When an incumbent office-holder is challenged for re-election, the outcome depends in part on the background of the challenger. In particular, challengers who have held elective office prior to entering a race against an incumbent (call them “experienced” challengers) are more likely to succeed than challengers who haven’t held an elective office (call them “amateurs”).
Okay, fine. But why? The usual explanations are that experienced challengers have greater access to the resources that are required to mount a successful challenge, and/or that they possess greater political skills – two factors that are generally seen as independent of one another.
In a new study (“Why Do Experienced Challengers Do Better than Amateurs,” Political Behavior 30 [2008], 85-198), Jeffrey Lazarus argues that it’s not quite that simple.
bq. Experienced challengers tend to win elections because they disproportionately contest races which their party has a good chance of winning. This, in turn, has two causes. One is the high level of risk experienced challengers are exposed to in running for office: if they lose the election, they not only must give up their current seat, but the loss might also do damage to their reputation as a career politician. This high penalty for losing leads experienced challengers to only enter races they have a good chance of winning. Second is the resource/skill differential discussed by prior work: once an experienced challenger has decided to run for an office, he or she is very likely to win the party nomination. Because of these factors, experienced challengers become their party’s nominee in a large proportion of the races in which their party has a good chance of winning, and, on average, they do very well in general election contests. …[T]his self-selection is the direct cause of experienced challengers’ success.
Thus “an experienced challenger’s entry into the race is, in and of itself, a signal of incumbent vulnerability.” Lazarus’s self-selection model predicts that “amateurs who defeat experienced challengers in the primary election should, on average, do just as well in general elections as experienced challengers themselves.” By contrast, a resources-based explanation would predict that “amateurs, with their limited skills and access to resources, should do worse than experienced challengers.” Analyzing data for U.S. House elections, 1976-1998, Lazarus establishes that the self-selection prediction is the more accurate one.
Bottom line? The widely accepted interpretation has been that experienced challengers do because they enter winnable races and because they enjoy a resource advantage over other candidates. What Lazarus’s interpretation does is link these two factors together rather than treating them as independent sources of advantage. Not an earth-shaking contribution to our understanding of electoral dynamics, to be sure, but a nice one.