The Primary Premium: Why Legislators are Incentivized to Side with Primary Voters over General Election Voters (WP-23-07)
Sarah Anderson, Daniel Butler, and Laurel Harbridge-Yong
How are legislators incentivized to behave when their primary and general electorates disagree about an issue? The authors argue that primary electorates are generally more unified in their issue preferences and more sensitive to roll-call positions than general electorates, incentivizing legislators to prioritize primary voters when facing conflicting demands from the two groups. Using the 2016 Cooperative Election Study and an original survey experiment with over 13,000 respondents, the authors show that primary voters are both more unified and more likely to adjust their vote choice based on policy alignment. When they combine electorate unity and voter sensitivity, the authors find that U.S. senators had more to gain by siding with their primary electorate in 84% of the votes where they were cross-pressured. This helps explain why politicians are incentivized to cater to their primary electorate—shaping patterns of representation and policy outcomes in American politics.