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Strategic Voting and Candidate Policy Positions
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EVIDENCE OF CROSSOVER VOTING, CANDIDATE ENTRY, AND POLICY POSITIONS

Several recent studies have analyzed the effects of primary election laws on candidate strategies. Gerber and Morton 1998 compare the ADA scores of U.S. Representatives elected under different primary systems.[7] They show that winning House candidates elected from open, blanket, and nonpartisan primaries are more moderate (that is, Democrats are more conservative and Republicans are more liberal) than otherwise similar candidates elected from closed primaries. They also find that the greatest share of moderates are not elected from the most open systems, but rather from semiclosed systems. They conjecture that in semiclosed systems, where new voters and independents can participate, but not members of other parties, incentives for sincere crossover and hedging clearly dominate. In other words, Gerber and Morton's evidence suggests that while sincere crossover, hedging, and raiding all are important in blanket primaries, the moderating effects of sincere crossover and hedging prevail. In a related study, Grofman and Brunell (2001) show a higher proportion of mixed-party U.S. Senate delegations in open primary states, suggesting that voters are trying to moderate the net ideology of the delegation by electing Senators of different parties.

Together, these studies provide evidence that is consistent with the moderation hypothesis and contrary to the polarization hypothesis. They imply that, on average, the moderating effects of sincere crossover voting and hedging dominate the polarizing effects of raiding. As a result, moderate candidates tend to prevail in open primaries. These results are consistent with the findings in the five chapters in this volume on voter behavior


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(Sides, Cohen, and Citrin, chapter 5; Alvarez and Nagler, chapter 6; Salvanto and Wattenberg, chapter 7; Kousser, chapter 8; and Petrocik, chapter 14). All of these analyses find evidence of substantial sincere crossover and hedging, and very little evidence of raiding.

There is, however, some compelling evidence to the contrary. King (1998) shows that party organizations are less cohesive and candidate positions show greater variance in open primary states. He argues that under open primaries, candidates have an incentive to "specialize," focusing on one or a few issues and appealing to ideological subgroups in the electorate. In other words, he finds that candidates may be more moderate or more extreme under open primaries, depending on the issues they promote. Further empirical research is required to assess the generality of this claim.


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Strategic Voting and Candidate Policy Positions
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