aprimary, some candidates will be farther to the right orleft than others, but even the right-most Democrat islikely to be quite left of the left-most Republican in theopposite primary (see for example Bafumi and Herron2010). As a result I will refer throughout the articleto “relative moderates” and “extremists”—candidatesin a primary who are moderate or extreme relativeto their primary opponents, but who likely lie all toone side of the district’s median voter. Classifying pri-mary candidates in this way clarifies our expectationsabout the consequences of nominating more or lessextreme candidates. Even if general-election votersreward nominees who are moderate relative to theirprimary opponents, polarization may still be high ifthe pool of candidates as a whole is quite polarized.7Thus in studying the effects of nominating extremistswe will learn about one important potential mecha-nism through which primaries can affect polarization—through the selection of candidates to stand in the gen-eral election—but we must be aware that primariescan still affect polarization in other ways, e.g., throughaffecting the pool of candidates that enter primary elec-tions in the first place.

Considering the overall consequences of nominat-ing extremists is important for the reasons above, butso, too, is studying the way these consequences varyacross districts. We might suspect, for example, thatany reaction of general-election voters will be mutedin especially partisan districts. In these “safe” districts,general-election voters may be likely to elect theirparty’s nominee regardless of her ideological positionrelative to her primary opponents. This is an importantsource of variation because many U.S. House districtsare safe, by typical standards. In the 2008 presidential

5 For information on the size and growth of polarization, see forexample McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal (2006) as well as updatedanalyses at http://www.voteview.com.6 A formal theoretical literature also studies issues related to thistradeoff (e.g., Aranson and Ordeshook 1972; Coleman 1971; Owenand Grofman 2006).7 What is more, the institution of primary elections could play a rolein fostering polarization, even if moderates enjoy a large general-election advantage, if they encourage incumbents to adopt strate-gic positions to satisfy their partisan bases in anticipation of futureprimary elections. However, Hirano et al. (2010) investigates theintroduction of primaries in seven U.S. states and finds no evidencethat they increase polarization.

19

http://www.voteview.com

What Happens When Extremists Win Primaries? February 2015

election (the last such election occurring within theperiod of study), for example, almost exactly half ofall Congressional districts had a Democratic presiden-tial vote share above 0.6 or below 0.4. Primaries arelikely to play a different role in these districts than inthe other half of the districts which are more competi-tive. In addition to the overall on-average effect of ex-tremist nominations—our single most important quan-tity of interest—we should therefore also investigatevariation in the effect across safe and competitive dis-tricts in order to gain further understanding of whereand when extremists are punished more or less in thegeneral election.

The effect might vary, also, with the presence of anincumbent candidate. Incumbents possess a large elec-toral advantage (e.g., Erikson 1971; Gelman and King1990) which may give them leeway to take differentpositions. If incumbents are more likely to be rela-tively moderate primary candidates, then any penaltyto candidates labeled more “extreme” might actuallybe driven by the removal of the incumbent when theextremist wins nomination and not by any other charac-teristic of the more extreme candidate. This is one rea-son to investigate the effect in open-seat races, whereneither primary has an incumbent running. A secondreason is that most incumbents first enter office throughopen-seat races. Given the well-known persistence ofincumbents once in office, open-seat primaries are es-pecially important for selecting candidates.

Short-term electoral outcomes are not the only con-sequence of nominating extremists in primary elec-tions, either. Even if an extremist performs poorly inthe general election, her nomination might be valu-able to her supporters in other ways. The podiumthat the general-election campaign offers might allowan extremist to trumpet her views and incite supportfor future election cycles, and the views she espousesmight make their way into the legislature even if she,herself, does not. This could occur directly throughincreased demand for her supported policies or indi-rectly through the threat her candidacy signals to theincumbent anticipating future elections (see for exam-ple Sulkin 2005). For these reasons it is important tostudy not just the immediate electoral consequencesof nominating more or less extreme candidates, butalso the effects of nominating relatively extreme ormoderate candidates on downstream roll-call voting.

In similar ways, extremist nominees might also affectdownstream election results. On one side, advocatesand others often point to the “galvanizing” effect ofextremist nominations. Even if the extreme nomineeloses in the general, the logic goes, she can succeedin energizing the party’s base, which can enhance theparty’s electoral fortunes the next time around. Afterlosing her Senate election, Tea-Party candidate Chris-tine O’Donnell, for example, declared that “Our voiceswere heard and we’re not going to be quiet now.... Thisis just the beginning.”8

8 http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2010/1102/Lesson-from-Christine-O-Donnell-defeat-where-tea-party-overreached

On the other side is the cold, hard logic of the in-cumbency advantage. Incumbents in the U.S. Houseenjoy enormously high reelection rates (e.g., Jacobson2012), and the “as-if” random assignment of incum-bency status conveys a roughly 40 percentage-pointincrease in the probability the party retains the seatin the next election cycle (Lee 2008). Once a partycontrols a seat, it is unlikely to give it up for a longtime. Fowler and Hall (2013), for example, show thatthe election of a Democrat over a Republican in acoin-flip election today makes the district more likelyto still be represented by a Democrat 16 years later.The decision to nominate the extremist in the currentprimary election thus might boost the opposing party’sdownstream electoral outcomes if it makes that partymore likely to gain incumbency status today.

Finally, we can learn more about the candidate selec-tion process, and can speak to formal models of theseprocesses, by studying the mechanisms underlying theeffects of extremist nominations. The electoral effectsof nominating extremists might result from their ideo-logical positioning, as implied by spatial models of elec-toral processes (Downs 1957), or they might result fromother differences between the two types of nominees.Probabilistic voting models often predict, for example,that candidates will strategically take more extremepositions when they are disadvantaged on a separate di-mension of valence such as quality (e.g., Ansolabehereand Snyder 2000; Aragones and Palfrey 2002; Grose-close 2001). Models of these forms also suggest com-parative statics in which increases in the informationabout candidate positions lead to larger disadvantagesfor extreme positions, suggesting another dimension ofvariation in the response to extremist nominees.

In this section, I have explained why consideringthe effects of extremist nominations is important andI have situated the study in the context of legislativepolarization. I have also described how I operationalize“extremist” primary candidates—those who are ideo-logically extreme relative to their primary opponents—and offered some important theoretical sources of vari-ation in the consequences of nominating these rela-tively extreme candidates. I have also laid out theo-retical ideas for testable mechanisms underlying theresponse to extremist nominees. With these in mind,I now proceed to describe the details of the empiricalapproach and its results.

EMPIRICAL APPROACH

Primary-Election Campaign ContributionsPredict Candidate Ideology

For information on classifying candidates as extrem-ists, I rely on the estimated ideological positionsof U.S. House primary candidates from Hall andSnyder (2013), which covers the years 1980–2010.9Technical details on the method are available in

9 I use the scalings that employ a cutoff of 10 on the number ofunique contributions a donor must make in order to enter the scalingprocedure.

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http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2010/1102/Lesson-from-Christine-O-Donnell-defeat-where-tea-party-overreachedhttp://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2010/1102/Lesson-from-Christine-O-Donnell-defeat-where-tea-party-overreachedhttp://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2010/1102/Lesson-from-Christine-O-Donnell-defeat-where-tea-party-overreached


FIGURE 1. Estimated Ideology of Primary Candidates and Observed Roll-Call Behavior

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Notes: For primary candidates who go on to win the general election, the contribution-based estimate of their ideology accords wellwith how they vote on roll calls. Points labeled “D” represent Democratic incumbents; those labeled “R” are for Republican incumbents.

Appendix B. Candidates are scaled on the basisof their primary-election campaign receipts,10 imput-ing each candidate’s ideological position from thecontribution-weighted average estimated positions ofher donors.11 The donors’ positions are estimated asthe contribution-weighted average DW-NOMINATEscore (Poole and Rosenthal 1985) of incumbents theyhave donated to, but excluding donations to candi-date i when computing the score for each candidate i.The technique is similar to those employed in, for ex-ample, Bonica (2013) and McCarty, Poole, and Rosen-thal (2006). I choose this technique over other op-tions only because it produces scalings that are spe-cific to the primary election. Using general-electioncontributions—though statistically efficient for manyother purposes—would introduce post-treatment biasin the present setting since the “treatment,” the nomi-nation of the extremist, occurs prior to the start of thegeneral-election campaign.

To validate this scaling technique in the sample usedfor analysis, Figure 1 compares it to observed DW-NOMINATE scores for primary candidates who go onto win the general election. The donor-based scaling of

10 Hall and Snyder (2013) removes all contributions classified forthe general election, according to the FEC’s disclosure requirements,and also removes contributions received after the date of the primaryelection.11 In practice, weighting these donations by dollar size makes littledifference in the scalings.

candidates correlates with observed DW-NOMINATEscores at 0.90.12 This is consistent with a fuller battery ofvalidation tests presented in Hall and Snyder (2013).As a result, there is good reason to believe that theestimated primary candidate positions are reflective oftheir actual ideological positioning. Importantly, anyrandom error in these estimated positions biases thesubsequent analysis against finding differences in out-comes for more and less extreme candidates.13

In primary races with two major candidates, the raceis tentatively identified as being between an extremistand a relatively moderate candidate if the difference

12 The within-party correlations are 0.66 for Democrats and 0.56for Republicans. These within-party correlations are very similar tothose in Bonica (2013), which reports within-party correlations withDW-NOMINATE of 0.66 for Democrats and 0.64 for Republicans,analyzing only sitting incumbents. The within correlation for Repub-licans is slightly lower in the current sample, probably because thecomparison includes some challengers who go on to be incumbentslater. Bonica (2013) reports a within-party correlation of 0.49 forthese Republican candidates.13 Nonrandom error from strategic donating, on the other hand,would be a serious problem for resulting estimates. Fortunately thereare several reasons to suspect this is not an issue. First, scalings fromcontributions are robust to choices over the types of donors includedin the sample (Bonica 2014), and the scalings are highly predictiveof actual roll-call voting. In the Appendix, I re-estimate the mainresults using a completely separate measure of candidate ideologythat takes advantage of primary races between state legislators whohave roll-call records from their time in office. Point estimates arehighly similar using this alternate strategy.

21


TABLE 1. Number of Primary Elections In Sample, By Type: U.S. House, 1980–2010

Incumbent Presence Safe For Party Competitive Safe For Other Party Total

No incumbents (open seat) 100 162 25 287Open primary, incumbent in other party 15 61 3 79Incumbent in primary, other primary open 55 61 3 119Incumbents in both primaries 5 12 2 19Total 175 296 33 504

Note: The majority of races occur in open seats either in competitive districts or districts that are safe for the party.

between their estimated ideological positions is at orabove the median in the distribution of ideologicaldistances between the top two candidates in all con-tested primary elections. This median distance trans-lates to roughly one-third the distance on the DW-NOMINATE scale between the medians of the twoparties in the 112th Congress, and it is approximatelytwo to three times as large as the average distancebetween representatives and their own party’s me-dian.14 These are therefore races between candidateswho offer meaningfully different platforms within theumbrella of their party.

Using a strong cutoff like this has two potential ad-vantages. First, it may reduce the number of incorrectmoderate/extreme labels caused by measurement er-ror in the donor scores. Second, it ensures that we arefocusing on strong comparisons in which the two pri-mary candidates are starkly different.15 After present-ing main results, I address the use of this cutoff, showinghow the results are robust to alternate definitions and,moreover, that changes in the estimates as the cutoff ischanged accord with theoretical predictions—namely,that the effect grows in magnitude as the cutoff be-comes more extreme (as the contrast between the twocandidates sharpens).16

Dataset Covers U.S. House Elections,1980–2010

Data on U.S. House primary and general elections arecompiled from primary sources by Ansolabehere et al.

14 These calculations are performed as follows. First, I take the me-dian primary-election distance between candidates, which is roughly0.109. To convert this number to the DW-NOMINATE scale, I plugit in as X in a regression predicting DW-NOMINATE based onthe contribution-based scaling. I then compare this converted num-ber (0.32) to the observed difference in party medians in the 112thCongress (1.072), and the observed mean differences between eachrepresentative and his or her party’s median (0.14 for the Republi-cans and 0.1 for the Democrats).15 Focusing on this subset of contested primaries makes the esti-mated results “local” to these kinds of races. It is possible that theseraces differ from other contested primaries. For example, greaterideological distance between the candidates may depress turnout inthe primary (Rogowski 2014). However, these are still precisely theraces we want to focus on to understand the differing consequencesof choosing between a truly extreme candidate and a more moderatecandidate.16 In addition, an interactive specification which avoids the use ofthe cutoff produces substantively similar findings. See Appendix A,Table A.6.

(2010). I focus on elections in the years 1980–2010 tomatch the data on candidate positions. I keep all pri-mary elections in which at least two candidates havedonor scores.17 Among these elections, I analyze thetwo candidates with the top two vote totals, and Icalculate each candidate’s share of the top two votetotals.18 Full summary statistics are available in Ap-pendix A in Table A.1.

What Kind of Elections Enter the Sample?

The analysis uses a special subset of all primaryelections—namely, contested primaries with two “vi-able” candidates who raise enough money to allow forreliable ideological scaling. Investigating the character-istics of this sample is important for understanding andinterpreting the results.

Table 1 breaks down the primary elections that enterthe sample according to the presence of incumbentsand the safety of the district for the party holding theprimary. Districts are defined as “safe” if the party’sshare of the presidential two-party normal vote, cal-culated as the average presidential vote share for theredistricting period, is above 60%.19 As the first rowshows, the majority of observations (287 of the 504total) occur in primaries for races with no incumbentspresent, i.e., no incumbents in either party’s primary. Ofthese 287 races, roughly 35% occur in districts that aresafe for the party holding the primary, with the lion’sshare of the remainder occurring in “competitive” dis-tricts, those where the party’s presidential normal voteis below 60% (or, equivalently, those where the Demo-cratic presidential normal vote is between 40% and60%).

Looking across the columns, we also see that themajority of primary races in the sample occur eitherin districts safe for the party (175 total) or in compet-itive districts (296). It is unusual for a primary elec-tion that occurs in a district safe for the other party toenter the sample. This is probably because these pri-maries are unlikely to yield viable candidates, and thusare unlikely to be competitive or to feature sufficient

17 There are 504 such elections in the dataset.18 For the few cases of runoff primaries, I include the candidates andvote shares of the two-candidate runoff election.19 I use the presidential vote share to avoid concerns of post-treatment bias. In practice, however, results are highly similar usingthe district’s vote share for Congress to calculate the normal vote.

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contribution behavior to scale candidates. In the Ap-pendix, I compare these characteristics to those of thelarger universe of all primary elections. The districtsthat enter the sample are no different in terms of theirpartisanship, but they are disproportionately open-seatraces.

Estimation Strategy: RegressionDiscontinuity Design in Primary Elections

I estimate equations of the form

Yipt = β0 + β1Extremist Primary Win ipt+ f (Vipt) + �ipt, (1)

where Extremist Primary Win it is an indicator vari-able for the extremist winning party p’s primary indistrict i at time t. Thus β1 is the quantity of interest,the RDD estimator for causal effects from the “as-if” random assignment of an extremist in the generalelection.20 The variable Yipt stands in for three mainoutcome variables: party vote share, party victory, andthe DW-NOMINATE score of the winning general-election candidate in the ensuing Congress. The termf (Vipt) represents a flexible function of the runningvariable, the extremist candidate’s vote-share winningmargin, i.e., the extremist candidate’s share of thetop two candidates’ vote less 0.5, which determinestreatment status. I present estimates using a varietyof specifications for f as well as at different band-widths, following the usual RDD practices (Imbensand Lemieux 2008). Typically, f either contains a high-order polynomial of the running variable or a locallinear specification estimated separately on each sideof the discontinuity.21

The key identifying assumption of the RDD is thatpotential outcomes are smooth across the discontinuity,i.e., that districts where the relatively moderate primarycandidate barely wins (or, equivalently, those wherethe extremist candidate barely loses) are in the limitcomparable to those in which the relative moderatebarely loses (or, equivalently, those where the extrem-ist candidate barely wins). Assumptions of “no sorting”like this have been challenged in the context of general-election U.S. House races (Caughey and Sekhon 2011;

20 The use of the RDD to obtain exogenous variation in candidatetypes rather than party (Democrat vs. Republican) is similar in spiritto several previous studies. Broockman (2009) uses such a designto study the effects of copartisan incumbency in Congress on presi-dential elections returns. Anastasopoulos (2014), Brollo and Troiano(2012), Broockman (2014), and Ferreira and Gyourko (2014) exam-ine the effects of the “as-if” random assignment of female vs. malecandidates to office.21 In the current setting, the treatment indicator pools over a va-riety of intensities of treatment because some extremists are far-ther from their moderate opponents (or vice versa), while otherraces feature relatively close-by candidates. To ensure this doesnot affect estimates, I also run models controlling for distit ≡|Moderate Donor Score it − Extremist Donor Score it| and inter-acting this with the treatment indicator. See Table A.6 in Ap-pendix A.

Grimmer et al. 2012; Snyder 2005), but across numer-ous other electoral contexts are found to be highlyplausible (Eggers et al. N.d.).

For primary elections, this assumption is extremelyplausible; to sort, candidates would need to have pre-cise information about the expected outcome of pri-mary elections, and would need to exert extra effortonly after finding out that the election was going to beextremely close.22 Given the difficulty even general-election campaigns have in predicting votes (Enos andHersh N.d.), and the typical “running scared” men-tality that leads candidates to pull out all the stops(King 1997), this seems unlikely. In addition, I validatethe assumption in the Appendix by presenting balancetests using the same samples and specifications as themain results in the article. No evidence of sorting isfound.23

In addition to testing for sorting, it is also impor-tant to show that the RDD estimate is not sensitive tochoices over the size of the bandwidth and the func-tional form of the running variable’s specification. Inthe Appendix, I replicate the main analysis on general-election outcomes at a large variety of bandwidths andspecifications and show that the resulting estimatesconsistently produce the same conclusion.

One final aspect of the estimation strategy deservesmention. Like any comparison across candidate types,the RDD I employ measures the total effect of assign-ing the extremist vs. the relatively moderate candidateto the general election. This includes the component ofthe overall effect that comes from the change in ideol-ogy, but also includes any other factors that differ be-tween the two types of candidates.24 To understand theconsequences of primary voters’ decision to nominateone kind of candidate or the other, though, we want toinclude all of the differences between the two types ofcandidates, not only their ideological differences. Forthe present analysis, then, this feature of the estima-tion strategy is suitable. However, it is also valuable tounderstand why the observed effects occur. To makeprogress in this direction, I examine heterogeneity inthe effect across contexts as well as characteristics ofthe more moderate and more extreme bare-winnersafter presenting the main results.

22 Alternatively, barely winning extremists might have some abilityto alter vote totals after the election in a way that barely losingextremists cannot. This seems even less likely.23 Of 24 balance tests run, only 1 (4%) reject the null of no differ-ence. This single rejection is for one specification of lagged electoralvictory, but does not persist across specifications for this variable.See Appendix A for more details.24 The estimate thus includes any dynamics occurring after nomina-tion, including any changes in the nominee’s platform or that of theopposing party’s candidate. Because of the “as-if” randomization,however, any such dynamics are consequences of the treatment, andthus mechanisms, rather than sources of bias for the estimates. It isnot necessary to assume anything about whether candidates changepositions from the primary to the general in order for the RDDestimates to be unbiased, but considering such factors is importantfor explaining the results. Given the well-known failure of the medianvoter theorem in House campaigns (e.g., Ansolabehere, Snyder, andStewart 2001), it seems likely that the results are driven more byvoters responding to fixed characteristics of the candidates than todifferential changes in general-election positioning by extremist vs.moderate nominees.

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FIGURE 2. General-Election Vote Share AfterClose Primary Elections Between Moderatesand Extremists: U.S. House, 1980–2010

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Notes: The close election of the more extreme primary candi-date causes a decrease in general-election vote share for theparty. Large black points are averages in 0.02 point bins of therelatively extreme candidate’s winning margin; small gray pointsare raw data. Lines are OLS fits from raw data estimated sepa-rately on each side of threshold. Average general-election voteshares are above 0.5 on both sides of the discontinuity becausecontested primaries are more likely to occur in districts wherethe normal vote is tilted towards the party.

RESULTS: EXTREMIST NOMINEESPERFORM WORSE IN THE GENERALELECTION

Figure 2 plots the discontinuity in the data. As canbe seen, when the extremist goes from barely losingthe primary to barely winning it (horizontal axis), theparty’s general-election vote share decreases notice-ably. Among “coin-flip” primary elections between arelative moderate and an extremist, the nomination ofthe extremist appears to cause a large decrease in theparty’s general-election vote share.

Table 2 presents the estimates from Equation 1 usinggeneral-election vote share and victory as the outcomevariables, with three specifications for each. In the firstand fourth columns, I use a 5% bandwidth and a local-linear specification of the forcing variable, estimatedseparately on each side of the discontinuity. In the sec-ond and fifth columns, I use all the data and includea cubic specification of the running variable. In thethird and sixth columns, I employ the “optimal band-width” procedure from Imbens and Kalyanaraman(2012).25

25 Because sample sizes are relatively small, especially at small band-widths, I report the maximum of robust and conventional standard er-rors for the local linear and cubic specifications (Angrist and Pischke

FIGURE 3. Effects of Nominating theExtremist Candidate on General ElectionVictory Across Primary Types

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Overall: −.37

Open Elections: −.49

Safe Districts For Party: −.08

Notes: The penalty to extremists is largest in primaries foropen-seat general election races, and close to zero in primariesfor districts that are safe for the party. Estimates are calculatedaccording to Equation 1, using the full data and a third-orderpolynomial of the running variable. Horizontal lines are 95%confidence intervals from robust standard errors.

As the table shows, the “as-if” random assignmentof the extremist to the general causes approximatelya 8–12 percentage-point decrease in the party’s shareof the general-election vote, and a 35–53 percentage-point decrease in its probability of victory. These arelarge effects.

These estimates average over the different types ofprimaries, including those for open-seat races as well asincumbent-held seats and districts that are safe, com-petitive, or unsafe for the party holding the primary.As discussed in the “Theoretical Perspectives” section,investigating the variance in the effect across these dis-trict types is important for interpreting it. In Figure 3,I plot RDD estimates of the effect of nominating theextremist on the probability the party wins the generalelection, estimated separately for three relevant setsof elections. For comparison, the first estimate, labeled“Overall,” corresponds to the overall estimate from thefifth column in Table 2.

The second estimate uses only open elections, i.e.,elections with no incumbent present in either primary.For these elections the effect is approximately 12 per-centage points larger in magnitude than the overall

2009). I report the standard errors from Imbens and Kalyanaraman(2012), as reported by the procedure, for the optimal bandwidthspecifications.

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TABLE 2. RDD Estimates of the Effect of Nominating an Extreme Candidate on General ElectionVote Share, U.S. House 1980–2010

Vote Share Vote Share Vote Share Victory Victory VictoryGeneral General General General General GeneralElection Election Election Election Election Election

Extremist win − 0.12 − 0.10 − 0.08 − 0.53 − 0.37 − 0.35(0.06) (0.03) [0.04] (0.22) (0.11) [0.17]

N 83 252 135 83 252 148RDD bandwidth 5 – 8.51 5 – 9.68Specification Local linear Cubic IK Local linear Cubic IK

Notes: Maximum of robust and conventional standard errors in parentheses. Columns 3 and 6 use optimal bandwidth technique fromImbens and Kalyanaraman, implemented using rdob in Stata. Standard errors from this procedure in brackets.

estimate.26 Open-seat races appear to be doing most ofthe work in driving the observed penalty to extremists,either directly because these races feature no incum-bents or because of other factors that differ across dis-tricts that tend to have open-seat races and those thatdo not. Whatever the reason, this large effect showsthat incumbents, or the loss of the incumbency advan-tage when relatively moderate incumbents lose to moreextreme candidates, cannot explain the findings.27

Finally, the third estimate uses only primaries thatoccur in districts that are safe for the party holding theprimary, i.e., districts where the presidential normalvote is at or above 60% for the party. Here we findalmost no penalty to nominating the extremist, per-haps because the partisan voters in the district supportwhomever the party nominates.28 As mentioned in thetheoretical section, a large number of districts are safefor one party or the other in U.S. House elections. Thetradeoff between “electable” and “ideologically pure”candidates is quite different in these districts, as thisheterogeneity in the effect shows.

This section has established the electoral penalty thatthe party faces when it is “as-if” randomly assignedan extremist candidate for the general election. Thispenalty is large, probability of victory and it is espe-cially driven by the reactions of general-election votersin open-seat races. The penalty to extremists largelydissipates in districts that are safe for the party.

26 The size of the effect is unlikely to be driven by the increasedcompetitiveness of districts that are likely to have open-seat races.In fact, there is almost no correlation between the presence of anopen-seat race and the competitiveness of the district. As a result,the estimated effect in open-seat races is equally large when a controlfor district safety is included.27 One possible mechanism related to incumbents, for example,would be if moderates in competitive primaries were more likely tobe incumbents than were extremists. Then the observed overall effectcould be driven by extremist nominations also being those where theincumbency advantage is not present. As the open elections resultshows, this is unlikely to be the case. The penalty is especially largeeven when neither the moderate nor the extremist is an incumbent. Ina related vein, Table A.3 presents estimates in incumbent-contestedprimaries and also in open primaries taking place in districts wherethe other party has an incumbent-contested primary.28 The null hypothesis that the effect is the same in safe districts as inall districts is strongly rejected (t = 2.74, p = 0.007; robust SEs). Theresult is equally large when a control for open-seat races is includedin the regression.

INCREASING EFFECT SIZE ACROSSCANDIDATE EXTREMISM

The results presented thus far average over treatmentsof varying intensity because the ideological distance be-tween the relatively moderate and extreme candidatein contested primaries is not constant across races. Toensure that I only include true contrasts between anextremist and a more moderate candidate, the anal-ysis above employed the median ideological distancebetween primary candidates as the cutoff for inclusionin the sample. By examining the effect across possiblesizes of this cutoff, we can test the theoretical expec-tation that the electoral penalty should increase as thedistance gets larger, and we can verify the robustnessof the findings.

There are two methodological reasons to preferlarger cutoffs. First, too small of a cutoff might increasethe probability of misclassifications due to measure-ment error in the donor scores. Measurement error inthese scores means that, for candidates closer togetherin ideology, there is a greater probability that by ran-dom chance the more extreme candidate appears to bemore moderate than the relatively moderate candidate.This type of error would lead to measurement errorin the treatment variable—by identifying a winningcandidate as an extremist and thus incorrectly callingthe district “treated,” or, likewise, by calling her moremoderate and incorrectly calling the district a “con-trol” district—and thus would lead to attenuation biasin the estimates. At larger cutoffs this concern may bemitigated because two very far apart candidates areless likely to be misclassified in this manner.

Second, smaller cutoffs also bring into the sam-ple more elections in which the contrast between the“moderate” and the “extremist” is less than sharp.Given the low information of voters, there is surelya point at which the distance between the candi-dates ceases to matter, and so the distinction between“treated” districts and “control” districts among theseprimaries becomes moot. Again, at larger cutoffs thisconcern dissipates.

Despite these advantages, there is also a cost tothis cutoff approach. Although the treatment is “as-if”randomly assigned in the RDD, the intensity or “dose”of the treatment is not. Cutting the sample based on

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FIGURE 4. Estimate of Effect on General-Election Vote Share Across Possible Cutoffs

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Notes: Top panel plots the estimate from Equation 1 across different possible values of the ideological distance cutoff, i.e., the minimumestimated ideological distance between two primary candidates required to define one as “moderate” and the other as “extreme.” Aswe sharpen the contrast between the two primary candidates, the effect on general-election vote share continues to grow in magnitude.Bottom panel indicates sample size for each estimate. Vertical lines in top panel indicate 95% confidence intervals from robust standarderrors. RDD estimates use cubic specification of running variable including whole sample.

intensity can provide a sense of how the effect varieswith intensity, but it may also indicate underlying dif-ferences in the kinds of districts that have greateror smaller ideological distances between primarycandidates. To address this problem, I have also esti-mated effects including all races in the sample, withoutemploying a cutoff on ideological distance, and includ-ing a control for the estimated ideological distance be-tween the candidates as well as an interaction of thisdistance with the treatment variable. The results, avail-able in Table A.6, are consistent with those presentedin the article.

Figures 4 and 5 present RDD estimates for the effectof nominating the extreme candidate over the moremoderate candidate on the party’s general-electionvote share and probability of winning across possiblecutoffs. The horizontal axis represents the cutoff valueused, and the 25th, 50th, 75th, and 95th percentiles ofthe distribution of ideological distances among closelycontested primary elections are indicated towards thebottom of the plots. Vertical lines represent 95% con-fidence intervals from robust standard errors. The esti-mates reported in the previous sections are highlightedand indicated in the plot with arrows.

As the figures show, we find similar, negative esti-mates even when we include all comparisons between

extremists and relative moderates (when the cutoff iszero in the figures). As expected, the estimates grow inmagnitude as the cutoff increases. In both cases, the es-timated effect more than doubles if the 95th percentileis used as the cutoff—i.e., only using the most extremecases—relative to the 50th percentile cutoff used in theprevious section.29

In contested primary elections, the nomination of anextreme candidate causes a large decrease in the party’selectoral prospects in the general election. This effect ispresent in many settings and especially large in cases inwhich the extreme candidate is especially ideologicallyextreme. Having established this on-average electoralpenalty, we can examine its consequences for behaviorinside the legislature.

29 The graph does not reflect tests of the null hypothesis that theeffect is the same at different values of the cutoff. Table A.6 presentsthese tests, comparing the effect at the minimum cutoff to that atthe maximum. While observed differences are always substantivelylarge, we cannot reject the null that the effect is the same at theminimum and maximum for the vote share specifications and forone of the victory specifications. However, we can reject the null thatthere is no overall effect in all three victory specifications and in oneof the vote share specifications.

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FIGURE 5. Estimate of Effect on General-Election Victory Across Possible Cutoffs

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0100200300400500

Notes: Top panel plots the estimate from Equation 1 across different possible values of the ideological distance cutoff, i.e., the minimumestimated ideological distance between two primary candidates required to define one as “moderate” and the other as “extreme.” Aswe sharpen the contrast between the two primary candidates, the effect on general-election victory continues to grow in magnitude.Bottom panel indicates sample size for each estimate. Vertical lines in top panel indicate 95% confidence intervals from robust standarderrors. RDD estimates use cubic specification of running variable including whole sample.

EFFECTS ON ROLL-CALL VOTING INCONGRESS

In this section, I link the nomination of an extrem-ist candidate to roll-call voting in the subsequentCongress. As the “Theoretical Perspectives” sectiondiscussed, extremist nominations could affect roll-callvoting directly, by affecting which candidate and whichparty attain office, and indirectly, by altering the incen-tives of those in office.

Two opposing forces compose this first, “direct” ef-fect. On the one hand, the nomination of an extremecandidate pulls subsequent roll-call voting away fromthe middle and towards the party’s ideological core—to the left when Democratic extremists are nominatedand to the right when Republican extremists are—because the extremist is likely to vote more extremelyif elected. On the other hand, as the previous sectionshowed, the nomination of the extremist benefits theopponent party in the general, making roll-call votingmore likely to shift in the other party’s direction—tothe right when Democratic extremists are nominated,and to the left when Republican extremists are.

Figure 6 suggests this dynamic in Democratic andRepublican primaries, respectively. The horizontal axisrepresents the estimated donor score of the winningprimary-election candidate, and the vertical axis rep-

resents the DW-NOMINATE score of the winninggeneral-election candidate in the ensuing Congress.Points are labeled “R” if the Republican candidatewon the general election, and “D” if the Democratdid. Consider the left panel, representing Democraticprimaries. In the elections with a relatively moderateDemocratic primary winner—observations to the rightof the plot—subsequent roll-call voting tends to beliberal (negative on the DW-NOMINATE scale). Aswe move to the left, i.e., as the winning Democraticprimary candidate becomes more extreme, averageroll-call voting first becomes more liberal, because theprimary winner delivers more liberal roll-call voting.However, as the donor score becomes more extreme,Republicans begin to gain a more significant electoraladvantage, and roll-call voting starts to become increas-ingly conservative.

The same pattern is present in the Republican pri-maries. Moderate primary winners—those to the leftof the plot—tend to win and deliver moderate roll-callvoting. As we move to the right, there is an increasein roll-call conservatism, but as we move farther right,this effect is washed out by the increasing electoralvictories of Democrats in the general election.

As previewed in the “Theoretical Perspectives” sec-tion, the tradeoff between extremist and more moder-ate nominations may vary across districts. To explore

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FIGURE 6. Nominee Ideology and Roll-Call Voting

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Notes: Plots the estimated ideology of candidates who win contested primaries against the roll-call score the district receives from itsrepresentative in the subsequent Congress. Points are labeled “D” when the Democratic candidate wins the general election and “R” ifthe Republican wins. Black lines are from kernel smoother, with bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals in dashed gray lines. Extremeprimary candidates (those to the left in the Democratic panel, and to the right in the Republican panel) win office so rarely that thedistrict’s roll-call representation swings towards the other party.

TABLE 3. RDD Estimates of the Effect of Nominating an Extreme Candidate on District’s Roll-CallRepresentation, U.S. House 1980–2010

Republican Districts Democratic Districts

District District District District District DistrictDW-NOM DW-NOM DW-NOM DW-NOM DW-NOM DW-NOM

Extremist win − 0.69 − 0.31 − 0.56 0.25 0.11 0.12(0.28) (0.16) (0.29) (0.28) (0.12) (0.11)

Extremist win × safe for party 0.73 0.44 0.39 − 0.09 − 0.19 − 0.17(0.34) (0.18) (0.29) (0.28) (0.11) (0.12)

Safe For Party − 0.01 − 0.07 − 0.01 − 0.21 − 0.22 − 0.22(0.21) (0.14) (0.21) (0.15) (0.08) (0.08)

N 35 99 46 48 153 144RDD bandwidth 5 – 6.49 5 – 21.73Specification Local linear Cubic IK local linear Local linear Cubic IK local linear

Note: Maximum of robust and conventional standard errors in parentheses. Third and sixth columns select optimal bandwith fromImbens-Kalyanaraman and apply with local-linear OLS.

this, as well as to add empirical rigor to the descrip-tive data presented above, I re-estimate the RDD withthe district’s subsequent DW-NOMINATE scoreas the outcome variable. Overall, I find that the nomi-nation of the extremist causes a reversal in roll-call vot-ing, producing more conservative roll-call voting whenDemocrats nominate a more extreme candidate andmore liberal roll-call voting when Republicans nom-inate a more extreme candidate (see Figure 8 in thenext section). Here, I interact the treatment variable

with an indicator for whether the district is safe for theparty holding the primary.

The first three columns of Table 3 investigate theeffect in Republican districts. The coefficient on “Ex-tremist Win” reflects the effect of nominating the ex-tremist in districts that are not safe for the party (when“Safe For Party” is zero). Here we see that nomi-nating the extremist produces a leftward shift in roll-call voting. Though the sample sizes make the esti-mate somewhat unstable, it is consistently negative and

28


substantively meaningful. In all three cases, moreover,we see that this roll-call reversal disappears in safedistricts, where the electoral penalty to nominating theextremist is small.

Consider, for example, the second column, which in-cludes all of the data. In districts that are not safe for theparty, nominating the extremist is estimated to cause a−0.31 point decrease in the DW-NOMINATE score ofthe representative voting on behalf of the district in thenext Congress. In safe districts, on the other hand, thiseffect is estimated to be positive 0.13 (−0.31 + 0.44 =0.13), and we can reject the null hypothesis that theeffect is the same across these two cases. The samepattern of evidence, though noisier, occurs in Demo-cratic districts, as shown in the latter three columnsof the table. In competitive districts, nominating theextremist appears to cause more conservative roll-callvoting, but the effect moves close to zero in districtsthat are safe for the party.

The previous section demonstrated that there is apronounced electoral penalty to nominating an ex-treme candidate over a more moderate candidate incontested primaries. It is difficult to evaluate the im-plications of this penalty for primary voting behaviorwithout considering the overall effects nominating anextremist produces. This effect is in part a compositeof the electoral penalty and the differential roll-callbehavior of the extremist vs. the general-election can-didate of the other party.

As it turns out, the implications vary depending ondistrict conditions. In competitive districts, the nomi-nation of an extremist may be a “mistake” from thepoint of view of primary voters who care about aver-age roll-call representation in the legislature. In thesedistricts, the likelihood that the other party will defeatthe extreme nominee is too large, and the desired roll-call voting of the extremist nominee too unlikely tomanifest itself in the legislature. But in safe districts,this may no longer be the case. In safe districts, the ex-tremist wins enough of the time to make the observedroll-call effect close to zero.

It is more difficult to evaluate the possible “indirect”effects nominating the extremist has on roll-call voting,but the results place some bounds on them. That roll-call voting shifts in the opposite direction in competitivedistricts tells us that these indirect effects cannot belarge relative to the change in roll-call voting causedby switching the party of the representative. It is stillpossible that the nomination of the extremist couldcause incumbents in the district in the future to adoptmore extreme positions, but any such effect must besmall relative to the direct effects from nominating theextremist that flow through the changes in the proba-bility the party wins the seat.

EXTREMIST NOMINEES AFFECT FUTUREELECTIONS

On average, the nomination of an extremist has a pro-nounced negative effect on the short-term electoralfortunes of the party. What are the longer-term effects

FIGURE 7. Long-Term Effect of NominatingExtremist on Party’s General-Election Victoryand Vote Share

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Notes: Nominating the extremist today continues to cause adecrease in the party’s electoral fortune even 8 years (4 terms)later. Estimates based on Equation 1. Lines are 95% confi-dence intervals from maximum of robust and conventional stan-dard errors.

of this nomination? The “Theoretical Perspectives”section laid out arguments for either a “galvanizing”effect, in which nominating the extremist today mighthelp the party tomorrow even if it loses today, or fora sustained penalty brought on by the likelihood ofceding incumbency status to the opposite party.

Consistent with this latter view, Figure 7 presentsestimates from Equation 1 using the party’s victoryand vote share in subsequent electoral cycles as thedependent variable.30 As the figure shows, the nom-ination of an extremist today continues to cause anequally large decrease in the party’s expected proba-bility of victory and vote share even four terms, or eightyears, later—the farthest downstream that redistrictingallows us to examine.

Figure 8 plots the same for the district’s downstreamDW-NOMINATE score, separately for Democraticand Republican primaries, pooling over safe and com-petitive districts. The overall reversal explored in the

30 I use the third-order polynomial of the running variable with thefull bandwidth; results are robust to other specifications.

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FIGURE 8. Long-Term Effect of Nominating Extremist on District’s Roll-Call Representation

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Notes: Nominating the extremist today continues to cause an ideological reversal in the district’s roll-call voting even eight years(four terms) later. The effect is present in both Republican primaries (where observed roll-call voting becomes more liberal) and inDemocratic primaries (where observed roll-call voting becomes more conservative). Estimates based on Equation 1. Lines are 95%confidence intervals from maximum of robust and conventional standard errors.

previous section persists even four terms (eight years)later. In Democratic districts, roll-call voting becomesmore conservative (increases) on average, and in Re-publican districts it becomes more liberal. Like in theprevious section, this suggests that any indirect effectsof extremist nominations on roll-call voting are small.Though extremists might be able to pull future roll-call voting towards their preferred positions withoutserving in office, any such effect is swamped in the longrun (as well as the short run) by the direct effects ofnominating the extremist and giving the office to theother party.

The decisions that primary voters make affect thecurrent election. As I have shown, their choice influ-ences the party’s vote share and probability of victory,as well as the style of representation they receive inCongress. But the decisions primary voters make todayecho for at least the next decade, too.

DISCUSSION OF POSSIBLE MECHANISMS

How do we account for these effects? In this sectionI consider a variety of explanations and mechanisms,focusing both on the “bundle” of characteristics thatextremists and moderates offer and on other featuresof the electoral environment. These explanations arenot mutually exclusive, nor do they comprise the wholeuniverse of possible explanations, but they do encom-pass some of the most salient possibilities.

Extremists Do Not Differ On ObservableValences

Perhaps the most obvious possible mechanism otherthan ideological positioning is that extremist nomineesmay possess some kind of valence disadvantage relative

to more moderate candidates, as discussed previously.31Although measuring “valence” directly is impossible,we can assess whether bare-winner extremists appearto differ from bare-winner moderates in their previousoffice-holder experience, a measure often used as aproxy for unobserved quality and known to provide avalence advantage (Jacobson 1989, 2012).32

The first point estimate in Figure 9 reports the RDDestimate like in Equation 1, but where the outcome isan indicator for whether the winning primary nomineehas previous office-holder experience. This tests thehypothesis that part of the “treatment” of nominatingthe extremist candidate is receiving a nominee withmore or less quality, in a particular sense, than the“control” of nominating the moderate candidate. Littledifference is found. Using the full data and a third-order polynomial, extremists are estimated to be 9.9percentage points more likely to have previous office-holder experience than more moderate candidates, andwe cannot reject the null of no difference. Candidatequality, at least in the form of previous experience, doesnot appear to be driving the results.33

The second point estimate in Figure 9 shows, in thesame vein, that extremist nominees do not receive

31 Keep in mind that, while the fact that the extremists and moremoderate candidates are involved in “coin-flip” elections in theRDD, this does not mean that their quality is balanced. Anythingthat differs between the candidates, including quality, is part of thetreatment. That said, the fact that their vote shares are so closesuggests their quality is likely to be somewhat similar—otherwise,other factors would have to explain a large amount of vote share inorder to counteract the quality differential and make the election soclose.32 Data on previous office-holder experience is from Jacobson (2012)as augmented by Hirano and Snyder (2014).33 Figure A.7 in Appendix A shows that this conclusion is robustacross bandwidths.

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FIGURE 9. Examining the Characteristics ofModerate and Extremist Bare-Winners

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Notes: Plots the estimated difference between extremist bare-winners and moderate bare-winners in the probability of hav-ing previous office-holder experience, the share of primarydonations, the probability of holding incumbency status, andthe probability of being female. Moderate and extremist bare-winners do not appear to differ markedly in terms of previousoffice-holder experience, donations, or incumbency status, butextremist bare-winners are roughly 13 percentage points lesslikely than moderate bare-winners to be female. Estimates arecalculated according to Equation 1, using the full data and athird-order polynomial of the running variable. Horizontal linesare 95% confidence intervals from robust standard errors.

fewer primary contributions than do more moder-ate nominees—another indication that the two typesof nominees do not differ in their underlying qual-ity.34 The third point estimate tests the hypothesis thatextremist bare-winners might be less likely to be incum-bents, another form of valence advantage. Parallelingthe candidate quality and contribution estimates, wesee in the figure that extremist bare-winners are, ifanything, more likely to be incumbents, but the effectis small (4.7 percentage points) and we cannot rejectthe null of no difference.

Possible Demographic Differences ofExtremists and Moderates

The final point estimate shows that extremist bare-winners appear roughly 13 percentage points less likelyto be female than moderate bare-winners.35 While in-teresting, this difference is unlikely to drive the effect.

34 The plotted estimate uses the share of primary contributions thatflow to the winning nominee. The result is the same in levels. In such aspecification, extremists at the discontinuity are estimated to receiveroughly $20,000 more than moderates, and we cannot reject the nullof no difference between the two.35 I apply the statistical technique from Ferreira and Gyourko (2014)to estimate candidate gender. I calculate the probability that a can-didate is female given her first name by using the U.S. census dataon the distribution of first names and gender. I code a candidate asfemale if the probability the first name is a female name is above 0.99,

TABLE 4. Testing Mechanisms, U.S. House1980–2010

Share $ General ElectionFrom PACs Vi

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