Card-Carrying Members on the Ballot: Group Affiliations and Their Electoral Implications

How members of Congress align with and promote the interests of their coalitional allies is a concern for academics and the public alike. To understand the relationship between interest groups and officeholders, we must examine group ties prior to a candidate’s electoral victory. From there, we can begin to evaluate the partisan dynamics and electoral implications of candidate-group alignments. How do Democrats and Republicans differ in terms of group affiliation? Moreover, what are the consequences of these affiliations for a candidate’s performance at the ballot box? To answer these questions, we turn to a novel dataset on the recorded professional and civic group affiliations of all US congressional candidates from 2008–2014. This dataset, built on Vote Smart data, allows us to comprehensively assess the role of these group affiliations in recent elections. To complement these observational data, we conducted a survey experiment to test whether specific group affiliations influence officeholder evaluations. Ultimately, we find that few partisan groups exert any significant effect on evaluations. We find some evidence that non-partisan groups with positive reputations can mitigate outgroup hostility among opposing partisans.