AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP
Abstract: In this talk, Professor Harbridge-Yong will share some of her research on primary elections, including a working paper that examines how the composition of primary electorates can change. Presidents and presidential candidates have a platform by which they can exert influence through persuasion. But they also may shape electoral participation within their party. We argue that co-partisan supporters who back losing candidates in the primary are less likely to participate in subsequent primary elections. Utilizing data on campaign donors between 1984 and 2020 and the American National Election Study (ANES) panel from 2016-2020, we find that supporters of losing candidates are less likely to participate via voting or campaign donations in subsequent primary elections. This effect holds across both major parties and shapes the partisan landscape by altering the composition of the primary electorate. Our findings reveal that the disengagement of losing candidate supporters consolidates support for the winners, creating a primary electorate skewed towards the presidential nominee’s faction. These dynamics highlight an important mechanism through which presidential nomination outcomes influence broader political processes, reshaping intraparty coalitions and legislative agendas.
Laurel Harbridge-Yong is a Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She received her PhD in 2009 from Stanford University. Her research and teaching explore questions surrounding partisan conflict and the difficulty of reaching bipartisan agreements and legislative compromises in American politics. Her work spans projects on the U.S. Congress, state legislatures, and the mass public. She is the author of two books – Is Bipartisanship Dead? Policy Agreement and Agenda-Setting in the House of Representatives (2015) and Rejecting Compromise: Legislators’ Fear of Primary Voters (with Sarah Anderson and Daniel Butler, 2020) – and numerous journal articles. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Unite America, National Institute of Justice, the National Science Foundation Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS), the Social Science Research Council, and the Dirksen Congressional Center, among others. Her current research projects examine how primary elections shape representation, and how threats and violence against elected officials shape legislative behavior and whether the public rationalizes the use of political violence.
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