¹ Mayhew, David R., Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Roderick Kiewiet, D. and McCubbins, Mathew D., ‘Congressional Appropriations and the Electoral Connection’, Journal of Politics, 47 (1985), 59–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² McCubbins, Mathew D., Noll, Roger G. and Weingast, Barry R., ‘Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control’, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 3 (1987), 243–277Google Scholar; Weingast, Barry R. and Marshall, William, ‘The Industrial Organization of Congress, or Why Legislatures, Like Firms, are Not Organized as Markets’, Journal of Political Economy, 96 (1988), 132–163CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weingast, Barry R., ‘Rational-choice Institutionalism’, in Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner, eds, Political Science: The State of the Discipline (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002)Google Scholar.

³ McCubbins, Mathew D., ‘The Legislative Design of Regulatory Structure’, American Journal of Political Science, 29 (1985), 721–748CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Remington, Thomas F. and Smith, Steven S., ‘Theories of Legislative Institutions and the Organization of the Russian Duma’, American Journal of Political Science, 42 (1998), 545–572CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Moe, Terry M., ‘Power and Political Institutions’, Perspectives on Politics, 3 (2005), 215–233CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Hirschman, Albert, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google ScholarPubMed.

⁷ Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., ‘Constituency Influence in Congress’, American Political Science Review, 57 (1963), 45–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 60.

⁸ Rohde, David, ‘Risk-Bearing and Progressive Ambition: The Case of the United States House of Representatives’, American Journal of Political Science, 23 (1979), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Schlesinger, Joseph A., Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966)Google Scholar; Copeland, Gary W., ‘Choosing to Run: Why House Members Seek Election to the Senate’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 14 (1989), 549–565CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Groseclose, Timothy and Krehbiel, Keith, ‘Golden Parachutes, Rubber Checks, and Strategic Retirements from the 102nd House’, American Journal of Political Science, 38 (1994), 75–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hibbing, John R., ‘Voluntary Retirement from the U.S. House of Representatives: Who Quits?’ American Journal of Political Science, 26 (1982), 467–484CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Hall, Richard L. and Van Houweling, Robert P., ‘Avarice and Ambition in Congress: Representatives’ Decisions to Run or Retire from the U.S. House’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 121–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Hibbing, John R., Choosing to Leave (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982)Google Scholar; Frantzich, Stephen E., ‘De-Recruitment: The Other Side of the Congressional Equation’, Western Political Quarterly, 31 (1987), 105–126Google Scholar; Moore, Michael K. and Hibbing, John R., ‘Situational Dissatisfaction in Congress: Explaining Voluntary Departures’, Journal of Politics, 4 (1998), 1088–1107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Brace, Paul, ‘A Probabilistic Approach to Retirement from the U.S. Congress’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 10 (1985), 107–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bianco, William, ‘Strategic Decisions on Candidacy in U.S. Congressional Districts’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 9 (1984), 351–364CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cooper, Joseph and West, William, ‘Voluntary Retirement, Incumbency, and the Modern House’, Political Science Quarterly, 96 (1981), 279–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jacobson, Gary and Kernell, Samuel, Strategy and Choice in Congressional Elections (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ McCubbins, Noll and Weingast, ‘Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control’; McCubbins, Mathew D. and Schwartz, Thomas, ‘Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms’, American Journal of Political Science, 28 (1984), 165–179CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roderick Kiewiet, D. and McCubbins, Mathew D., The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Shepsle, Kenneth A., ‘Institutional Equilibrium and Equilibrium Institutions’, in Hebert F. Weisberg, ed., Political Science: The Science of Politics (New York: Agathon, 1986), pp. 51–81Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Black, Gordon S., ‘A Theory of Political Ambition: Career Choices and the Role of Structural Incentives’, American Political Science Review, 66 (1972), 144–159CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ This conception of the model assumes that legislators have perfect information about their prospects for future value both within and outside the institution. One could explicitly model uncertainty through the use of expected utility, but this issue is peripheral to the one at hand and is therefore omitted to maintain the simplicity of the model.

¹⁷ But not necessarily more valuable than a more powerful House seat.

¹⁸ Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957)Google Scholar; Black, Duncan, The Theory of Committees and Elections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ For a formal model of how this would work, see Kanthak, Kristin, ‘Top-Down Divergence: The Effect of Party-Determined Power on Candidate Ideological Placement’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 14 (2002), 301–323CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Parshall, Gerald, ‘As the Old Order Begins to Crumble on Capitol Hill …’, U.S. News and World Report, 3 February 1975, p. 23; The Economist, ‘The new Congress: Test of democracy’, 18 January 1975, p. 50Google Scholar.

²¹ See Rohde, David W., Parties and Leaders in the Post-reform House (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Parshall ‘As the Old Order Begins to Crumble on Capitol Hill …’.

²³ From a DSG report quoted in Beth Donovan, ‘Organization: Visions of Next Congress Inspire Reform Plan’, Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 3 October 1992, p. 3017.

²⁴ H.Res. 311 was introduced by Dave McCurdy in the 102nd Congress.

²⁵ Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard, ‘Patterns of Congressional Voting’, American Journal of Political Science, 35 (1991), 228–278CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Abramson, Paul, Aldrich, John and Rohde, David, ‘Progressive Ambition among United States Senators, 1972–1988’, Journal of Politics, 49 (187), 3–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ See Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Post-reform House.

²⁸ Minority party members can hold the position of ranking minority member of a committee or subcommittee, but that job is institutionally far weaker than the chair.

²⁹ Roderick Kiewiet, D. and Zeng, Langche, ‘An Analysis of Congressional Career Decisions, 1947–1986’, American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 928–941CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ E.g., Kalbfleisch, J. D. and Prentice, R. L., The Statistical Analysis of Failure Time Data (New York: John Wiley, 1980)Google Scholar; Peterson, Trond, ‘Analysis of Event Histories’, in Gerhard Arminger, Clifford C. Clogg and Michael E. Sobel, eds, Handbook of Statistical Modeling for the Social and Behavioral Sciences (New York: Plenum Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Han, Aaron and Hausman, Jerry A., ‘Flexible Parametric Estimation of Duration and Competing Risks Models’, Journal of Applied Econometrics, 5 (1990), 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M. and Jones, Bradford S., Timing and Political Change: Event History Modeling in Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

³² Cheng, Simon and Scott Long, J., ‘Testing for IIA in the Multinomial Logit Model’, Sociological Methods and Research, 35 (2007), 583–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Re-estimating the model using the more restrictive multinomial logit specification yields substantively similar results to those reported here.

³⁴ Note that the data include all legislators who choose to run for higher office. Whether or not they were successful is immaterial to the theoretical question at hand.

³⁵ This measure applies equal weight to divergence from the median in either the liberal or conservative direction. Alternatively, the Democratic party may tolerate leftward movements better than rightward ones, with the Republican party tolerating the opposite. In the current context, however, this is not true. Such a variable fails to achieve statistical significance for any of the outcomes.

³⁶ Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard, ‘The Polarization of American Politics’, Journal of Politics, 46 (1984), 1061–1079CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Poole and Rosenthal, ‘Patterns of Congressional Voting’.

³⁷ Variables indicating the age of the legislator, the ideology of the state, the legislator's average committee assignment, and a dummy variable indicating serving on a ‘power’ committee (Rules, Ways and Means, and Appropriations) were also included in the regression, with no effect on the result of theoretical interest.

³⁸ Note that some states and Congressional districts, such as those in Virginia, do not hold traditional primaries. For this reason, no data for Primary are available. Rather than deleting these observations listwise, I use the mean of the variable as its imputed value in those observations. The substantive results of the analysis are no different if either listwise deletion or Amelia ( King, Gary, Honaker, James, Joseph, Anne and Scheve, Kenneth, ‘Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for Multiple Imputation’, American Political Science Review, 95 (2001), 39–69Google Scholar), another imputation method, is used.

³⁹ I use the Turnover variable because it provides more relevant information than simple year dummies. But using Turnover obviously precludes the use of year dummies because they are perfectly correlated. Note that one can also think of Turnover as a measure of any legislator's most basic hazard rate – if chairs are randomly distributed, the probability of receiving one would be based entirely on the amount of legislative turnover.

⁴⁰ Note that there is variation on Higher for all outcomes, including the ‘Running for Higher Office’ outcome because other statewide elected offices, such as attorney general or secretary of state, may be open in some cases.

⁴¹ Groseclose, Tim and Stewart, Charles III, ‘The Value of Committee Seats in the House, 1947–91’, American Journal of Political Science, 42 (1998), 453–474CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² Most of the legislators in the dataset have ideological distances of less than 0.5 from the party median, but this does not imply that these highest values of distance are merely theoretical. About 2 per cent of observations in the actual dataset are in this furthest category.

⁴³ Cooper and West, ‘Voluntary Retirement, Incumbency, and the Modern House’; Brace, ‘A Probabilistic Approach to Retirement from the U.S. Congress’; Hibbing, Choosing to Leave.

⁴⁴ Poole and Rosenthal, ‘Patterns of Congressional Voting’, and ‘The Polarization of American Politics’.

⁴⁵ Cox, Gary W. and McCubbins, Mathew D., Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Cox, Gary W. and McCubbins, Mathew D., Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ Maestas, Cherie, ‘The Incentive to Listen: Progressive Ambition, Resources, and Opinion Monitoring among State Legislators’, Journal of Politics, 65 (2003), 439–456CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ Hibbing, John R., ‘Ambition in the House: Behavioral Consequences of Higher Office Goals Among U.S. Representatives’, American Journal of Political Science, 30 (1986), 651–665CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Francis, Wayne L. and Kenney, Lawrence W., ‘Position Shifting in the Pursuit of Higher Office’, American Journal of Political Science, 40 (1996), 768–786CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Francis, Wayne L. and Kenney, Lawrence W., Up the Political Ladder (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Davidson, Roger H., Oleszek, Walter J. and Lee, Frances E., Congress and Its Members, 12th edn (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2010), p. 214Google Scholar; Gibbs, Nancy, Tumulty, Karen, Cole, Wendy, Duffy, Michael and Waller, Douglas, ‘Newt Gingrich; Master of the House’, Time Magazine, 25 December 1995Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Unfortunately, analysis for the Republicans after the Gingrich era (2001–06) is not possible due to the paucity of data. Attempting to estimate the models results in a failure to converge. The analysis includes all the same variables as that reported in Table 2, save for the exclusion of the Reapportionment variable since no reapportionment occurred in the years under consideration.

⁵¹ McNollgast, , ‘Public Interest and Structure-Induced Policy’, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 6 (1990), 203–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McNollgast, , ‘Positive and Normative Models of Procedural Rights: An Integrative Approach to Administrative Procedures’, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 6 (1990), 307–332CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roderick Kiewiet, D. and McCubbins, Mathew D., ‘Presidential Influence on Congressional Appropriations Decisions’, American Journal of Political Science, 32 (1988), 713–736CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCubbins and Schwartz, ‘Congressional Oversight Overlooked’; McCubbins, ‘The Legislative Design of Regulatory Structure’; Kiewiet and McCubbins, ‘Congressional Appropriations and the Electoral Connection’; Kiewiet and McCubbins, The Logic of Delegation; McCubbins, Noll and Weingast, ‘Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control’.

⁵² Kiewiet and McCubbins, The Logic of Delegation, p. 20.

⁵³ Kiewiet and McCubbins, The Logic of Delegation.

⁵⁴ Matland, Richard E. and Studlar, Donley T., ‘The Determinants of Legislative Turnover: A Cross National Study’, British Journal of Political Science, 34 (2004), 87–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ Kam, Christopher, ‘Demotion and Dissent in the Canadian Liberal Party’, British Journal of Political Science, 36 (2006), 561–574CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Hibbing, John R., ‘Legislative Institutionalization with Illustrations from the British House of Commons’, American Journal of Political Science, 32 (1988), 681–712CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁷ Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., ‘Constituency Influence in Congress’, American Political Science Review, 57 (1963), 45–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ McCarty, Nolan, Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Boston, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Fiorina, Morris P. with Abrams, Samuel J. and Pope, Jeremy C., Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, 3rd edn (New York: Longman, 2010)Google Scholar.