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3 November 2005

PPBW: Frisby Paper

In the PPBW workshop last Friday, Tammy Frisby presented her paper on how terms limits affect the strategic entry of challengers to state legislative races. Frisby analyzes state legislative races from 1996 – 2004 in California, Colorado, Florida, and Ohio, and finds that challengers are just as likely to run against a last term incumbent as a non-last term incumbent. Additionally, the quality of these challengers who face last-term incumbents does not seem to be lower. The discussion centered on a few themes; first, a discussion of the utility function used to describe the strategic choice of potential challengers to enter a race. The basic utility function strategic politicians are assumed to use, developed by Gordon Black and popularized by Jacobson & Kernell, states that the utility is the result of the product of the probability of winning the office (P) times the value of the office (B), less the risk (R) involved in waging a campaign. To improve on this model, the audience suggested indexing terms by i for each individual candidate and by j for the district. Additionally, there was discussion as to how the values of all the variables may be different for state legislative candidates (as opposed to federal office candidates).

There was debate over whether the effects observed were due to the interaction between term limits and strategic political behavior, or whether the effects could be attributed to one of these explanations more so than the other. Lastly, some time was spent making the distinction between strategic politicians and savvy politicians; the former being those candidates who employ cost benefit analysis to inform their decision regarding entry to the race, the latter group of savvy politicians describes those who have better estimates of the variables to plug into the utility function.

Posted by Sarah Sled at November 3, 2005 7:43 PM