Party Loyalty

In this article, “The Electoral Costs of Party Loyalty in Congress”, the authors Carson, Koger, Lebo, and Young, attempt to understand if partisan loyalty has a more significant adversely affect than ideological extremity on the electoral outcomes of incumbents. Therefore, the authors set up an experiment to determine whether voters punish incumbents more severely for voting lockstep partisanship than for ideological extremism. By understating the article’s results, political scientists are able to analyze if partisanship voting motivates constituents to hold their legislators accountable. In addition, political scientists have an opportunity to explore the extent to which each factor, partisanship and ideological extremity, directly affects …show more content…
As Doherty points out, voters prefer a legislator whom prioritizes their district above all (245). This standard is consistent with Carson’s findings that voters prefer a legislator whom is an ideological “extremist” because the representative is not prioritizing the party, while the “partisan” legislator is siding with the party above all. This is also true for the congruency effect Doherty found. An incumbent voting along party lines too often might be seen as a “party hack” whose vote in Congress does not match the district’s views, so voter will be more inclined to punish that legislator at the ballot …show more content…
As examined in class, the pivotal politics theory notes that parties have no internal effect on Congress. This article shows that voters do punish incumbents whom are party loyalists, therefore, representatives do not have to listen to party leaders during roll-call votes, and can vote ideological extreme because they do not face an inverse effect during reelection for voting extreme. Hence, this article’s findings have a strong support for the pivotal politics theory since the threat of losing reelection imposed by party leaders has no