1 Goal Salience and the 2006 Race for House Majority Leader

In intraparty congressional leadership races, the characteristics of candidates and the nature of their campaigns increase the salience of particular legislator goals and, in doing so, influence legislators ’ support of particular leader-ship candidates. Using multinomial logit regression analysis, the authors test this “goal salience ” theory to determine what factors predict individual legislators ’ commitments to candidates in the 2006 House Republican majority leader’s race. Notably, among other factors, the level of campaign donations made to Republican House members had a positive and statistically significant relationship with the choice of specific candidates