Do Voters Know Enough to Punish Out-of-Step Congressional Candidates?

Abstract

Traditional democratic norms suggest that accountability requires voters to be able to accurately perceive the positions of candidates for office. When asked to place congressional candidates on an ideological spectrum, voters show a surprisingly high level of both inaccuracy and variation in the policy positions of candidates. In this article, we investigate three theories of candidate placement to determine the possible sources for voter inaccuracy of candidate positions: the assimilation and contrast theory, the partisan cheerleading theory, and the information theory. We develop an instrumental variables approach for distinguishing between the competing theories. We find some evidence for assimilation and contrast among low knowledge voters and little support for cheerleading. We also find evidence that the actual position of the candidate has a detectable but small effect on voters’ perceptions of that candidate, limiting the extent to which House candidates are held individually accountable for the positions they take. Instead, we find evidence that voters cue off of the positions of the party’s other candidates, suggesting that candidates for a political party are held collectively accountable.