Why Americans Split Their Tickets by Burden Barry C.;Kimball David C.;

Author:Burden, Barry C.;Kimball, David C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

FIG. 5.1. Performance of the president’s party in midterm House elections

Other nonbalancing explanations (such as the increased motivation of voters with negative evaluations of the president) can account for midterm losses (Erikson 1988, 1014). In fact, alternative explanations for midterm losses abound. The original surge-and-decline theory (A. Campbell 1960) fingers the decline in voter turnout as the primary culprit. In addition, midterm elections are a referendum on the president’s performance and the state of the national economy (Tufte 1978), and midterm losses reflect inevitable negative evaluations of the president after two years in office (Kernell 1977). In addition, the more seats the majority party holds (the more exposed it is), the more susceptible it is to midterm losses (Marra and Ostrom 1989; Oppenheimer, Stimson, and Waterman 1986). Finally, strategic politicians are thought to magnify referendum effects if potential challengers wait to run for Congress until national conditions are most favorable (Kernell and Jacobson 1983). A revised surge-and-decline theory (J. Campbell 1993, 1997) combines several of these elements but also argues for the importance of voter turnout. In any case, there is substantial controversy as to which of these explanations (including the balancing model) best accounts for midterm losses (Niemi and Weisberg 1993).

We focus on the surge-and-decline explanation in particular because it makes the clearest predictions about the nature and influence of abstention and party defection in midterm elections. The following section discusses surge-and-decline theories in more detail. We then explain our use of the ecological inference procedure to estimate party differences in midterm abstention and voter defection. After discussing our estimates of both sources of electoral change, we conclude by explaining why voters defect from the president’s party in midterm elections.

SURGE-AND-DECLINE THEORIES

OF MIDTERM ELECTIONS

The most prominent explanations of electoral change in congressional elections focus on turnout as the primary source of change. The theory of surge and decline posits that the surge of turnout in a presidential election helps congressional candidates from the winning presidential candidate’s party, while the decline in turnout in the ensuing midterm then hurts candidates from the president’s party. The name implies an elegant tidal metaphor in which congressional candidates of the president’s party are represented by the ocean debris carried into shore (election to Congress) at high tide and then washed out to sea (electoral defeat) at low tide. The theory divides the electorate into “peripheral” voters who participate only in presidential elections and “core” voters who participate in presidential and midterm elections (A. Campbell 1960). Thus, independent or peripheral voters are responsible for the surge and decline in turnout and thus for the president’s midterm losses in Congress (cf. J. Campbell 1993).

Efforts to find empirical support for the original surge-and-decline theory have been rather unsuccessful (Born 1990; J. Campbell 1993). For example, the surge-and-decline theory predicts that the midterm electorate should be more partisan, more interested in politics, and more knowledgeable than the presidential electorate. However, differences in the demographic composition of midterm and presidential electorates are small (A. Campbell 1960; Kernell 1977; Wolfinger, Rosenstone, and McIntosh 1981; see J.

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