Essay On Congressional Elections

The article demonstrates the findings of the analysis done by Mann and Wolfinger, where they examine the parties and candidates in the congressional elections. The findings indicate that incumbents who run for the House of Representatives have a significant advantage over their rivals. Interesting is the fact that incumbents not only manage to get the support of the majority of their political party’s voters, but also succeed to obtain every fourth out five independent votes, and about half of the opposition party votes, according the data of the Congressional elections in 1978. The data on the elections from 1956 to 1978 showing that levels of defection constantly arise in the House elections. Therefore, it comes out slightly puzzling why the voters supported more the incumbents.

First of all, based on the 1978 data, incumbents are more noticeable than challengers (House incumbents were totally unknown to only 3% of the voters, while 37% was the

challenger, with the final vote. The reason behind this is to show in most of the cases the higher rated candidate gets the vote. The results indicate that the higher rated candidate is mostly the incumbent one. The authors clarify this by looking at the data, which point out that 90% of the voters had few contacts with their incumbent Representative, compared 44% for the challenger. However, the efficiency of the candidates with the contact in open seat races (73) is roughly as good as that of incumbents, suggesting that incumbency is not the only argument for incumbents’ higher perceptibility, but their scarcity of serious challenge. This assumption is confirmed by the data on campaign spending, which shows that only challengers in close-race districts spend budget on par with those of the incumbents. Therefore, had the sample involved more voters from high competing districts, the numbers above may have been