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Why Local Party Leaders Don't Support Nominating Centrists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2019

David E. Broockman ,
Nicholas Carnes ,
Melody Crowder-Meyer Open the ORCID record for Melody Crowder-Meyer [Opens in a new window]  and
Christopher Skovron
David E. Broockman*
Affiliation:
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Nicholas Carnes
Affiliation:
Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
Melody Crowder-Meyer
Affiliation:
Davidson College, Davidson, NC
Christopher Skovron
Affiliation:
Civiqs and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: dbroockman@stanford.edu
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Abstract

Would giving party leaders more influence in primary elections in the United States decrease elite polarization? Some scholars have argued that political party leaders tend to support centrist candidates in the hopes of winning general elections. In contrast, the authors argue that many local party leaders – especially Republicans – may not believe that centrists perform better in elections and therefore may not support nominating them. They test this argument using data from an original survey of 1,118 county-level party leaders. In experiments, they find that local party leaders most prefer nominating candidates who are similar to typical co-partisans, not centrists. Moreover, given the choice between a more centrist and more extreme candidate, they strongly prefer extremists: Democrats do so by about 2 to 1 and Republicans by 10 to 1. Likewise, in open-ended questions, Democratic Party leaders are twice as likely to say they look for extreme candidates relative to centrists; Republican Party leaders are five times as likely. Potentially driving these partisan differences, Republican leaders are especially likely to believe that extremists can win general elections and overestimate the electorate's conservatism by double digits.

Keywords

polarizationelite surveys
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 724 - 749
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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