State Party Competition and Citizens’ Political Engagement

^†Authors’ names are listed alphabetically to reflect equal contributions to the research. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2014 State Politics and Policy Conference in Bloomington, IN.

Abstract

Is living in a politically competitive state beneficial for democratic citizenship? Given citizens’ generally limited information about state politics, we argue that the most effective method of evaluating this question is by examining the degree to which the two parties generally compete for control of state government. Using data on citizens’ political attitudes and participation from the American National Election Studies and the Ranney measure of state party competition, we investigate the relationship between state party competition and citizen engagement from 1952 to 2008. Our analysis reveals that citizens report more interest in politics and participate at higher rates when there is greater competition between the two parties in their state. We also find that the relationship between competition and engagement has varied over time and that it is the strongest among citizens with lower levels of education and income. These findings suggest that vigorous competition for control of state government has important implications for citizens’ political engagement and, ultimately, the quality of democracy in the American states.

Acknowledgements

We thank Dave Bridge, Shannon Jenkins, Phil Jones, Carl Klarner, Jamie Monogan, Ben Tafoya, and Jenny Wolak for helpful comments. We also thank Carl Klarner for data on state party competition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^† Authors’ names are listed alphabetically to reflect equal contributions to the research. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2014 State Politics and Policy Conference in Bloomington, IN.

1. After the November 2014 elections, the legislature and governor's mansion are controlled by a single party in thirty of the 50 states.

2. However, praise for political competition is not universal. An emerging theoretical perspective contends that more competitive elections can actually have negative consequences for democratic citizenship by increasing the number of voters on the losing side in any given election and increasing citizens’ feelings of political dissatisfaction and alienation (Brunell 2006, 2008; Brunell and Buchler 2009). For example, voters who supported the losing candidate tend to feel less efficacious, less trusting, and less satisfied with democracy in general (Clarke and Acock 1989; Anderson and Guillory 1997; Anderson and LoTempio 2002; Bowler and Donovan 2002, 2012; Anderson et al. 2005). Even those who generally extol the virtues of political competition have acknowledged potential tradeoffs. For example, competition may lead to more deliberation about political issues, but it can also depress participation rates (Mutz 2006). Moreover, competition can lead to greater levels of awareness and mobilization, but also exacerbates partisan differences and lowers overall approval ratings of Members of Congress (Bowler and Donovan 2012).

3. Shufeldt and Flavin (2012) find that while the average competitiveness of state legislative elections and the degree of competition between parties for control of state government were positively correlated across the states in the 1970s and 1980s, they are now (as we might expect, given they are different concepts) negatively correlated.

4. For example, one public opinion survey found that “barely one-fourth (25.2%) of the registered voters surveyed were able to name their state representative” (Songer 1984, 390).

5. As detailed in the next section, we conceptualize and measure political competition in this paper as the degree of competition between the two parties for control of state government (Ranney 1965, 1976). An alternative conceptualization of competition is Holbrook and Van Dunk's (1993) measure of the average competitiveness of individual state legislative elections that accounts for the average margin of victory along with the presence of uncontested and “safe” seats. When we use a moving four-year average of the Holbrook and Van Dunk electoral competition measure instead of the Ranney party competition measure in the model specification presented below, we find no statistical relationship between the average level of competitiveness of legislative elections in a respondent's state and levels of political engagement (the full results of this analysis are reported in Table A1 of the Appendix).

6. Data for the Ranney Index, created by Austin Ranney (1965, 1976), are from Carl Klarner and accessed online at http://www.indstate.edu/polisci/klarnerpolitics.htm.

7. The formula for the folded Ranney Index is: 1 – ABS (Ranney – 0.5).

8. Intensity of partisanship is constructed by folding the ANES 7-point partisanship scale with strong Democrats/Republicans coded as a 4, weak Democrats/Republicans coded as a 3, leaning Democrats/Republicans coded as a 2, and independent and/or apolitical respondents coded as a 1.

9. Marital status is a dummy variable with respondents who are married coded as 1 and all other respondents coded as 0.

10. We include a term for age and age squared because of our expectation that the relationship between age and interest/participation is curvilinear (i.e. propensity to be interested/participate increases with age up to a point and then begins to decline).

11. For race/ethnicity, “white” serves as the reference category.

12. Specifically, we take the difference between the number of votes for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and divide it by the total number of votes for the Democratic and Republican candidates. We then take that value and subtract it from 1 such that a higher value for the Presidential Competitiveness variable indicates greater competitiveness in that state. For ANES respondents surveyed in a presidential election year, we use the two-party presidential competitiveness measure from that election year. For ANES respondents surveyed in a midterm election year, we use the two-party presidential competitiveness measure from the election two years prior. State vote data are from Dave Leip's “Atlas of US Presidential Elections” and accessed online at http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/.

13. State and year effects are accomplished by including a dummy variable for every state and for every year in the sample (excluding one state and one year as a reference category).

14. The results presented in Table 1 are substantively similar if we instead use a random intercepts hierarchical linear model with respondents nested within states.

15. One potential concern about our interpretation of the findings in Table 1 is that instead of greater party competition boosting citizen engagement, it could instead be the case that a more active and engaged citizenry in a state encourages a more competitive political environment. As one attempt to address this concern and confirm the robustness of our findings, we ran models with the same specification as Table 1 but instead used the average level of state party competition for the eight years preceding the survey year where respondents’ political engagement is measured (for example, using a state's level of party competition for 1972–1980 for an ANES respondent surveyed in 1980). The results of these additional estimations are reported in Table A2 of the Appendix and reveal that the coefficient for party competition remains positive and statistically different from zero in all four models. We interpret this finding using an extended timeframe to measure party competition as suggestive evidence that increases in party competition temporally precede increases in citizen engagement.

16. See Shufeldt and Flavin (2012) for an extended discussion of the changing nature of party competition in the American South.

17. Since citizens with higher socioeconomic status are already the most likely to participate in politics, it should be of little surprise that party competition has the largest effect on engagement among citizens with lower levels of education and income. However, given the generally low levels of political engagement and voter turnout among the socioeconomically disadvantaged and the correspondingly poor political representation of their opinions among elected officials (Piven and Cloward 1977, 2000; Bartels 2008; Gilens 2012), our finding suggests that more intense party competition is one viable avenue for promoting greater political equality and democratic inclusion.