A Little Learning is the Safest Thing: Causes and Electoral Effects of House Incumbents Holding Well Known Issue Positions.

This study used nationwide surveys of voters and campaign managers and content analyses of campaign communications to investigate two interrelated puzzles concerning public knowledge about House incumbents' specific issue positions: one puzzle about the causes of this knowledge, and one about its effects. The puzzle about the causes was why some incumbents were relatively well known for their issue positions when most incumbents were not. The puzzle about the effects was that the literature most relevant to congressional elections had concluded that incumbents are helped when they are known for issue positions, whereas other literature--especially that on unrepresentative voting by incumbents and on negative voting by constituents--suggested that being known for issue positions should hurt incumbents. This study proposed a way to integrate the congressional-elections literature with other findings, hypothesizing that the impact of issue knowledge varies according to how widespread it is. Data from the 1978 American National Election Study confirmed this hypothesis: widespread knowledge tended to hurt incumbents; other knowledge generally neither helped nor hurt. The potential causes underlying these effects were tested by merging Election Study data with data from the 1978 Congressional Campaign Study. The best known incumbents tended to have unrepresentative positions, and the most unrepresentative incumbents' positions tended to be widely known. However, some unrepresentative incumbents successfully hid their positions, while some representative incumbents successfully publicized theirs. Knowledge of unrepresentative incumbents' positions tended to be widespread only in districts with large amounts of issue content both in newspapers and in incumbents' advertising on television. That such content was often sparse in these sources explains why unrepresentative incumbents' positions were often unknown. Knowledge of representative incumbents' positions varied somewhat with newspaper content. However, such knowledge often existed at normal levels even in districts with very low amounts of news and advertising, presumably due mainly to non-televised communications from these incumbents. Thus the generally negative effect of widespread knowledge appeared at least partly due to its tendency either to have been largely about unrepresentative positions or to have been largely from sources other than the incumbent.PhDPolitical scienceUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161593/1/8720343.pd