Much of the political punditry in the United States discusses the notion that facing a primary election results in legislators voting in a more partisan fashion in the legislature. A common refrain of this analysis is that facing the primary election constituency (Fenno 1978) or even the threat of facing the primary election constituency causes the senator to vote with the ideological extremes of the party in following sessions of congress. The literature on congressional elections has examined this area of research as it applies to the U.S. House, but few studies fully examine the impact of primary elections on roll call voting in the Senate. This study examines Senate primary elections to see how facing a primary, specifically a competitive primary, influences how a senator votes in the legislature in the first term following the election. This study specifically asks if senators who face a competitive primary challenge and win reelection vote with their party more often in subsequent congresses than senators who do not face a competitive primary challenge. Using OLS regressions and a number of control variables shown in the literature to impact roll call voting patterns, I examine the percentage of the vote that a senator received in her primary election compared to her party unity score in the Senate after the election. While my models demonstrate that facing a competitive primary correlates with a senator having a higher party unity score than senators who do not face a competitive primary, in all of my models the coefficient on this variable is not statistically significant. However, serving in the majority party and being elected in certain election years did have a statistically significant impact on a senator's partisan voting behavior. When testing an interaction effect between facing a competitive primary and serving in the majority party after the election, I also did not find a significant relationship between the interaction and a senator's change in party unity score. These findings add to our understanding of congressional elections by exploring an under-studied aspect of elections in the United States, and future research that adapts and refines the methodology of this study could further develop these results. / Master of Arts / There is a common perception that facing a primary election makes it more likely that a member of congress votes with her party more often. The idea is that the primary voters want their representatives to be more radical, and therefore push incumbents to the extremes, resulting in more polarization in the legislature. While studies on elections to the House have shown mixed results when examining this question, few studies examine if these patterns exist in elections to the Senate. This study examines Senate primary elections to see how facing a primary influences how a senator votes in the legislature. However, because of limited data, this study examines competitive primaries, based on how much of the vote the senator receives in her election, rather than ideological primaries, based on the senator being challenged from the extremes of the party. This study specifically asks how facing a competitive primary influences a senator's partisan voting patterns in subsequent congresses after their election. In order to study this, I examine the percentage of the vote that a senator received in her primary election compared to her partisan voting patterns in the Senate after the election. I did not find that senators who face a competitive primary respond by voting in a more partisan fashion in the congressional sessions following the election. However, serving in the majority party and being elected in certain election years did have a significant impact on a senator's partisan voting behavior. When testing if the impact of facing a competitive primary was conditioned by serving in the majority party, I also did not find that serving in the majority party conditions the impact of facing a competitive primary on a senator's partisan voting patterns. While these findings did not support the notion that facing a competitive primary influences a senator's partisan voting behavior, future research could alter this study to further examine this question. Such additional research is necessary in order to more fully understand Senate elections.

By selecting the pool of candidates that voters can choose from in the general election, party nominating contests play a fundamental role in determining the outcome of elections at all levels of government. However, past research has indicated that, due largely to the incumbency advantage, primary competition has declined dramatically since the institution’s origins. Strategic entry theory suggests that skilled candidates, often those holding prior political office, wait for the most opportune chance to run for higher office. To test this hypothesis, I collected data on all congressional districts and candidates from the 2014 midterm elections. Using candidate information gathered from the Federal Election Commission and other candidate databases, district level demographic and political data, and incumbent statistics, I developed a model using the individual and structural factors to predict when an experienced politician will challenge an incumbent within their own party. The data show that strong intraparty challenges are rare compared to cross-party challenges, and that the most ideologically centrist incumbents, of either party, are the most likely to be “primaried” by an experienced and ambitious challenger.

Over the past decades, European democracies have experienced diminishing trust in their political representative institutions leading to a decline in party membership as well as both reduced electoral turnout and overall political participation (Van Biezen et al., 2012). In response, many European parties began reforming themselves allowing for the direct participation of party members or even non-members in various intra-party arenas, such as leadership selections through primaries. Parties claim that such reforms increase intra-party democracy (IPD) by making internal organisation more inclusive and by providing all party members or even non-members with decision-making power perilously reserved to the party elites (Hazan and Rahat, 2010). However, the positive effect of increased IPD on membership is highly contested and surprisingly few relevant empirical and comparative studies exist. The central research question of this thesis is what are the (different) consequences of adopting different types of primary rules for party members? Hence, my aim is to examine whether the introduction of primaries is in fact as negative for party members as outlined by Katz and Mair (1994), Lefebvre (2011) or Hopkin (2001) or, alternatively, whether it represents a chance to revitalize parties as membership organizations (Macpherson, 1977; Ware, 1979; Bille, 2001). Primaries are defined as selection process for party leaders and candidates in which the final vote rests with either party members in closed primaries, or loosely defined group of party supporters or the wider electorate, open primaries. Thus, introducing a primary leads to a change in the level of intra-party democracy, as it shifts power from a more exclusive selectorate to either of the two selectorates outlined above. While this project focuses on primaries that select top-executive candidates, the theory and conceptual framework developed can be applied to primaries more broadly. The general argument put forward is that to capture the differentiated effects of party primaries we have to study the interplay between the rules determining who can vote (selectorate) and who can run (candidacy requirements) in primaries. This thesis answers its central research question by developing a conceptual framework that combines these two dimensions for party primaries that select the party leader in public office. First, it outlines the underlying logic of the conceptual framework that links the two dimensions and then provides a theoretical discussion of its consequences for party members looking specifically at the interaction between the two. To assess the consequences of different primary reforms, the thesis focuses on four dimensions of party membership: the party membership level, the turnout in primaries, the quality of membership and the attitude towards the leadership. This perspective highlights that different combinations of selection rules and candidacy requirements in primaries result in four distinct types of intra-party democracy from the perception of party members. In turn, these types lead party members to respond in a distinct fashion. Using a mixed-method case study approach, the second part of the thesis tests the theoretical framework for various Western European parties. The analysis will mainly use primary and secondary document analysis as well as new and existing survey data complemented by qualitative in-depth membership surveys. The main conclusion is that only some combinations of primary rules can lead to a positive effect for members while others do not. For example, closed primaries with open candidacy requirements will lead to more active participation of members, while open primaries with open candidacy requirements will reduce membership participation considerably.

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<p>Theories of ambition have taught us that higher offices are valuable commodities to certain politicians, and under the right circumstances, the benefits of running for an office outweigh the associated risks. Yet some ambitious politicians emerge as candidates while others do not. In this dissertation, I present a Theory of Strategic Candidacy Decisions to explain how primary elections unfold. With new comprehensive data on the timing of candidacy decisions, I test several hypotheses regarding the determinants of electoral and fundraising success, the timing of strategic candidacy decisions, the interactions of prospective officeholders, and the impact of strategic retirements on primary races for the United States Senate. Using both qualitative and quantitative tools, including event history techniques to capture the complex dynamics of primaries, I find that potential candidates interact with one another and the unique political context within each race and emerge from the pool of potential candidates in systematic ways. In the end, the strategic behavior of ambitious politicians has implications for the slate of candidates available to the electorate and ultimately, on the quality of representation between legislators and constituents.</p> / Dissertation