• Corpus ID: 41629670

Are Close Elections Random

@inproceedings{Grimmer2011AreCE,
  title={Are Close Elections Random},
  author={Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh and Brian D. Feinstein and Daniel P. Carpenter},
  year={2011},
  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:41629670}
}

• Justin Grimmer, Eitan Hersh, +1 author D. Carpenter
• Published 2011
• Sociology

Elections with small margins of victory represent an important form of democratic competition and, increasingly, an opportunity for causal inference. When scholars use close elections for examining competition or for causal inference, they impose assumptions about the politics of close contests: campaigns are unable to systematically determine the outcome. This paper calls into question this model and introduces a new model that accounts for strategic campaign behavior. We draw upon the… 

Elections with small margins of victory represent an important form of democratic competition and, increasingly, an opportunity for causal inference. When scholars use close elections for examining competition or for causal inference, they impose assumptions about the politics of close contests: campaigns are unable to systematically determine the outcome. This paper calls into question this model and introduces a new model that accounts for strategic campaign behavior. We draw upon the intuition that elections that are expected to be close attract greater campaign eorts before the election and invite legal challenges and fraud after the election. Our theoretical models predict systematic dierences between winners and losers in extremely close elections. We test our predictions using all House elections from 1880-2008, nding that structurally advantaged candidates are more likely to win close elections. But the structural advantages that predict winners shift over time: from 1880 to the 1960’s, candidates from strong parties are systematically more likely to win close contests, but the advantage dissipates in more recent contests. After the 1940’s, incumbent candidates are much more likely to win close elections. Our ndings suggest a new research agenda on the systematic determination of close contests.