Campbell, Noel D

Lopez, Edward J.

Rogers, Tammy

English

San Jose State University

Incumbent Deviations from Constituents: Further Tests

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San Jose State UniversitySJSU ScholarWorksFaculty Publications Economics1-1-2008Incumbent Deviations from Constituents: FurtherTestsNoel D. CampbellUniversity of Central ArkansasEdward J. LopezSan Jose State University, edwardjlopez@gmail.comTammy RogersUniversity of Central ArkansasFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/econ_pubPart of the Political Economy Commons, and the Public Economics CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Economics at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in FacultyPublications by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@sjsu.edu.Recommended CitationNoel D. Campbell, Edward J. Lopez, and Tammy Rogers. "Incumbent Deviations from Constituents: Further Tests" Journal of PoliticalScience (2008): 33-35.Further Tests of Legislators Pay­ing to Deviate from Constituent Interests Noel D. Campbell* University of Central Arkansas Edward J. Lopez San Jose State University Tammy M. Rogers University of Central Arkansas Lopez and Campbell (2004) find a statistically significant, positive re­lationship between incumbents' deviations from their constituents' pre­ferences and incumbents subsequent campaign expenditures. We replicate their empirical program using a different measure of incum­bent deviation based on Berry, Ringquist, Fording, and Hanson (1998). Using both measures of incumbents' deviations we both confirm and disconfirm the Lopez and Campbell result, implying either the construct of incumbents' deviations from constituents' interests or its operationa­lization is underdeveloped. INTRODUCTION L opez and Campbell (2004) examine the empirical rela­tionship between vote score residuals and incumbents' campaign expenditures in the subsequent re-election bid. The incumbent's goal is to get re-elected. The literature on legis­lator voting has consistently shown that deviating from constitu­' Corresponding author. THE JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE VOLUME 36 2008 PAGES 33- 53 34 CAMPBELL, LOPEZ, & ROGERS ents' preferred policies makes this objective more difficult (~ender and_ Lott, 1996). Despite this, an incumbent may occa­siOnally deviate from constituents' preferences with good reason (to pursue personal views, to service interest group pressure, to d~~on~trate loyalty to party leaders, etc.). To deviate while di­rrumsh_mg the costs of deviating, incumbents may increase their campaign expenditures in an effort to convince constituents to ~ote for them regardless of their policy positions. This interpreta­tion of re-election expenditures has been termed "persuasive" campaigning (Mueller and Stratmarm, 1994). If we view con­gressiOnal seat~ as _an economic good and re-election expendi­~ures as the urut pnce pmd by an incumbent for the good, then I~cumbents may "buy" some deviation, in the form of dimi­rush~d el~ctoral punishment, by expending more in their re­e~ectwn bids: ~opez ~d.Campbell (2004) find a statistically sig­mfi~ant positive empmcal relationship between incumbents' deviatiOns and their subsequent campaign expenditures for the 1992 throu?h 1998 Congressional elections, indicating persua­sive campaign expenditures. However, to derive their measure of incumbent deviation Lopez and Campbell rely on the widely used but still controver~ sial "residualization" procedure pioneered by Kau and Rubin (1979). This paper seeks to replicate the empirical program of ~opez an~ Campbel~ witho~t recourse to the controversial empir­Ical tec!Ullq~e by usmg a different literature to derive a different measure of mcumbent deviation. Berry, Ringquist, _Fording, and Hanson (1998) present a framework for producing an alternative me_asure on congresspersons' ideology based on interest group ratm?s of congress~ersons (like the Kau and Rubin measure) and electiOn results. Usmg ~method similar to that of Berry, et al., we produce an alternative measure of incumbents' deviations from electorate wishes. THE JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE PAYING TO DEVIATE FROM CONSTITUENT INTERESTS Using our new measure of incumbents' deviation from con­stituents' interests, we replicate the Lopez and Campbell empiri­cal procedure. Contrary to the findings of Campbell and Lopez (2004), we find that our measure of incumbent deviations is not significantly related to incumbents' re-election expenditures. However, we find that more incumbent deviation significantly predicts lower vote margins for the incumbent and lower oppo­nent's expenditures in the incumbent's subsequent re-election bid. Taken together, these findings imply that incumbent devia­tion does matter, as implied by Bender and Lott (1996). Further­more, the incumbent is not able to "buy back" some of his deviation in a subsequent election bid. Rather, the electorate re­wards the challenger with higher voter support regardless of in­cumbent expenditure. However, closer inspection of our results is not as injurious to Lopez and Campbell (2004) as first inspection might indicate. Despite the proposition that Lopez and Campbell's deviation variable and our current deviation variable measure the same phenomena, and despite the shared derivation of both meas­ures-adjusted ADA scores for incumbents-the two variables have a low correlation coefficient of 0.049. Furthermore, models applying both deviation variables both reconfirms the main Lo­pez and Campbell (2004) result and reconfirms this study's re­sult. These findings imply to us that either the construct of incumbent deviations from constituent's purported interests, or the operationalization of the construct, is underdeveloped. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: section two considers background theoretical issues, section three presents the empirical results, while section four discusses and concludes. VOL. 37 2008 35 

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Incumbent Deviations from Constituents: Further Tests

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