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Voting Statistics and Presidential Coattails

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Charles Press
Charles Press
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Extract

The coattail effect in presidential and congressional races was long supposed to show that the winning presidential candidate led his party to victory by adding votes to the ticket all along the line. The fact that the same party almost always won control of both houses of congress and usually also a majority of the governorships at stake at the time of a presidential victory made this a plausible theory.

More recently, the sweeping nature of such an explanation has been challenged. The first criticism of the simple theory noted that even when a presidential candidate wins, congressional candidates in some districts lead the president. In these cases, presumably, the congressional candidates' coattails are more effective.

A second criticism pointed to the paradox in the assumption that if a presidential candidate leads his party by a wide margin, he is an effective candidate for the party ticket. The greater the margin, presumably, the stronger are the presidential coattails. But large margins, on the contrary, must indicate that the presidential candidate has not been able to transfer all of his votes to the congressional ticket; and so it would seem that the attraction of his coattails is minimal if this margin is great. Thus the most significant symptom of the coattail process is straight ticket voting.

Type
Studies in American State Politics
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 1958 , pp. 1041 - 1050
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1958

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References

1 Moos, Malcolm C., Politics, Presidents and Coattails (Baltimore, 1952), pp. 82–118Google Scholar.

2 Miller, Warren E., “Presidential Coattails: A Study in Political Myth and Methodology,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 19 (Winter 1955–1956), pp. 353–368CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Campbell, Angus and Miller, Warren E., “The Motivational Basis of Straight and Split Ticket Voting,” this Review, Vol. 51 (June 1957), pp. 293–312Google Scholar.

4 Congressional Quarterly Almanac, Vol. 13 (Washington, 1957), pp. 180–183Google Scholar.

5 At first glance it may appear preferable to group percentages by using the presidential rather than the congressional vote as a base. Since the congressional vote seems to be more closely associated with the dominant motivational variable of party identification, it results in categories which are more homogeneous and hence involves less averaging of extreme variations.

6 By Schattschneider's rule-of-thumb measure, Republicans should have captured around 65 per cent of the congressional seats instead of 46 per cent. Schattschneider, E. E.Party Government (New York, 1942), pp. 75–76Google Scholar.

7 See Key, V. O., Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups, 4th ed. (New York, 1958), pp. 630–632Google Scholar.

8 Congressional Quarterly Almanac (Washington, 1956), Vol. 12, pp. 790–792Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., 1957, Vol. 13, pp. 16–20.